The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has committed one more utterly reprehensible action. Had there been a significant revolutionary Marxist alternative rooted in the working class and gathering in its fold a considerable part (even though a minority) of the revolutionary vanguard elements of the working class, perhaps these repeated and practically predictable betrayals of the CPI(M) would have meant if anything the likely strengthening of the revolutionary alternative. But wishes are not horses and there is no such alternative built yet. We refer of course to the CPI(M)’s decisions to support Ansari for Vice President and Pranab Mukherjee for President in the forthcoming elections. Prakash Karat, the Party General Secretary and supposedly an ideologue opposed to reformist pragmatism, explained bluntly that in order to widen the gulf between the Congress and the Trinamul Congress, in West Bengal, this was a necessary action.

Just who is Pranab Mukherjee? He began his career in the jotedar (capitalist-farmer) dominated Bangla Congress, and rejoined the Congress. He has since been a staunch upholder of the Congress line. He had once harboured some ambition of succeeding Indira Gandhi when she was assassinated, and for that was always looked upon with the deepest suspicion by Rajiv and then by Sonia Gandhi. This was why even when Sonia chose not to be Prime Minister, she opted for the politically colourless Manmohan Singh. But Pranab was always a top Congress leader, and therefore a major political figure for the Indian capitalist class. Over the last few years, he has been the Finance Minister, and as such, a key figure behind the continuing and deepening commitment to liberalisation, the gutting of the state sector, and the constant turning of the screws to ensure the pumping of wealth from the lower layers of society to the upper layers.

If you are a worker (including white collar) who has had the old pension scheme yanked out and pushed into the NPS, thank Pranab. If you are wondering why petrol and diesel prices go up regularly, remember Pranab. But if you are a worker supporting CPI(M), under the belief that it is indeed a Communist Party, committed to the revolution, also close your eyes, and tell yourself, that Pranab may be bad, my wages may be down and prices may be up, but Buddhadev must be brought back to the Writers’ Building by any means, even if the result is allying with the most notorious exploiter. Failure to understand why means you do not have the razor sharp training in dialectics given by AKG Bhavan. Even a bunch of poor JNU SFI cadres were unable to have adequate suppleness of spine and ended up being expelled from the SFI for condemning this decision of the CPI(M).

By contrast, the RSP has decided that as a matter of principle it will not vote for any Congress candidate, regardless of other considerations. This is laudable, and within the very limited framework of bourgeois parliamentarism, a correct, albeit inadequate action. To make it meaningful, the RSP should have called upon all working class parties to put up a common working class candidate with a programme, calling for proportional representation (more democratic), immediate halt by the President of mass killings of adivasis in the name of anti-Naxal hunt, and immediate restoration and expansion of social security, among other demands. RSP should also have drawn the necessary conclusion that popular frontism is per se the problem.

Instead, the RSP is busy patting itself in the back. When a leading bourgeois daily, the Ananda Bazar Patrika, editorially criticised it, one leader, Ashok Ghosh, took it upon himself to respond. Ghosh wrote a letter defending RSP. While doing so, he asserted that RSP was truly Leninist, and it was not Trotskyist because it did not believe in exporting revolutions.

What does he mean by this, our Leninist? Can he adduce a single quotation from Trotsky advocating the export of revolution? He indeed criticised those like Tukhachevskii who thought that the Red Army could become an instrument of international revolution. The building of the Communist International by Lenin and Trotsky flowed from their common understanding that the Russian revolution could not stand alone as an isolated workers’ state forever. It was one corner of a global class struggle. To continue to wage that class struggle globally it was necessary to separate the revolutionaries from the reformist traitors everywhere, to unite the revolutionaries and coordinate their actions. As the multivolume documents of the early Communist International edited by John Riddel show, it was not a bureaucratic body in those years, not a body for the transmission of soviet foreign policy, but a revolutionary international organisation with its own life, its own dynamics.

The Second International had been little more than a loose federation of national socialist parties with relatively weak internationalism, a harsh judgement which is however borne out by its ignominious collapse. That the Third should be different was a theme common to all sections of the left. Thus the journal Die Internationale, brought out in the April 1915 by Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others, carried Luxemburg’s article ‘The Reconstruction of the International’. In it she wrote: “The epoch of imperialism cannot permit the existence, in a single party, of the revolutionary proletariat’s vanguard and the semi–petty–bourgeois aristocracy of the working class.” [1] In 1916 the Internationale group adopted ‘Theses on the Tasks of International Social Democracy’, drafted by Luxemburg. In part the theses read: “3. The centre of gravity of the proletariat’s class organization is the International. The International decides the tactics of the national sections in time of peace on the questions of militarism, colonial policy, trade policy, and the celebration of May Day, and in addition, the entire tactical policy to be applied in wartime.

“4. The duty to carry out the International’s decisions takes precedence over all other organizational obligations. National sections that violate these decisions place themselves outside the International.”

“5. Only the mobilized masses of the proletariat in all countries can exert decisive power in the struggle against imperialism and against war. Thus the policy of the national sections aims above all to prepare the masses for political action and resolute initiative; to ensure the international cohesion of the masses in action, and to build the political and trade union organizations so that they can always guarantee prompt and effective collaboration of all the sections and so that the will of the International takes shape in actions by the broadest masses of workers of all countries.

“6. The immediate task of socialism is to liberate the proletariat spiritually from the tutelage of the bourgeoisie, as expressed in the influence of nationalist ideology. The national sections must agitate in the parliaments and the press, denouncing the traditional phraseology of nationalism as an instrument of bourgeois rule. The revolutionary class struggle against imperialism is today the sole defence of all real national independence. The workers’ fatherland, to the defence of which all else must be subordinated, is the Socialist International.” [2]

Similar sentiments were expressed by various other leftwingers who came out of the old International. At the Zimmerwald Conference, Christian Rakovsky, representing the Romanian social democrats, and speaking also on behalf of the Bulgarian Tesnyaki (“narrow socialists”) (he was also to represent the latter at the foundation congress of the Comintern) said, “The old International had many doors providing opening for class–collaboration…. We must close these doors.” [3]

We emphasize this, because histories of the Communist International too often distort this issue. Soviet historians have rarely admitted the subsequent degeneration of the Comintern. They have also, therefore, rarely (if ever) explained the difference between a centralised leadership and a bureaucratized apparatus. Western historians, on the contrary, portray a caricature, where a malicious ogre named Lenin strove to impose his diktat on the world labour movement. Thus, Franz Borkenau, a former Comintern official, wrote in his history that Lenin stood for an international which should begin as a small body and be under the strict control of his party, which he had come to regard as the one safeguard of orthodoxy. [4]

A relatively scholarly work (or at least a work containing some traces of scholarly techniques), Braunthal’s History, notes the Comintern’s rejection of federal type of organization, even stating that the report of the Committee on Rule and Procedures was presented at the Second Congress by the Bulgarian Kristo Kabakchiev. [5] But Braunthal manages to imply that all this was a Bolshevik manipulation, and that the aim of the Comintern, especially at its foundation Congress, was less to fight capitalism and imperialism and more to fight Social Democracy. [6]

Trotsky’s major contribution to the First Congress was the manifesto. The Congress itself was a small affair. There were 51 delegates, 35 with voting rights, representing 19 parties and organizations, and 19 with consultative votes on behalf of 16 organizations. Only four of the voting delegates were from outside Russia, one each from Norway and Sweden, neither of which had a Communist party as yet, and Hugo Eberlein of the German Communist Party and Karl Steinhardt of Austria. Nevertheless, it would be totally erroneous to say that the Bolshevik leaders pressed for the formation of an international just to seize control of it. No less than Rosa Luxemburg, they too were concerned with the task of winning over the broad mass of workers. But the defeat of the Spartacists and the murder of their best leaders showed the terrible result of not organizing quickly. Luxemburg had opposed the Spartacist uprising. But the KPD – Spartacus League was not an organization that had been painstakingly built up. It was not an organization that enjoyed the confidence of the masses so much that it could tell them to their face that they were wrong, nor could it control the movement as the Bolsheviks did. In his History, Trotsky compared the July Days in Petrograd with Spartacus Week. He emphasized that it began, not in the manner of a strategy calculated by the party, but in the manner of a pressure from the ranks. In origin it was a minor issue, the removal of a police chief. But it was in its tendencies a new revolution. “The Spartacus League and the Left Independents were taken unawares; they went farther than they intended and at the same time did not go through to the end. The Spartacus men [sic!] were still too weak for independent leadership. The Left Independents balked at those methods which could alone have brought them to the goal …. The Young Communist Party was physically beheaded …. The unachieved revolution was switched over into Fascism.” [7]

A centralized revolutionary party and a centralized revolutionary international were thus felt necessary because of the objective possibility of world revolution. It is noteworthy that the KPD, despite Luxemburg’s influence even after death, was to rapidly adhere to the Comintern. When it was founded, its leaders knew well that it would not remain small for long. They wanted the communist elements to be theoretically and politically equipped so that when mass movements developed, they could achieve mass influence and lead revolutions.

The manifesto of Trotsky was drafted explicitly for this. It declared its solidarity with the original Communist Manifesto and at the same time sought “to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, to purge the movement of the corroding admixture of opportunism and social–patriotism, to unify the efforts of all genuinely revolutionary parties of the world proletariat and thereby facilitate and hasten the victory of the Communist revolution throughout the world.” [8]

There was a sharp analysis of the war and its imperialist nature. The manifesto also noted the beginning of the end of British domination and the rise of U.S. imperialism. The manifesto also surveyed the transformation of free–market capitalism into monopoly capitalism and the increasing interpenetration of state and monopoly capital. In view of this evolution, the manifesto declared that if the opportunists’ calls for social peace were to find acceptance among the working masses, “capitalist development in new, much more concentrated and monstrous forms would be restored on the bones of several generations –– with the perspective of a new and inevitable world war.” [9]

The manifesto also made the communist standpoint on revolution clear. Imperialist war, it noted, was passing over into civil war, which pits class against class. The perpetual criticism of the Comintern, of Lenin, of Bolshevism, from Social Democratic opponents since the revolution, has been that he and they made civil war and red terror an end in itself, or that in Bolshevism there was a refusal to countenance any alternative path. The manifesto opposed to this view the reason for communist rejection of legalism, simultaneously refuting the claim that the Comintern stood for terrorism and laying down the line against sliding from this position to a rejection of armed struggle.

“The wails of the bourgeois world against civil war and against Red Terror represent the most monstrous hypocrisy yet known in the history of political struggles. There would be no civil war if the clique of exploiters who have brought mankind to the very brink of ruin did not resist every forward step of the toiling masses, if they did not organize conspiracies and assassinations, and did not summon armed assistance from without in order to maintain or restore their thievish privileges. Civil war is imposed upon the working class by its mortal enemies. Without renouncing itself and its own future, which is the future of all mankind, the working class cannot fail to answer blow for blow.” [10] This was not, then, a specifically “Trotskyist” position. The ‘Platform’ of the International rejected peaceful, parliamentary socialism as sharply as did Trotsky in the Manifesto. [11]

Workers’ power was thought to mean rule by the workers’ own organizations, with democracy in them. So the Manifesto could declare in all sincerity, “The entire bourgeois world accuses the Communists of destroying freedom and political democracy. These are lies. Upon assuming power, the proletariat merely lays bare the complete impossibility of employing the methods of bourgeois democracy and creates the conditions and forms of a new and much higher workers’ democracy.” [12]

It has been suggested that the International was an instrument of Russian state policy from birth. [13] Trotsky was quite aware that the creation of a workers’ state meant a new relationship between internationalism and patriotism. But he was resolutely in favour of a subordination of the latter to the former. Shortly after the First Comintern Congress, he wrote an article, ‘To Comrades of the Spartacus League’. He drew their attention the radical difference between a revolution in Russia and a revolution in an advanced country. He wrote: “As regards Germany, we consider that the task of transforming her into a socialist republics first of all the business of the German working class.” [14]

In a subsequent article, he wrote that the German revolution must be judged primarily by taking Germany’s internal evolution into account. [15] Even more bluntly did he repudiate any special status for Russia. In an article of April–May 1919, he wrote: “In our analysis there is not an atom of “messianism”. The revolutionary “primogeniture” of the Russian proletariat is only temporary…. The dictatorship of the Russian working class will be able to finally entrench itself and to develop into a genuine, all sided socialist construction only from the hour when the European working class frees us … If today the centre of the Third International lies in Moscow… then on the morrow this centre will shift westward …” [16]

The charge of Moscow control would be hurled again and again by the ultra – left and by the right alike. Responding to Filipo Turati’s accusation that “The Russians have invented the Soviets and the Communist International for their own profit and to further their own national interests”, [17] Trotsky said, in a speech at the Third Congress of the Comintern, “Yes, Comrades, we have erected in our country the bulwark, still very barbaric…But we are defending this bulwark of the world revolution since at the given moment there is no other in the world. When another strong hold to erected in France or in Germany then the one in Russia will lose nine–tenths of its significance … Finally, Comrades, it is sheer absurdity to believe that we deem this Russian stronghold of the revolution to be the centre of the world. It is absurd even to claim that we believe it is our right to demand of you to make a revolution in Germany or France or Italy, whenever this was required by our domestic policy. Were we capable of such perfidy, then all of us would deserve to be put against a wall and shot, one by one.” [18]

After Lenin’s death, as a bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin took power in the USSR, it also began to control the International and turned it into an agency of Soviet foreign policy. This was resisted by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and in a more half hearted way by the Zinovievist opposition. Why did Trotsky oppose the slogan of Socialism in One Country?

It was a common idea of Marxism that the socialist revolution could only be international. It is important to emphasize that even in the pre-imperialist epoch, when there was a feeling that capitalism still had a positive dynamic left, Marx clearly sought to build a revolutionary proletarian foreign policy as a response to the foreign policy of capitalism, and he did his best to make this one of the key elements in the politics of the First International. Lenin and Trotsky were to remain committed to this activist, global conception of internationalism.

It was Joseph Stalin who first challenged this conception of an international revolution and activist internationalism, step by step. The first, key step was the theory of socialism in one country. As late as April 1924, three months after the death of Lenin, Stalin was writing that while in order to overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are enough, for the organisation of socialist production the efforts of the proletarians of several countries was needed. However, within a short while, Stalin was to change his position, and produce a picture of “Leninism” totally at variance with the outlook of the living Lenin. George Thomson’s From Marx to Mao Tse-Tung has this to say: “Stalin made the following analysis of Trotskyism: ‘What is the essence of Trotskyism? The essence of Trotskyism is, first of all, the denial of the possibility of completely building socialism in the USSR by the efforts of the working class and peasantry of our country…. It means that, if a victorious world revolution does not come to our aid in the near future, we shall have to surrender to the bourgeoisie and clear the way for a bourgeois-democratic republic.” [19] Indeed, in so far as one can talk about theoretical sources of the crimes of Stalinism, “Socialism in One country” is a major source. In December 1924, Stalin affirmed that in Russia there existed the basis for building socialism without the spread of the revolution elsewhere, and that only the “complete victory” of socialism was impossible without revolutions in other countries. This theory found a receptive mood. There was a growing discouragement and demoralization due to the defeats of the European workers’ movement; a growing national messianism; a retreat from the international revolution to an illusion of national self-sufficiency.

Initially, Trotsky did not respond to this patently cynical “theory” whose sole aim was to cut-paste sentences to “prove” that Trotsky had been fundamentally opposed to Lenin. He preferred to fight over concrete policies.

But he attacked the idea that socialism could be constructed “at a snail’s pace”, and by abstracting from the international context. He was particularly sharp in attacking attempts to replace revolutionary internationalism by diplomatic connections with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces. It was only during the fifteenth party conference in late 1926 that Trotsky launched a full attack on this “theory”.

There were several strands in the attack on Trotsky, and he exposed the hollowness of the attacks by first of all pointing to the contradictory approaches. On one hand, he was being accused of having no faith in at all trying to build socialism, of seeking salvation solely in the international revolution (i.e., not also in the development of class struggle in the USSR), and on the other hand he was being accused of trying to exploit the peasantry. Responding to this, he said, “If we have no faith in the establishment of socialism in our country, or if (as is said of me) we propose that the European revolution be passively awaited, then why do we propose to “rob” the peasantry?…We are of the opinion that industrialization – the basis of socialism – is proceeding too slowly, and that this negatively affects the peasantry.” [20]

Concerning the argument of Stalin that to deny the possibility of building socialism in one country was to deny the justifiability of the October Revolution, Trotsky said: “But in 1918 we heard from Lenin that the establishment of socialism requires the direct cooperation of at least several advanced countries, “which do not include Russia”. Yet Lenin did not deny the justifiability of the October Revolution.” [21] This comment was followed by quotations from Lenin [22], on which Trotsky commented that Lenin combined two conditions – an alliance with the peasantry and revolution in other countries, as the preconditions for building socialism in Russia [23].

Turning to Stalin’s arguments, Trotsky attacked him for reducing the question of interaction with world capitalism to the issue of interventions. “Can we simply imagine that we are establishing socialism here in this house, while the enemies outside in the street are throwing stones through the window panes? The matter is not so simple. Intervention is war, and war is a continuation of politics, but with other weapons. But politics are applied economics. Hence the whole question is one of the economic relations between the Soviet Union and the capitalist countries. These relations are not exhausted in that one form known as intervention. They possess a much more continuous and profound character. Comrade Bukharin has stated in so many words that the sole danger of intervention consists of the fact that in the event no intervention comes, ‘we can work towards socialism even on this wretched technical basis;”….But I tell you that we shall never realize socialism at a snail’s pace, for the world’s markets keep too sharp a control over us.” [24] Bukharin as well as Stalin were repeatedly criticised by Trotsky for imagining a model of socialist construction abstracted from the world market. “It is possible to walk naked in the streets of Moscow in January, if we can abstract ourselves from the weather and the police. [stenographic notes here record laughter].” [25] Trotsky argued that finance capital and Marxism, were both products of a world economic and political system, and so, the very Russian revolution could not be abstracted from the international context.

However, it was only after his expulsion from the party that Trotsky wrote his most comprehensive critique of the “theory” of socialism in one country. This formed the bulk of the first chapter of his book length work: The Draft Program of the Communist International – A Criticism of Fundamentals, usually published as The Third International after Lenin. Contrary to his usual practice, he filled this book, especially this section, with pages of quotations, from Lenin, from Bukharin, and from party documents. In this context, it is worth looking at a sophisticated apologia for Stalinism. This comes from Monty Johnstone, a CPGB ideologue who wrote a pamphlet length work on Trotsky. In a chapter entitled “The debate on Socialism in One Country”, Johnstone wrote the following:

“The great historical controversy on the possibility of building socialism in Russia is still today befogged on both sides by decades-old distortion and misrepresentation. Thus, on the one hand Trotskyists present Stalin as having from 1924, when he first formulated his theory, counterposed Socialism in One Country to the spread of revolution to other countries. On the other side Soviet histories still present Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin’s theory as opposition to Socialist Industrialisation in the Soviet Union and in favour of an export of revolution by force of arms. Both versions are equally false.” [26]

Having set up dummies, Johnstone has no problem taking a spuriously objective position. “Stalin’s argument was that the spread of revolution to the West was obviously the most desirable thing, but with the delay in this Russia had no alternative but to set itself the aim of building Socialism in the belief that she had all that was necessary to complete this.” [27]

Supplementing this by a few quotations from Stalin, Johnstone then triumphantly concludes: “The course of revolutions in the world, which today see a growing Socialist camp challenging the old imperialist one, has in no small measure confirmed Stalin’s broad perspective.” [28]

Today, with most of the so-called socialist camp having been turned into capitalism, in no small measure by the heirs of Stalin themselves, Johnstone’s triumphant proclamation from the 1970s appears a mockery. Johnstone had claimed that Trotsky had dogmatically underestimated the internal forces of the Russian revolution. The massive documentation provided by Trotsky was intended to show that prior to December 1924, that which Johnstone fancifully called Trotsky’s dogmatism had actually been the tradition of revolutionary Marxism. It is not surprising that any party or individual, backsliding from revolutionary Marxism, even now finds it necessary to attack permanent revolution, and to do so, at first, in the name of real Leninism, just as Stalin did.

Trotsky’s elaborate arguments in the critique of the draft programme of the Comintern require scrutiny. He began by arguing that no communist party could, in the epoch of imperialism, “i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital” [29], develop a revolutionary programme proceeding only or mainly from nationally specific conditions and tendencies. The first and decisive aspect that he criticised the draft for not discussing adequately was the meaning of the rise of US imperialism since World War I and the impact on Europe. For Europe to resist the pressure of US capitalism, he argued, overturning the national barriers was essential, and this meant a revival of the slogan of a Socialist United States of Europe. (Trotsky’s only error, if it can be called an error, is that he did not foresee that Social Democratic and Stalinist treachery would help in the prolongation of life in capitalist Europe for three quarters of a century, by which time European capitalists would agree on partial surrender of sovereignty to hammer out a capitalist semi-united states of Europe.) Trotsky proceeded to argue that the abandonment of the slogan of a Socialist United States of Europe meant a nationalist transformation, in the European context, of communist parties. He then went on to examine were in the history of socialism precursors of the slogan of Socialism in One country could be found. He showed that Georg von Vollmar, a German social Democrat (who had been subsequently a supporter of Bernstein’s revisionism) had written an article on ‘The Isolated Socialist State’. Vollmar had assumed that the first socialist revolution would occur in a highly developed country, which would then pursue a policy of peaceful coexistence with capitalism and overturn capitalism through its greater economic efficiency. Thus, Socialism in One Country also led inexorably to the doctrine of peaceful coexistence with capitalism, and the selling-out of revolutionary struggles in order to ensure it. Finally, Trotsky argued, if this theory was adopted as the guiding theory of international communism, it would mean a reformist and social-patriotic transformation of the communist parties. He argued for this perspective on a number of grounds. “Complaints and accusations to the effect that the denial of the possibility of building socialism in one country dampens the spirit and kills enthusiasm are theoretically and psychologically closely related to those accusations which the reformists have always hurled at the revolutionists….: ‘You are telling the workers that they cannot really improve their lot within the framework of capitalist society; and by this alone you kill their incentive to fight’.” [30]Trotsky argued that just as the revolutionary response to reformism had been, that every successful reform is a by-product of the revolutionary struggle of the working class, similarly all steps in the direction of socialist construction could be successful only as steps taken in conjunction with the struggle or the world revolution. His further argument was, “If it is at all possible to realize socialism in one country, then one can believe in that theory not only after but also before the conquest of power. If socialism can be realized within the national boundaries of backward Russia, then there is all the more reason to believe that it can be realized in advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany will undertake to propound this theory. The draft programme empowers them to do so. The day after tomorrow the French party will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism.” [31] Thus, Trotsky demonstrated in advance that both Khrushchevite supineness to imperialism in the name of peaceful coexistence, and the Eurocommunist turn leading to the ultimate social democratisation/social-liberalisation of the ex-Stalinist parties, derived from Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country.

If the RSP, under the able leadership of UTUC leader Ghosh, decides to slide into the morass created by Stalin, let it not try to hide its politics with reference to Lenin.

Just one more issue. Ghosh rightly rejects voting for the Congress. But why oppose the Congress? For some personal reason, or class politics? If the latter, one cannot support any section of the bourgeoisie, any bourgeois party. The RSP was part of a bourgeois provincial government, the Left Front, in West Bengal. More properly, it was a Popular Front government, where working class parties subordinate the class goals of the proletariat to the “higher” interests, i.e., to the bourgeoisie or the shadow of the bourgeoisie. The RSP made some occasional noises, but kept on remaining inside the regime. Token gestures like not voting for Pranab might be salve for the soul if they despite proclaiming their Leninism believe in immortal souls. But such tokenism proves not that one is a Leninist but a hypocritical faker. If the RSP wishes to have even a modicum of Leninism, it should begin by basing its politics on class struggle, not the parliamentary shadow of those struggles.

Kunal Chattopadhyay

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