Isolation and the circle spirit

But these objective difficulties had another effect. They led to the development of a “circle spirit” in the Trotskyist movement. Since its formation, the Trotskyist movement has been largely isolated. It didn’t have a mass base in the unions of the imperialist countries; it wasn’t leading big peasant struggles in the colonies and semicolonies. In that situation, its written program was all the movement had, the thing that justified its existence. And because of this, there developed a strong tendency to spend a lot of time in an endless elaboration of the written program. Now, elaborating the program — that is, trying to maintain Leninism, trying to understand the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, trying to understand what was happening with the world revolution as a whole — might have had a certain relevance in the ’20s and the ’30s. But since the end of World War II, since the world revolution has been on the ascent, winning important victories, we have to say that it’s long past time for revolutionaries to have broken through that earlier isolation and found their way to the masses, to have made the emphasis of their activity implementing rather than elaborating a revolutionary program.

Furthermore, it’s one thing now to look back with the benefit of hindsight and decide that conditions in the ’30s were too difficult, and therefore perhaps it wasn’t objectively possible for them to break out of their isolation. But that sort of understanding of the character of the period comes only after the fact. At the time, it wasn’t obviously inevitable that the working class would suffer the defeats it suffered, yet many Trotskyists had already reconciled themselves to isolation.

In any case, to a large extent the Trotskyist movement has persisted in that approach well beyond the time when objective necessity forced it to do so. We even made a virtue of that necessity. We quote a little bit of a document of the Fourth International from 1953-54 in the resolution. Here is more of the quote:

This principled origin of the Trotskyist movement represents its great strength. For the first time in the history of the workers’ movement, an international organisation was constituted exclusively on the basis of agreement of the cadres with a precise program, strategy, and tactics. But at the same time in this strength lay a sure danger of great weakness because of its being cut off from the workers’ movement: that of the transformation of the Trotskyist organisation into a discussion club and into an academic sect of Marxist critics of Stalinist policy. The founders of the Fourth International, especially Leon Trotsky, were to such a degree conscious of this danger that as early as 1933 they concentrated all their efforts upon rooting the Trotskyist nuclei in the mass movement, upon reestablishing ties with this movement wherever they had been broken, and upon selecting a new generation of Trotskyist workers’ cadres …2

You’ll find that sort of statement made often in Trotskyist resolutions: Historically, there is an understanding in the Trotskyist movement of the danger of isolation. You’ll see statement after statement of the need to root ourselves in the mass movement. But the fact that the way the Fourth International was constituted — that for the first time an organisation is constituted exclusively on the basis of agreement of the cadres with a precise program, strategy and tactics — was seen as a historic advantage indicates an underestimation of the problem of isolation.

That whole method of constituting an international is a mistaken one. In the end it’s no strength at all. That’s not how real parties or programs are developed and formed.

The Trotskyist movement began with a lot of cadres within the Soviet Communist Party in the 1920s. But the fight against Stalinism that developed in the CPSU, which had real roots in the needs of the masses, went down to a terrible defeat. And the attempt to build a major international current as a result of that fight also was largely unsuccessful; it remained an isolated process throughout the international communist movement. Around the world only a few thousands of cadres were won from the Stalinists.

And in 1933, after the victory of Hitlerism in Germany and the refusal of the Communist International to even acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the policy that its German party had pursued up to that time, it was decided to break with the Communist International and form new parties in every country. No distinction was made in this new policy between different communist parties. To develop new parties with an international program was the Trotskyist line for all countries.

It was decided to do that even where the Trotskyist formations were small and weak, perhaps consisting of a handful of propagandists, perhaps only of left critics with no roots in the mass movement. But that meant that these small, weak, isolated groups began to determine the life of the Fourth International.

That was the objective weakness of the movement, right from the start. A certain attempt was made to overcome this real weakness — the fact that it wasn’t built on developed revolutionary parties, or parties with real team leaderships, real weight in the mass movement — by substituting an international centre that would give adequate guidance to the movement around the world. And of course, while that centre was led by Trotsky, a very great Marxist revolutionary was leading this process. But there was a danger there, the danger of Cominternism: the danger of directing parties, trying to substitute for the development of real leadership. And this inevitably led to a series of splits.

I’ll never forget going to a convention of the US SWP once at Oberlin, which began with a talk which was written by George Breitman and delivered by Joe Hansen. It was called “The Rocky Road to the Fourth International”. This was to start off a major national conference of the US SWP. I never heard a more depressing talk. It would go along like this: On the initial International Executive Committee there were eight members, six ratted, one was killed by the fascists, one was still alive. And this sorry tale went on right through the ’30s.

All right, we’re not criticising them; they were in the framework of objective difficulties. But after Trotsky dies, you have a bigger problem: Who’s going to substitute for Trotsky? What’s the new leading party? What should be the new strength of the centre? Who’s the new genius? How do we substitute for the fact that we don’t have living parties, a real living experience in each country?

An international centre is formed made up people who have never had experience in building real parties, with broad team leaderships, a centre made up of people who have had little experience in revolutionary mass struggles. But because of the weakness of the national sections of the Fourth International these people, or in some cases, one person, is looked to to provide the precise program, strategy and tactics for the whole movement.

So the process of universalising the tactics which should be followed by the International all around the world began. But, above all, that method tends to universalise tactical mistakes. In the 1950s the Fourth International made the tactic of complete immersion in the mass reformist parties a universal tactic. In the late 1960s, when it finally broke with that tactical schema, it adopted a new one — guerrilla warfare — and universalised it to all its Latin American sections. Then when it finally disposed of that tactical schema and its accompanying ultraleftist errors for the advanced capitalist countries, it decided to adopt another universal tactical schema — the “turn to industry” as elaborated at the 1979 World Congress.

This Cominternism that the Fourth International fell into, was of course also a grave danger for the Comintern itself. Lenin, when he proposed and led the formation of the Third International, was gambling, was staking a lot on rapidly developing revolutionary parties in a number of countries. And the situation from 1917 to 1923 looked exceedingly ripe for revolutions, for eliminating the isolation of the Bolshevik Party.

The tactics pursued by the Comintern were designed to split the social democratic parties, to carve out mass communist parties, to overleap the fact that Lenin and his party had been a very isolated minority in the Second International. There were no other living parties of the same sort, of the same size, of the same experience, of the same potential for leading revolutions at that moment. He plunged a lot on that tactic. And, to give Lenin his due, it almost came off. There was no objective reason that the German revolution in 1923 had to be defeated. It failed because of the weakness of the leadership of the German Communist Party, because it didn’t have a leadership team that had been built and steeled over the previous 20 years, as the Bolshevik Party had been in Russia. The lack of such a leadership team had its roots in the failure of the revolutionary leaders in the old German Social Democratic Party, to understand, as Lenin had from 1903 on, the need to consciously create a politically homogeneous, democratically-centralised vanguard formation.