Making a fetish of ‘program’

The attempt to create an international centre in Moscow that could substitute for the weaknesses of the national communist parties in the end failed. After Stalin’s bureaucratic faction gained control of the strongest party in the Comintern, the CPSU, the centralism of the Comintern enabled the Stalinists to impose their domination over most of the communist parties and subordinate them to the diplomatic needs of the Soviet bureaucracy. The communist parties in the main became obstacles to the further development of the world revolution.

But if the idea of a centralised international revolutionary organisation led to tragedy in the case of the Third International, in the case of the Fourth International it became a farce.

At least the Comintern had a centralised organisation based on mass parties, with real roots in the class struggle. The Fourth International, however, sought to build a centralised organisation on nothing but small propaganda groups united around a written program.

Moreover, when you are small you have a tendency to collect the windbags and to substitute for the fact that you have no real mass weight, with a certain arrogant posing: to talk about your claims to continuity with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky — as though you could inherit a program instead of forging one in life, in the class struggle itself. And then this written program is elevated above everything else, because if you’ve got nothing — you’ve got no mass press, you’ve got no trade union implantation, you’ve got very few cadres, you don’t have a functioning team — at least you have “the program”. Remember all the sayings we were brought up on: The program will conquer the party; the program will conquer all these things.

This hype built up even during the ’30s. So, in the founding programmatic document of the Fourth International, the Transitional Program, Trotsky could state that “there does not a single revolutionary current on this planet, really meriting the name”.3

Think what it means to say that in 1938: The few thousands of people in the Trotskyist movement were the only revolutionaries in the world. Seven years later, there are big revolutions — and they aren’t led by the “only revolutionaries”. Yet I don’t think we ever lost that view of ourselves until around 1979. That’s what we were brought up on: We were it. That’s where the roots are of our problem in the International today in regard to the Cubans. Remember how many formulations we tried to find to avoid calling them revolutionary Marxists, to avoid saying they’re the same as us — except that in reality they’re a good deal better at it than we are!

I was struck, in the Allen [Myers]’s report on the Vietnamese Revolution,4 by the passage he quoted from the 1973 article on the Vietnamese Communist Party by Feldman and Johnson. What was the Fourth International’s role in relation to the VCP? asked Feldman and Johnson. “To provide programmatic guidelines to the Vietnamese revolutionists”, they answered. The few thousand members of the Fourth International, who’ve never led a revolution, are to provide “programmatic guidelines” for a party that has led, through 30 years of the most difficult struggle imaginable, 50 or 60 million people to victory over the mightiest imperialist power on Earth. Can you think of anything more ludicrous?

But that sort of grotesque posturing flows inevitably from the view that the Fourth International is the only organisation of revolutionaries in the world, the only ones with a fully thought out revolutionary program.

So the written program is elevated to our distinguishing feature. The implication is that it is a finished program. But in reality, that’s not how a program is developed at all. Our resolution points this out. In it we note that among the key problems of the Fourth International have been:

l A view of program abstracted from the practice of parties, which leads to judging other currents by their words rather than their deeds and thus to the view that the Fourth International is the only Marxist revolutionary current;

• l An attitude towards other class-struggle or revolutionary currents that downplays their achievements and seeks for programmatic differences rather than practical agreements;

• lA reluctance to put our program into practice, as seen in the failure to orient to the industrial working class and establish a base there when the conditions for doing so exist.5

This idealistic view of program reaches its extreme with organisations like the Healyites [now known as the Socialist Equality Party in Australia], who can’t even recognise revolutions when they occur, because they don’t accord with the Trotskyist program. That’s the extreme form in the Trotskyist movement. But it’s actually the same method, the same error, committed by comrades who think that revolutions are instant coffee or dinner parties — that everything is going to be a perfect, pretty affair. No, they’re very violent affairs, as Engels pointed out.

There are many in the Fourth International who accept this in words but when faced with a living revolution with all its inevitable warts throw their hands up in horror. They want an all or nothing revolution, a perfect revolution.

This attitude is generally found far more in the advanced capitalist countries. Think how grotesque it is. Think of the standard of living that we enjoy in this country today, the comfort that we enjoy — even us, who give most of our money to the party. We live a great life compared to the Vietnamese “bureaucrats”. It’s just grotesque for us to accuse them of being “privileged”. Millions of them spent years of their lives risking death every day. But we, from the comfort of our middle-class existence, can make those statements. And people continue to do so in the Trotskyist movement today. Where is their sense of proportion if they continue to do that?

This “dinner party” attitude is very common. I remember it was one of the things that shocked Doug Lorimer and me at the US SWP’s 1980 conference when we heard Jack Barnes explaining why the US SWP had to drop the position it had had in common with us of supporting the Soviet Union’s use of troops to aid the defence of the Afghan revolution from the imperialist-backed landlord counter-revolution. Barnes said: “… we are fighters for the world proletarian revolution … not a 10-cent revolution today, then a 50-cent revolution tomorrow.” For him it was all or nothing; he wanted either the full 50 cents’ worth today, or nothing at all!

This sort of childish attitude comes from an ultraleft view also of what is possible in politics and in the world revolution today: The view that, as it says in the Transitional Program, conditions are rotten ripe for revolution. There it is, right at the beginning: All that is lacking is the leadership.

We insist on that so much, we get it wrong. The conditions aren’t ripe for revolution here. Even if we were leading the trade unions today, the conditions would not be ripe for revolution here. They’re not always ripe. There’s such a thing as a revolutionary crisis. True, the conditions leading up to a revolutionary crisis are prepared by the sorts of struggles we are engaged in today. But you have to deal with the real world. A refusal to do that was apparent in the view of the August Revolution in Vietnam in 1945 that we used to have. Here you have a small formation, the Vietnamese Communist Party, which has only recently begun to develop any sort of armed forces. It’s manoeuvring with extreme skill, intelligence and cunning to get on to the board. But that was not good enough for us, who thought that instant socialist revolution was possible. In our old view all the VCP had to do was call the masses into the streets. That approach ends up as mere preaching from the sidelines. It ends up with the view that all that we face is betrayal — that’s the only problem. Everything would be right if people would just adopt our line.

We have to have a certain humility, a certain shame for our past on this. We don’t have to beat our breasts, this is not a church, no one has to forgive us our sins. But for the future let’s keep a sense of proportion. Let’s learn this lesson quite well.

It’s a funny feature of the Trotskyist movement, almost a rule of thumb: The less achievements you have, the less is your humility. Perhaps that’s so because once you get into the real world, once you start moving in the direction you want to go, you begin to understand how far you still have to go and the complications of politics, the difficulties of revolutionary politics. That is, once you’ve started to take revolutionary struggle seriously, building a revolutionary party seriously and realising that it’s not a parlour game, you begin to estimate in a different light the achievements of others who’ve done far better than you.

It’s characteristic of sectarianism to elevate principles above real motion. We would have been falling prey to that error if we had failed to adopt our more flexible line on the Labor Party after seeing the political developments this year and the motion they produced.

Sectarians love to create principles where there are no principles, to develop a dogmatic, schematic view of theory. This then justifies all their worries about the dangers of involvement in the mass movement — the danger of popular frontism, the danger of stagism and so on.

Well, did this all come from Trotsky? Perhaps some of the errors did. We should keep that in mind as we continue to study things that Trotsky said and did and wrote. But it’s not a question of individual blame. All of us were caught in this trap, including Trotsky — and he had a right to be caught in it, given his revolutionary achievements. But we were all caught in this trap, this dead end. The question we faced was how to break out of it.

The real point is that for last 25 years our movement has had a chance to break out of this trap, to break out of this dead end. With the victory of the Cuban Revolution, we had that chance. But the Fourth International hasn’t yet seized this chance.

This abstract, dogmatic, schematic elevation of theory above practice is not Leninism. We noted this two years ago and called attention to it in a report on preparing the party to meet the crisis.6 In the report, we quoted two passages that Trotsky wrote about Leninism. These passages are what make me think Trotsky was caught in a trap rather than that Trotsky was a Trotskyist. The first was:

Marxism is a method of historical analysis, of political orientation, and not a mass of decisions prepared in advance. Leninism is the application of this method in the conditions of an exceptional historical epoch. It is precisely this union of the peculiarities of the epoch and the method that determines that courageous, self-assured policy of brusque turns of which Lenin gave us the finest models, and which he illuminated theoretically and generalised on more than one occasion …

Leninism cannot be conceived of without theoretical breadth, without a critical analysis of the material bases of the political process. The weapon of Marxist investigation must be constantly sharpened and applied. It is precisely in this that tradition consists, and not in the substitution of a formal reference or an accidental quotation. Least of all can Leninism be reconciled with ideological superficiality and theoretical slovenliness.7

The second passage is equally instructive for us today:

"… The simple appeal to tradition never decided anything. As a matter of fact, with each new task and at each new turn, it is not a question of searching in tradition and discovering there a nonexistent reply, but of profiting from all the experience of the party to find by oneself a new solution suitable to the situation and, by doing so, enriching tradition. It may even be put more sharply: Leninism consists of being courageously free of conservative retrospection, of being bound by precedent, purely formal references, and quotations."

Lenin himself not so long ago expressed this thought in Napoleon’s words: “On s’engage et puis on voit” (start fighting and then see). To put it differently, once engaged in the struggle, don’t be excessively preoccupied with canon and precedent, but plunge into reality as it is and seek there the forces necessary for victory and the roads leading to it.8

We should think about that, read it again. Because that’s not been the method of the Trotskyist movement in country after country.

We should be aware of the differences here. We think that the Trotskyist movement has been too much Trotskyist and not enough Leninist. But many people in the Fourth International still think that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and Trotsky’s fight against that founded a new historical current that has superseded Leninism. But there has already been sufficient historical test of that view. It hasn’t been the Trotskyist movement that has led revolutions. It’s been those who understood Leninism best who have led them.