In his rejoinder, Geoff Roberts has adopted an old procedure. His original critique of the IMG sought to establish a link between the tactics of the IMG over the past few years, the general orientation of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in the Seventies, and the theoretical tradition of Trotskyism. In our reply we defended the general underlying political analysis and strategic orientation of the USFI and its British section over the past period. We also sought to refute the facile counterposition of Gramsci and Trotsky, and to draw attention to the major contribution which Trotsky made to the elaboration of revolutionary strategy in the advanced bourgeois democracies.
Roberts has now chosen to concentrate almost entirely on a general critique of the 'economic determinism' which is held to vitiate Trotsky's thought; to which is appended some hasty reflections on the previously neglected topic of bourgeois democracy. We are not at all reluctant to join issue with Roberts on these latter questions, but we do object to Roberts' method of posing them — a method which involves conducting a debate on revolutionary strategy in some abstracted realm above and beyond history and politics. Naturally we are glad that Roberts has not indulged in petty point-scoring, or the inflation of every small incident or accident to historic significance which is sometimes passed off as polemic on the left. But to refuse to engage at all with the political conjuncture in Europe in this decade — the ostensible starting point of this exchange — is simply an evasion. Roberts has chosen not to respond to our defence of the general orientation of the Fourth International in capitalist Europe in this decade, nor to reply to our specific criticisms of the CPGB, nor to comment on our argument concerning the vital significance of proletarian democracy.
The strategic accommodation to bourgeois democracy which is now explicit in European Communism evidently requires a refusal to investigate the explosive dynamic of the crisis of the bourgeois order — a crisis which will be exacerbated by the assumption of governmental power by Communist Parties. Instead of firmly situating his analysis on the terrain of class struggle and capitalist crisis, Roberts constructs a supra-historical model of bourgeois democracy peacefully growing over into socialism. The pious 'democratic' incantations of the British Road to Socialism will, it seems, suffice to destroy the power of a ruling class which has accumulated a long experience of repression and sabotage of popular movements, with the appropriate accompaniment of provocation and demagogy.
The Question of Economic Determinism
The first part of Roberts' rejoinder is concerned to establish that Trotskyism is a species of economic determinism; that for Trotskyists pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situations are engendered by the economic contradictions of capitalism; and that they conceive the task of the revolutionary vanguard as being to remove the obstacles to socialist revolution and to make up for 'lags' in class consciousness. Roberts outlines all this in fairly simplified terms, but at least the caricature has some resemblance to its object. In fact we are happy, as Marxists, to plead guilty to many of the charges laid against us by Roberts in this section.
Let us take first the question of 'economic determinism'. According to Roberts, one of the main problems with the Fourth International is that it shares the economic determinism to be found in the Third International; and the economic determinism of the Third International was in its turn little but an echo of the economic determinism of the Second International. Roberts does not say so, but we can, I think, plausibly suggest that the root of this 'economic determinist' heresy is to be found in some of those involved in the First International — in fact in the work of Marx and Engels, much of which was devoted to examining the operation of economic determination in human societies. All scientific activity must have as its aim the establishment of determinant links between different kinds of phenomena. Marx and Engels were concerned to map out the dynamic of successive modes of production and above all of the capitalist mode of production. They were concerned to establish the different ways in which the contradictions of a mode of production and social formation can unfold — and this included the role of ideology and politics in deciding which of several rival outcomes would triumph and why. We do not propose to enter into an exposition of the Marxist conception of the ways in which economic determination works itself out, since this is a vast subject. We do, however, strongly contest the implied assumption made by Roberts that all analysis of the forms of economic determination is necessarily reductionist, or that it involves diminishing the relative autonomy of ideology or politics.
In justifying his rejection of 'economic determinism', Roberts refers to a 'proliferation of new and diverse theories' in the last decade and the unifying thread within it: 'the project of ridding Marxism of economic determinism — the form that has predominated throughout most of its history'. This way of putting his argument at least makes it clear what he is against, namely most of the history of Marxism. But what are we to put in its place? Apparently, the 'novelty and diversity' of the last decade; some quotations from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks; and the perspective offered by Stalin and Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, which (so we are assured in footnote 29) marked the beginning of a break with this otherwise pervasive 'economic determinism'.
We will not undertake here any detailed examination of the new and diverse theories that have erupted within Marxism in the last decade. We certainly would not deny that some valuable advances have been made, but what has been valuable certainly cannot be assembled under the rubric 'against economic determinism'. There have for example been some notable advances in Marxist historiography — including from the pen of those who are members of the CPGB. But part of what has been valuable in them has been an uncovering of economic determination in the age of capital with its unfolding class struggles. As for the trends in Marxist philosophy that have acquired a new currency over the past decade, what has been of most value here has been the beginnings of an emancipation from Stalinism. Unfortunately this has been incomplete. As Sebastiano Timpanaro has argued in On Materialism, it has been accompanied by not a few concessions to fashionable varieties of bourgeois idealism (phenomenology, structuralism, etc.) And as Perry Anderson has argued in Considerations on Western Marxism, the 'Western Marxists' systematically neglected history, politics and economics, which is no way to establish a valid critique of 'economic determinism'.
It seems likely that Roberts is primarily thinking of the work of Louis Althusser and his followers when he refers to the advances of the last decade in Marxist thought. In some of Althusser's work there is a materialist concern to establish the hierarchy of determination and 'over-determination' in history. But Althusser's work has been utterly disoriented by an unhistorical critique of Stalinism in the light of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The latter event was supposed to make possible an emancipation from the economic determinism of the Second and Third Internationals. It led directly to a species of cultural determinism in which ideological apparatuses decide the character of a society, 'political revolutions' can be made within the education system, the family is a crucial component of the state apparatus, and the Soviet Union is a capitalist country because intellectual labour supposedly dominates manual labour. This dangerous series of theoretical and political errors was attractive to some simply because it enabled them to equate Stalin and Trotsky, and to evade the devastating critique of the Stalinist system to be found in The Revolution Betrayed. Having briefly indicated how dubious and factitious we believe Roberts' alternative theoretical standpoint to be, we will now turn to his political critique of Trotsky's 'catastrophism'.
Trotsky and the Nature of the Epoch
Revolutionary Marxists maintain that August 1914 inaugurated an epoch of wars and revolutions. In the mid-Twenties Trotsky insisted that the stabilisation of capitalism would not last for ever, and that a new and deeper capitalist crisis would bring in its train a crisis of the bourgeois order throughout Europe. He predicted 'profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately pre-revolutionary situation'. In different ways the events in Austria, Germany, France and Spain were to bear out this perspective. So long as bourgeois democratic regimes survived, the workers parties were able to make striking advances; the widespread social misery caused by the depression was certainly a historical condition of this radicalisation. In three of these states the growing strength of the workers movement produced a counter-revolutionary bourgeois mobilisation which eventually smashed the workers parties; in France the Popular Front disoriented and demoralised the workers movement and helped pave the way for Petain. We would accept that Trotsky advanced a 'catastrophist' view in the sense that he predicted that catastrophes would ensue if the Communist Parties did not fundamentally revise their strategy and tactics. He was right.
Since, as Roberts concedes, Trotsky was an economic determinist, we may be sure that he would not have projected the possibility of imminent pre-revolutionary situations into the Europe of the post-war boom. For more than two decades after 1948 the locus of wars and revolutions was the 'Third World'. As we pointed out in our original critique, Trotskyists have sought to analyse this post-war capitalist boom, its consequences for the working class and the new contradictions which it has generated, at the ideological and political as well as the economic level. If capitalism in Western Europe had not achieved renewed economic dynamism but had plunged back into depression, there would certainly have been stormy class struggles. But acknowledging the post-war stabilisation of capitalism does not mean any neglect of the decisive events which made it possible; the victories of fascism, the frustration of the anti-capitalist dynamic within the European resistance movements, the Cold War. Until the post-war stabilisation was achieved, the course of events corresponded to a view of the epoch involving 'profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately pre-revolutionary situation' in many parts of continental Europe. The exhaustion of the post-war boom has again begun to thrust the bourgeois order in Europe into a prolonged period of danger and uncertainty. Very often it is precisely those questions which were evaded or suppressed in the period 1945-8 that are now resurfacing; the fate of Spain, Greece and Portugal, the possibility of Communist-led governments in Italy and France, the alternatives to British Labourism, the ravages of Stalinism in the European workers movement, the corruption of social democracy.
Political Conjunctures and the Neglect of Ideology
A refrain of the Roberts article in Marxism Today was that Trotsky substituted a catastrophist concept of the epoch for a concrete analysis of the 'current moment'. This line of criticism seems to have been abandoned. We now learn that Trotsky did analyse many political conjunctures, and that this was his error, since he did so without paying due attention to the crucial structural role of ideology. Roberts apparently denies that the study of particular conjunctures will often have to precede a full or adequate structural analysis. This is not simply because the class struggle is pressing and cannot wait for all the ideal conditions of analysis to be assembled. It is also because a 'conjunctural' analysis or intervention like Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, Lenin's Left Wing Communism or Trotsky's writings on Germany often proves to be a necessary preparation for a more systematic theory (of the capitalist state, parliamentarism, fascism, etc.). The historical and practical test to which such concrete analysis is necessarily subject is a condition of theoretical advance which cannot be matched by even the best generalised statements of a theoretical and political position.
In his fascination with 'cultural' determination, Roberts has again managed to avoid the awkward question of history. Yet anyone who reads Results and Prospects or Where is Britain Going? can see how important historical development was for Trotsky in deciding the 'specific gravity' of a given social formation within world economy and world politics, and for shaping the predominant forms of national culture. It is, of course, a pure myth that Trotsky failed to address himself to the relative autonomy of the domain of ideology and culture. In Russian conditions he was often concerned to vindicate the positive contribution which bourgeois cultural traditions could make to the proletarian revolution (for example, in Problems of Everyday Life and Literature and Revolution). But this certainly did not make him insensitive to the oppressive and limited character of bourgeois cultural forms. These aspects of bourgeois ideology and culture are, of course, invariably rooted in social and economic structures of inequality and domination. Combating bourgeois ideology is thus inseparable from a struggle against the source and roots of that ideology.
Thus in the Transitional Programme an important place was given to the struggle against the oppression of women and blacks, and in The Revolution Betrayed there was a whole chapter on the re-emergence of bourgeois family norms in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Trotsky had this to say about the struggle for women's rights in the Soviet Union: 'To establish the political equality of men and women in the Soviet State was one problem and the simplest. A much more difficult problem was the next — that of establishing the industrial equality of men and women workers in the factories, the mills and trade unions, and to do it in such a way that the men should not put women at a disadvantage. But to achieve the actual equality of men and women in the home is an infinitely more arduous problem. All our domestic habits must be revolutionised before that can happen. And yet it is quite obvious that unless there is an actual equality of men and women within the home, in a normal sense as well as in conditions of life, we cannot speak seriously of their equality at work or even in politics. As long as woman is chained to her house work, the care of the family, the cooking and sewing, all her chances of participating in social and cultural life are cut down to the extreme' (Problems of Everyday Life, London 1953, p.21).
The recent emergence of an independent women's liberation movement has evidently transformed the possibilities and conditions of the struggle against women's oppression, and has produced a valuable debate on its forms and underlying mechanisms. But it would be absurd to claim that Trotsky's conception of politics was deeply incompatible with such a development. In fact, every section of the Fourth International has had a far-reaching internal discussion on the questions raised by the women's movement, with the formation of women's caucuses and the involvement of the whole membership. Likewise every section has incorporated the fundamental demands of the women's movement into its programme — the comrades in Iran, Mexico and Portugal as well as those in the United States, Britain and France, where a stronger women's movement has made this easier.
While Roberts had much to say about the Trotskyist neglect of the role of ideology and culture in bourgeois society in his original article, he said nothing about the specific political mechanisms of bourgeois democracy. In his rejoinder he seeks unsuccessfully to remedy this deficiency.
'Consent' and the Origins of Bourgeois Democracy
Geoff Roberts claims that there is nothing very novel in Trotsky's observations concerning the role of popular consent within bourgeois democratic regimes. In that case we must ask why there has been no theoretical or historical study of this question for decades within the orthodox Communist movement? Roberts seems to have forgotten the dark shadow thrown on Marxist political theory by Stalinism and the reluctance of orthodox Communist theoreticians to face up to the reality of bourgeois democracy in the West and the denial of proletarian democracy in the East. Thus the source of the 'new thinking' to be found in the British Road to Socialism was not an analysis of the workings of capitalist democracy but a dubious analogy from the 'People's Democracies' of Eastern Europe (as James Klugmann points out in his article on the origins of the British Road in Comment, 5 February 1977).
Roberts suggests that in a bourgeois democratic regime not only does the governmental system rest on popular consent, as Trotsky maintained, but that the whole social order rests on popular consent. We think this is a confused and misleading formation, since bourgeois democracy is a much more limited affair than this would imply. As Norman Geras has observed: 'Bourgeois democracy obtains the consent of the masses not by revealing their subordination to them, but by concealing it from them, much as the wage form conceals their exploitation. It throws up a screen (which is not just a fiction, however, but a real structure with real effects) of elections, parliamentary legislation and debate, equal democratic rights, etc. behind which the central executive apparatuses of the State and their points of contact/access to the capitalist class are obscured' (Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, p.59). While Trotsky insisted that the governmental system rested for support on the masses, he could emphatically declare: 'Anyone who would say that in England, France, the United States, and other democratic countries, private property is supported by the will of the people would be a liar. No one ever asked the consent of the people' (Leon Trotsky on Britain, p.72). To argue that the governmental system — a real structure with real effects — rests on popular consent is not to minimise its significance. In order to claim this popular support the bourgeois regime must permit important democratic rights of expression and association in addition to a universal suffrage. Roberts is right in asserting that the workers movement historically fought for these democratic rights and for universal suffrage — and that it did so in large measure against the bourgeoisie. But he is wrong to argue that the installation of bourgeois democracy was purely or predominantly the work of the working class. There were, in fact, very few successful proletarian campaigns for universal suffrage. In the United States the introduction of manhood suffrage in the North pre-dates the emergence of an industrial working class in the modern sense. As George Novack has argued in a valuable historical study, Democracy and Revolution, the petty bourgeoisie and urban artisans played an important part in democratic agitation — and in some instances slave-owners like Jefferson and Jackson played a crucial role. In Britain the great popular movement for universal suffrage — Chartism — was defeated, and a decisive enlargement of the franchise was made by a Tory leader, Disraeli. In France the first stable bourgeois democratic regime was established after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the crushing of the Paris Commune. A not dissimilar pattern ensued in many other European states in the twentieth century following the two world wars. The initial conditions for this spread of bourgeois democratic regimes were certainly established during the great bourgeois revolutions. But it would be thoroughly anachronistic to ascribe these first shoots of bourgeois democracy to the working class in any modern sense. Subsequently, war and frustrated revolution have made a decisive contribution.
Roberts' conception of the scope and origins of bourgeois democracy clearly impels him to view it as being essentially a product of the working class and in principle amenable to its wishes. Yet if bourgeois democratic institutions were installed usually without the direct intervention of the working class, and if their operation normally excludes an effective command of the state apparatus, then the formation of a workers government upon the terrain of bourgeois democracy is a much more perilous and explosive undertaking than Roberts is prepared to admit.
The Workers Government and Revolutionary Leadership
The strategy of the British Road envisages the establishment of a government composed of workers parties and with a programme of transition to socialism within the parliamentary regime. Such a conception is essentially similar to that of the Union of the Left in France or the Popular Unity in Chile; it is different from the 'historic compromise' proposed by the Italian Communist Party, which calls for coalition with a major bourgeois party. While the historic compromise — if it can be pursued — implicates the Communists in the decay and repressive involution of Italian bourgeois society, the formation of a workers government in the 'weak' sense provokes an extra-parliamentary mobilisation of all layers of society.
[Workers governments in this 'weak' sense are tolerated by the bourgeoisie] in the sphere of economic and social policy so long as they observe two crucial taboos: that they do not encourage or permit any fundamental challenge to private property (expropriations, workers control); and that they do not encourage or permit any undermining of the effective monopoly of organised violence claimed by the bourgeois state (i.e. workers militias, soldiers councils, etc). A workers government in the weak sense attempts a partial and piecemeal dismantling of bourgeois power, with the decisive acts coming from above with all the 'force' of governmental authority. This invariably provokes an extra-parliamentary mobilisation of the bourgeoisie (economic sabotage, police provocations, military conspiracies, media demagogy, manipulation of the petty bourgeoisie, etc.). Every historical experience bears out the revolutionary Marxist contention that only a superior extra-parliamentary mobilisation of the working class and its allies can meet such a challenge and destroy the counter-revolution before the counter-revolution smashes the organised workers movement along with the workers government. A workers government in the 'strong' sense would anticipate and exploit the bourgeois mobilisation, using it to impose more comprehensive measures of expropriation and democratisation, guaranteed and implemented from below through the formation of revolutionary committees and militias.
Whatever the type of workers government, there can be no socialist revolution without that qualitative break in which the bourgeois repressive apparatus is dispersed and full sovereignty assumed by organs of workers power. In relatively backward conditions the socialist transition can be effected by a workers and peasants government that is not squarely based on political organs of the soviet type (e.g. Cuba, Vietnam). But in the conditions of an advanced bourgeois democracy only a full development of proletarian democracy can release all the energies that are required to destroy the social power of a more developed antagonist.
The 'democratic road' to socialism is not, in Roberts' curious and revealing phrase, 'the working class and its allies appropriating for itself the system of bourgeois democracy', but the suppression of all the limitations and restraints imposed on the masses by the bourgeois regime in an act of proletarian insurrection.
At one point in his rejoinder (footnote 28), Roberts himself makes a critical comment on the British Road to Socialism which, if taken seriously, could only lead to the rejection of its fundamental 'strategic' conception. Roberts writes: 'Although the notion here is primarily one of working class power expressing itself through existing institutions (e.g. Parliament) the development of new forms of working class power, even of the soviet type, is not precluded. Indeed, it would seem to me that this should form an integral part of [the strategy as a whole. Utilisation of existing institutions and the] development [of new, autonomous (from the] bourgeois democratic system) working class institutions should be seen as complementary rather than contradictory. A problem in the British Road to Socialism is that whilst a mechanical application of the forms of the Russian revolutionary process is correctly rejected, some of its content, valid in the British situation, tends to get thrown out as well.' It is odd, to say the least, that Roberts, who embarked on his critique of Trotskyism declaring his faith in the British Road, should now choose to make such a comment as an aside, literally in a footnote. And it is no doubt significant that the hesitant, typically centrist, phrasing of this remark fails to make clear whether 'new, autonomous... working class institutions' will be permitted to assert their sovereignty against the bourgeois regime in any version of the British Road re-written to suit Roberts' prescription. A strategy oriented to the victory of organs of workers power — whether in the context of a 'strong' or 'weak' workers government — will certainly require a revolutionary leadership.
Contrary to Roberts' apparent belief, Gramsci always insisted on the role of revolutionary leadership in the struggle for workers power. Gramsci's central strategic conception in 'The Modern Prince' is that workers councils must be forged from the spontaneous reaction of the exploited and oppressed to capitalist crisis. The spontaneous mass response must be educated, directed, purged of 'extraneous contaminations'. He recalled that the Turin workers council movement 'gave the masses a theoretical consciousness' of being creators of historical and institutional 'values, of being founders of a State. This unity between 'spontaneity' and 'conscious leadership' or 'discipline' is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes and not merely an adventure by groups [appealing to the masses]. In this same passage Gramsci issues a warning to all those who, like the latter-day Communist leaders in Chile, Italy or France, simultaneously reject mass spontaneity and the need for organs of workers power:
'Neglecting, or worse still despising, so-called spontaneous movements, i.e. failing to give them a conscious leadership or to raise them to a higher plane by inserting them into politics, may often have extremely serious consequences. It is almost always the case that a spontaneous movement of the subaltern classes is accompanied by a reactionary movement of the right wing of the dominant class, for concomitant reasons. An economic crisis, for instance, engenders on the one hand discontent among the subaltern classes and spontaneous mass movements, and on the other conspiracies among the reactionary groups who take advantage of the objective weakening of the government in order to attempt coups d'état. Among the effective causes of the coups must be included the failure of the responsible groups to give any conscious leadership to the spontaneous revolts or to make them into a positive factor' (Prison Notebooks, pp. 198-9).
Roberts will no doubt find distressing symptoms of economic determinism, catastrophism and vanguardism in this text of Gramsci. He will also note that Gramsci did not espouse the apparently super-revolutionary view that the task of the hegemonic party was, as Roberts puts it, 'the preparation of revolution rather than one of preparing for [the revolution]. [But nor did Gramsci believe that any] radical notion involves neglecting or despising the spontaneous creativity of the masses, and imagining that the entire historical process can be brought under the supervision and control of an omnicompetent Party centre.
Social Democracy and the United Front
In his discussion of Trotskyism and bourgeois democracy, Roberts simply fails to grasp some of the most basic points. While Trotsky himself did not elaborate a systematic account of the workings of bourgeois democracy, his work does offer a number of crucial insights and watchwords. Thus it is quite wrong to say that he regarded the elements of 'proletarian democracy' in bourgeois society as being entirely outside the political system. Likewise it is false to maintain that Trotsky considered social democracy to be purely and simply an obstacle to proletarian revolution. Having failed to understand these questions, Roberts is naturally incapable of comprehending the revolutionary Marxist conception of the united front, transitional demands, or workers government, arriving finally at the absurd conclusion that Trotsky and the Fourth International lack a strategic concept of socialist revolution.
Let us invite Roberts to consider again what Trotsky had to say about social democracy and the 'elements of proletarian democracy' in bourgeois society:
'In a developed capitalist society, during a "democratic" regime, the bourgeoisie leans for support primarily upon the working classes, which are held in check by the reformists. In its most finished form, this system finds its highest expression in Britain during the administration of the Labour Government as well as during that of the Conservatives... In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilising it, by fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sports clubs, the co-operatives, etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of bourgeois democracy, but can do so only by taking the road of revolution: this has been proved by theory and by experience. And these bulwarks of workers democracy within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for taking the revolutionary road.' (Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York 1971, pp. 158-9).
As we have earlier shown, Trotsky certainly did not regard reformism as the only ideological weapon of the ruling class within a bourgeois democracy — nationalism, racism, male chauvinism and many other ideologies spawned by bourgeois society are extremely important ideological expressions/supports of capitalist social relations. But at the political level, reformism and economism within the workers movement play a decisive role in preventing the working class from struggling for the leadership of society. And reformism is invariably more or less collusive with these ideological poisons and the repressive structures which generate them.
In Europe today the traditional workers parties are playing, or are about to play, an absolutely central role within the politics of every single state in capitalist Europe. That is to say, social democratic or Communist parties are in the government or are the most significant opposition grouping in every European state except Switzerland. Evidently Trotsky was quite right to stress that bourgeois democratic regimes rest on the working classes, and that the function of reformism is to hold the latter in check. Until now social democracy has carried out this function well enough, with only minor splits and strains; it remains to be seen whether the militants of the European Communist Parties will prove more recalcitrant. At all events, it should be clear from the passage from Trotsky quoted above that he saw social democracy not only as an obstacle but also as the residue of a historical conquest by the working class, and furthermore that the bulwarks of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society were inside as well as outside the political institutions of bourgeois democracy.
Because social democratic parties represented in part an historical gain of the workers movement the goal of communists, according to Trotsky, must be to engage in united action with social democrats, wherever this was possible. The programmatic basis of such united action could be either immediate demands (for example, a wage rise), democratic demands (such as trade union rights) or transitional demands. United action with social democracy was not only permissible, it was mandatory. Trotsky formulated this question in 1933 in the following limpid formulas:
'Let us for a moment transfer the problem to Great Britain, where the Communist Party (as a consequence of the ruinous mistakes of Stalinist bureaucracy) still comprises an insignificant portion of the proletariat. If one accepts the theory that every type of the united front, except the Communist, is "counter-revolutionary", then obviously the British proletariat must put off its revolutionary struggle until that time when the Communist Party is able to come to the fore. But the Communist Party cannot come to the front of the class except on the basis of its own revolutionary experience. However, its experience cannot take on a revolutionary character in any other way than by drawing mass millions into the struggle. Yet non-Communist masses, the more so if organised, cannot be drawn into the struggle except through the policy of the united front. We fall into a vicious circle, from which there is no way out by means of bureaucratic ultimatism. But the revolutionary dialectic has long since pointed the way out and has demonstrated it by countless examples in the most diverse spheres: by correlating the struggle for power with the struggle for reforms, by maintaining complete independence of the party while preserving the unity of the trade unions; by fighting against the bourgeois regime and at the same time utilising its institutions; by relentlessly criticising parliamentarism — from the parliamentary tribunal; by waging war mercilessly against reformism, and at the same time making practical agreements with the reformists in partial struggles.' (Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York 1971, pp.169-70)
United action to defend the interests of the working class is not only valuable in itself, it also lays the basis for autonomous working class organisation and a pole of anti-capitalist politics — as Trotsky put it, organisations of the soviet type are the highest form of the united front. For Trotskyists the united front with social democrats is thus a tactic within an overall strategic orientation towards workers power; it is not in itself this strategy. We certainly reject any concept of strategic unity with social democracy. Where social democracy is actively promoting class collaboration and pro-imperialist politics, as it is prone to do, and as the Labour Government is doing in Britain today, then there is no basis for united action with the whole of social democracy. Indeed in these circumstances the task of developing an independent pole of proletarian, anti-capitalist politics requires a struggle against social democracy. It becomes a priority to develop a socialist alternative, based on class struggle and prepared to contest social democracy on its home ground — the electoral arena.
In Britain today this is the burning task presented to us by the 'current moment' — Phase Three of the Social Contract, the Lib-Lab pact, the hopelessness of the Labour left, cuts in social expenditure, falling living standards, massive unemployment, the electoral advance of fascism, the repressive involution and decay of bourgeois civilisation in Britain and of its traditional state forms. In such a situation all those within the labour movement who are committed to anti-capitalist class struggle should unite to present the socialist alternative in the electoral arena. Bourgeois democracy claims to embody popular sovereignty and normally it does wield certain real powers and rest on mass consent. That is why the national and local apparatus of elections and assemblies are a crucial arena for presenting a socialist alternative to the crisis and decay of capitalism. Because bourgeois democratic institutions focus the political attention and aspirations of the masses, an intervention at this level is essential to any strategy which aims to release their independent political initiative and capacity.
Workers Power and Workers Government
The underlying strategic goal informing the tactics of the Fourth International in capitalist Europe is that of working for the emergence and victory of institutions of dual power. This entails striving to develop a revolutionary alternative to reformism in the working class movement and thus educating and preparing the working class for the creation of their own instruments of power. There is, of course, little that is specific to Trotsky in these conceptions. Lenin, or for that matter Gramsci, were equally concerned to find the road to workers power. To seek to counterpose Gramsci to Trotsky (and also presumably to Lenin) on this question is a very misconceived exercise. Gramsci's writings on the Turin workers councils furnish, in fact, a more detailed and vivid portrait of the emergence of a workers power than anything to be found in either Lenin or Trotsky (see the recently published volume of Gramsci's Political Writings). However the defeats of 1919-20 impressed on all three Marxist leaders that the victory of workers power in the bourgeois democracies would require a strategy that took into account the strength of bourgeois power in these states. Hence Left Wing Communism, hence the Prison Notebooks, and hence Trotsky's writings on the united front and the transitional programme, on Germany and France, on Britain and Spain.
But as Lenin made perfectly clear the theses of Left Wing Communism did not cancel out the imperatives indicated in State and Revolution and, as we have argued above, workers councils remained at the core of Gramsci's strategic thinking in the Prison Notebooks. It is no disrespect to Lenin or Gramsci to point out that Trotsky's writings on Western Europe have greater scope and concreteness. Because Trotsky wrote much, much more about the actual course of class struggle in the advanced countries than either Lenin or Gramsci, his writings contain many more precise concepts and formulas for understanding and intervening in that struggle than are to be found in their writings. For that same reason there were also more errors of interpretation and mistakes of prescription in Trotsky's work, but these are errors and mistakes from which much can be learnt.
As we have seen, Trotsky declared that parliamentarism should be denounced from the parliamentary tribunal. In Left Wing Communism Lenin also urged the British Communists to address themselves to the task 'of getting pro-Soviet politicians into parliament.' The early Comintern conducted a very important debate on the immense opportunities and the mortal danger that would face any workers movement that was in a position to form a government on the terrain of bourgeois democracy. But at this time there were very few concrete reference points. At that time, social democratic parties had formed governments either as a consequence of revolution (in Central Europe) or on a minority, coalition basis. In the Thirties there was a prospect of workers parties dominating the government in a series of European states. Trotsky's writings on Belgium, France and Spain for this reason furnish a more concrete indication and elaboration of the meaning of transitional demands, an Action Programme, the perspectives of a workers government, than is to be found in the earlier discussions. Thus Trotsky's analysis of the French conjuncture may have contained peremptory or false estimates of the tempo of events, or of the precise character of some of the French political parties (important questions which we cannot go into here). But they certainly contain some novel developments in proposed revolutionary tactics.
Thus Trotsky, in the Action Programme which he proposed to the French Trotskyists, suggested that they agitate for 'a more generous democracy' (abolition of the Senate and Presidency, etc.) since this would facilitate the struggle for workers power. This programme declared that if the social democratic SFIO 'were to gain the confidence of the majority, we are and always will be prepared to defend the SFIO government against the bourgeoisie. We want to attain our objectives not by armed conflict between the various groups of toilers but by real workers democracy, by propaganda and loyal criticism, by the voluntary regrouping of the great majority of the proletariat under the flag of true communism. Workers adhering to democratic socialism must further understand that it is not enough to defend democracy; democracy must be regained... We can defend the sorry remains of democracy, and especially we can enlarge the democratic arena for the activity of the masses, only by annihilating the armed fascist forces that, on 6 February 1934, started moving the axis of the state and are still doing so.' (A Programme of Action, June 1934).
As is well known, Trotsky opposed the political formula of the Popular Front that was subsequently formed in France. But this did not stop him from calling for its transformation into a force that could achieve a durable victory over the fascists and their collaborators: 'Is the Popular Front intended for the defence of "democracy"? Then let it begin by applying it to its own ranks. This means: the leadership of the People's Front must be the direct and immediate reflection of the will of the struggling masses. How? Very simply: through elections. The proletariat does not deny any one the right to struggle side by side with it against fascism, the Bonapartist regime of Laval, the war plot of the imperialists, and other forms of oppression and violence... The last Congress of the Communist International in its resolution on the Dimitrov report expressed itself in favour of elected Committees of Action as the mass support for the People's Front. This is perhaps the only progressive idea in the entire resolution. But precisely for this reason the Stalinists do nothing to realise it. They dare not do so for fear of breaking off collaboration with the bourgeoisie. To be sure, in the election of Committees not only workers will be able to participate but also civil service employees, functionaries, war veterans, artisans, small merchants and small peasants. Thus the Committees of Action are in closest harmony with the tasks of the struggle of the proletariat for influence over the petty bourgeoisie. But they complicate to the extreme the collaboration between the workers bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie.' (Trotsky, Whither France?, London 1974, pp. 100-1).
The course of the class struggle was to show that the possibility of such Committees of Action was no figment of Trotsky's imagination; but in France, as later in Spain, the momentum of workers committees was broken when the large workers parties denied them a democratic character. The strategy and tactics which Trotsky and the Fourth International elaborated in the Thirties have been further developed in debates and practical experiences (most recently concerning Chile and Portugal). However we believe that the class struggle in prospect in Europe today differs in one decisive respect from that which prevailed in most European countries in the Thirties, namely that social democracy no longer enjoys an unchallengeable hegemony over the workers movement. Political developments in Europe since 1968 have shown that social democracy and Stalinism are in crisis and decay, and that there exists a newly radicalised layer of workers who are drawn to revolutionary socialism. In the recent French municipal elections the united far left slate obtained an average [of] more than [5] per cent of the vote and in some areas (for example, Orleans) they obtained over 10 per cent of the vote. In Britain over the last decade the far left has grown into a stronger force within the working class than at any time since the early days of the CPGB. One piece of evidence for this is the votes gained by the far left in a number of union elections.
The fact that there is now the beginnings of an open debate between members of the CPGB and the Trotskyist far left is in itself a welcome sign of the new climate within the workers movement. Roberts in his conclusion declares that 'the critical trends within Trotskyism are going to have to come to terms with their movement's legacy'. We would point out that Trotskyists have every reason to be proud of their legacy, since it is the legacy of a movement which held fast to the best traditions of revolutionary Marxism in appallingly difficult circumstances and confronted, in all their enormity, the dire consequences of the ascendancy of Stalin. There are certainly 'critical trends' within Trotskyism. Indeed there is a continual debate within the Fourth International on many important questions, since this is integral to the democracy that characterises a healthy revolutionary movement. Until members of the CPGB like comrade Roberts undertake a thorough settling of accounts with the legacy they inherit, especially its rejection of proletarian democracy, their politics will lack the essential foundation for a victorious assault on capitalism, and will be smothered by the superior strength of bourgeois political forms and forces.
MARXISM AND BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY: A NOTE ON THE LITERATURE — Since this exchange has largely centred on the Marxist analysis of bourgeois democracy, the recent literature on this topic should be [consulted]. [The] recent major studies of the capitalist state — Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes; and Ralph Miliband, [The State in Capitalist Society — contain] much valuable material [on the] modalities of capitalist power but are not focused on [the] contradictions of class struggle in the framework of bourgeois democracy. The classical Marxist debates on these questions [are re-]considered in Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin; Norman Geras, [The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg]; [and] 'The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci', in New Left Review. The historical antecedents and developments of political democracy are traced in George Novack's pioneering work, Democracy and Revolution, New York 1971. For [the concept of the workers government see] Joseph Hansen and others, The Workers and Farmers Government, SWP 'Education for Socialists' series, New York 1974. For the experience of the Allende government in Chile see Regis Debray, Conversations with Allende, London 1971; Tariq Ali, [...]; [Ralph] Miliband, ['The Coup in Chile'] in The Socialist Register, [1973]; for the experience in Portugal see Robin Blackburn, 'The Test in Portugal', in New Left Review 87-88, and the exchanges between Joseph Hansen, Ernest Mandel and others in Intercontinental Press (New York) between August 1975 and January 1976. For the current strategic orientation of the Fourth International in Europe see Ernest Mandel, 'Revolutionary Strategy in Europe', in New Left Review 100; and the important statement of the Fourth International, 'On Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', to be published in Inprecor in June-July 1977.