From the archives two decades ago: On Trotskyism, and why I am not a 'Trostskyist'

[The post below is something I wrote two decades ago in reference to a long-forgotten conference dealing with the legacy of Trotskyism. It was written for the Marxism email list, maintained to this day by Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect, who together with this writer and many other on that list in those days, had come out of the wreckage of what had been until the 1980s the main Trotskyist group in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party.

[I had been a prominent leader of the SWP for several years before leaving the group in 1985. A few months earlier in the year 2000 I'd become embroiled in a controversy with the SWP over the case of Cuban 6-year-old Elián González, which earned me a two-page centerfold spread denunciation in the May 22, 2000, edition of the paper, which was a gratifying confirmation that the criticism I'd leveled against the SWP cult for denouncing the raid that freed Elián and returned him to his father had struck home.

[Recently there's been a lot of discussion in the DSA around various issues that led me to seek out and re-read this old post. That led me to think it was worth resurrecting although I do not have the time to explain why apart from saying that the underlying issues of the relationship between the actual social movement of working people, political organizations, and ideology or "theory" are present in both cases.

[Unfortunately I also don't have the time to try to make this post more understandable to those who did not live through those times as part of those circles. But I wanted to make it accessible as I started to write an article about current concerns where I wound up making reference to this post.]

*  *  *

Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 00:07:19 -0700

I've read with some interest the reports on the conference and related matters.

It seems to me the question that deserves the most thought is the legacy of Trotsky, of Trotskyism, and of the Trotskyist movement. They are not the same thing.

To start with the Trotskyist movement. It seems to me the current of Bolshevik-Leninists that arose in the USSR to fight against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union was entirely progressive and historically necessary. It was most of all a fight to rescue and preserve genuine Marxism. I believe Trotsky will be long remembered for this. And his analysis and understanding of the degeneration of the Soviet Union is now part of the ABC's of Marxism.

I think [Argentine socialist] Nestor [Gorojovsky] is right to place the Russian Revolution in the context of the great sweep of revolutions called forth by the development of capitalism in Europe, and the events now going on in Belgrade as quite likely their closing chapter.

I do not believe the Belgrade events close the book on the Trotskyist movement, however, no more than the 1989-1991 capitalist restorationist counterrevolution in  the USSR and Central and Eastern Europe did. I believe the book was closed on the specifically Trotskyist movement as "the" revolutionary movement by the Second World War and its immediate result, the anticolonial revolution, and this was shown in practice in China in 1949, and confirmed again in the 50s in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria.

The case of Cuba is particularly definitive because there was no question there but that these were fresh revolutionary currents, totally outside the by-then "traditional" tendencies in the workers and communist movement. There were undoubtedly many individuals who came out of the Trotskyist tradition or who were influenced by it who simply became part of the Cuban revolutionary movement. But those who chose to remain specifically and distinctively Trotskyist became, inevitably and irremediably, a sect.

In fact, the Trotskyist movement had been in a certain sense a sect all along, since the 1930s. I do not mean by this that they were sectarian (though many were) but that they were a strictly ideological formation, with a fully worked out theory and program, and the boundaries of the group were set overwhelmingly by this ideological frontier. A few times various Trotskyist groups began to go beyond being a mere sect formation in the direction of being an expression of the actual movement of social forces, but these remained in all cases, as far as I know, extremely limited and partial developments. In the one case I know best, that of the SWP in the mid-70s, the development was totally unconscious, a byproduct of its "intervention" in the mass movements of those days, and no one in the SWP except perhaps Peter Camejo even had an inkling of what was going on, what it really meant. Even incipient as Peter's tendency towards de-sectification may have been, he was instinctively rejected and pushed outside the party as a foreign organism.

I don't say this lightly, and it may seem to contradict what I said before about the importance of the fight waged by Trotsky and his comrades to preserve genuine revolutionary Marxism. But it was inevitable under the circumstances given the nature of the fight, an ideological one, that it had to be waged precisely by sect-like formations. Engels once said, I think in reference to the American SLP, that even sects can play a positive role during periods of downturn, because they keep alive socialist ideas.  Or to put it in American terms, without DeLeon, there would have been no Debs.

Marx and Engels's Communist League was a very similar formation to the Trotskyist movement, a purely ideological group, a group that largely played a role in the fight over ideas, creating a clear, Marxist pole of attraction in the inchoate communist rebelliousness of the mid-1840s. But it was a consciously anti-sect "sect," a group whose central ideological leaders understood that, at bottom, communism was not a doctrine but a movement, that the role of communists was not to teach the proletariat how to fight but to learn, to draw lessons and generalize them, bring to consciousness the actual existing social tendencies, motion and struggle. That's why in 1848, with the ink on the Manifesto barely dry, the Communists disbanded the Communist League, and Marx, Engels and some of their closest friends set up a daily newspaper instead.

The Communist League was briefly reborn following the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, when it was unclear whether the defeat was for an entire period of merely a momentary setback. When the actual reactionary nature of the new period, based on a vigorous capitalist expansion became clear, Marx, Engels and their closest friends made the conscious decision to wind up the organization. This was the logical, practical result of what they wrote in the Manifesto that the Communists did not have a set of their own sectarian principles by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement. Marx and Engels turned instead to strictly literary and theoretical work.

Similarly, throughout the 1930s and into the 40s, while the largely ideological battle against the Stalinist perversion of Marxism was paramount, the existence of these new "Communist Leagues" seems to me quite justified. But with the emergence of the anticolonial revolution, the right decision, whatever its forms, would have been to do something like what Marx and Engels did when the revolution in Germany broke out in 1848. China proved the Fourth International was not in fact the world party of socialist revolution, and to maintain those structures and groups could only lead to one's isolation from the real movement.

The Cuban Revolution unleashed a powerful wave of radicalization among young people throughout the continent. The emergence of this new generation of fighters posed very sharply and in real life the issue of whether the Trotskyists would become part of the renewed movement or would instead opt to become the church of LDT. Varying currents of the Trotskyist movement were well represented in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and despite lip service and even World Congress resolutions about becoming integrated into the historic current represented by OLAS, no Trotskyist current saw its way clear to doing what Marx and Engels did almost by instinct in 1848, which is to dissolve into the general revolutionary movement.

The reason for this is that large wings of the communist movement have abandoned the viewpoint of the Manifesto on an essential question, the relationship of the communists to the proletariat, the proletarian movement and to other proletarian parties. Lenin is usually blamed for this, although usually it is thought of as "credited" with this and as far as I can tell whether for good or ill, it is a bum rap.

This arose in the 1920s in the Comintern, and has been deepened and hardened since. And it is not even so much a question as to whether what the Comintern did in the first congress or the second congress was the right thing at that time. It is the idea that these are the right things for all times, places and circumstances, that there is some "ideal" form of party organization and mass movement form. This is not Marxism but Platonism, and I think it is totally alien to how Marx and Engels, and, yes, Lenin, approached these questions.

Whether Trotsky would have had the same approach of discarding old, worn-out organizational forms is an interesting question. The comment Nestor quoted about how if W.W.II came out the way it actually did, all the books would have to be rewritten, is certainly suggestive.

This idea of "the Leninist strategy of party building" as the sure-fire formula for revolutionary success, the turning of the Russian experience into a "model," is a mistake. It is an understandable mistake, and one that the new generation of fighters that came up in Latin America in the 60s ALSO made vis-a-vis the Cuban model, but which the Cuban leadership itself eventually came to recognize as a mistake. The reason that Cuban communists do not run guns to guerrilla groups in Latin America today is not that they have abandoned their sympathy, solidarity and support for revolutionary movements throughout the hemisphere, but because they do not believe this is helpful, you can't repeat the Cuban experience, history has proved that, you have to create your own revolutionary tactics and strategy in each country based on the history, the psychological makeup and concrete circumstances of each people.

What was wrong with those Trotskyist currents who tried to become part of the general "Cuba-inspired" movement while retaining their own identity? It was a totally ideological differentiation, not a political one. Communism is a movement, not a doctrine, and if there was to have been a differentiation, it should have been along political lines of cleavage on what was to be done, on the ground, in specific circumstances in a specific country, not ideological ones about who was right in Soviet Russia in 1927.

This insistence on maintaining the Church of Saint Leon led inevitably to countless political mistakes, such as the US SWP's insanely sectarian articles about the "Stalinism" of the Vietnamese comrades and its quite ignorant and arrogant criticisms of the Vietnamese line on the Paris Peace Accords. Similar things can be said about its stance towards Chile, the Allende government and the coup, and if more similar examples are wanted, go to the Militant's web site and look up their articles on Hugo Chávez.

For to maintain a group around the lessons of China in the 1920s and Spain in the 1930s at its core can only makes sense if the issues now are posed in exactly the same way then, so that you could take Trotsky's articles, change a few names, dates and places, and publish it as your analysis of something happening today.

This is why I am not a Trotskyist, and it has, really, nothing to do with how much of what Trotsky wrote I agree with or how important I think his legacy may be. It has to do with Marx and Engels's idea that Communism is not a doctrine, it is a movement. 

That's why when people press me on what sort of Marxist I am, I'm much more likely to say that I'm a fidelista rather than a trotskista, although I agree with Fidel that it's better not to "personalize" these things. But I said fidelismo because fidelismo is the communist movement we've got in the here and now --and, of course, I believe to the marrow of my bones it is genuine 100% real communism, not some fake or perversion. 

If I had lived in Russia in 1917 I hope I would have been a Leninist, or if in the 20s and 30s, a Trotskyist, but as I see things, beginning in the late 1940s, "Trotskyism" as a separate distinct current and organization should have begun to melt into and simply become part of the past of the revolutionary movement, and certainly by the early 60s this was an urgent, pressing, overriding political necessity.

To try to maintain a separate, distinct "Trotskyist"  (or "Maoist" or "Stalinist" or "Leninist" or even, depending on the circumstances, a "Fidelista" or "Marxist" current) cannot but push you in an incorrect political direction, because it puts you in a false position on the relationship between the communist movement and communist theory, and on the relationship between the communists and the working class movement. 

Why I am withdrawing from the DSA Socialist Majority Caucus

[The Democratic Socialists of America held their national convention in Atlanta August 2-4. I was a delegate and candidate for the DSA National Political Committee. I was also a member of the Socialist Majority Caucus although not on its slate of candidates, in part, I am sure, because other caucus members realized, as I did, that increasingly my views diverged from the approach the steering committee had decided on with the support of active caucus members.

[That approach was to become, in essence, a faction like the other main factions operating prior to the convention, one called Bread and Roses (formerly the Spring Caucus and prior to that Momentum), Build (which curiously claimed not to be a caucus), and the Collective Power Network. 

[There was also a North Star Caucus that operated as an ideological tendency rather than a faction because it did not seek to place a slate of its own members on the National Political Committee. In my view the difference between a tendency and a faction is that the latter seeks to place its own people on leadership bodies, which tends to transform the group into a disciplined fighting organization, a faction.

[Simultaneously with publishing this, I'm also informing the caucus through its internal mailing list that I am withdrawing from the grouping.]

DSA members in the Socialist Majority Caucus and I'm sure others who read carefully  my campaign leaflet for our recent DSA convention cannot possibly have failed to understand that I was criticizing the way this and other caucuses wound up functioning:

    Finally, I am running against factionalism. We need to channel our discussions and collaboration through structures and spaces which are open to everyone in the DSA.
    Members have a right to form caucuses, but caucuses carry a price. Separate discussion lists, private zoom calls, by-invitation-only conventions, “whipping the votes” through one-sided phone conversations, these practices undermine the cohesion of the DSA and can even compromise the integrity of the organization.

What I wanted and understood to be an aspect of the Socialist Majority project originally was the idea embodied in the "this caucus is not a caucus" proposal for its name, a formation that, yes, favored a range of ideas we have in common, but especially what I thought was a common view on the right way to function in the "big tent," multi-tendency organization we are all for.

And that way is to combat the fragmentation into caucuses for essentially no good reason. And having ongoing caucuses now seems to me to be unjustified at this stage of the organization.

Even for a convention, factions should not be formed on the basis of affinity, agreement with general principles, friendships and associations developed through collaboration on common projects, followers of particular individuals, electioneering for leadership posts, etc., but --if necessary under certain circumstances-- on concrete differences over what the organization should be doing and how it should function.

The difference that justified a caucus in my view was precisely that we should not be functioning with these permanent factions but that they should be dissolved into the general organization, not by some sort of prohibition, but by convincing comrades not to function in this way. In addition, I think I made a mistake in supporting Single Transferable Vote (STV) election for the NPC, a type of proportional representation, which very strongly encourages factional functioning merely for electioneering.

I now think we simply should have let delegates vote for 16 people and, subject to our gender and people of color demographic requirements, let the raw number of votes for each determine the winners.

I really found extremely off-putting and essentially undemocratic the way caucuses tried to game the STV system by urging delegates not to vote their best judgement, but asking different comrades rank the candidates in various sequences on the basis of some formula or calculation. I think this sort of "tactical" voting undermines individual and collective integrity. We end up voting for a faction and not candidates. If that's the way it is going to be then it should be proposed, honestly, openly and transparently, that voting be for slates.

I realize I have an extremely distinct outlook. I may be the only one in this caucus or among the delegates who in the past was centrally involved in the leadership of a leading socialist organization that I helped destroy through undemocratic practices, trumped-up disciplinary expulsions, and all sorts of underhanded maneuvers and manipulations.

Nothing going on in the DSA today resembles what happened decades ago in the Socialist Workers Party, but at any rate, I think certain lessons are applicable.

Sill, I've decided not to try to start a discussion to convince comrades in this caucus to dissolve now.

I've realized from discussions in my local and at the convention that younger comrades find my views on these issues almost completely inaccessible if not downright incomprehensible. A discussion would be a fruitless exercise.

Better to concentrate on the practical work. And practical collaboration is now the best way to try to get away from the fragmentation of the DSA into rival factions.

My all-time favorite post: Ghosts of the SWP past -- Llover sobre mojado (1999)

At the end of the last century, as I was just shy of 50, I viewed my adult life as divided into two parts: There were the 15 years I'd spent as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and an almost equal time since I had left, the first three spent in Nicaragua, then settling down in Atlanta with an English woman I had met in Nicaragua just after I left the SWP. 

In Atlanta I had wound up at CNN, despite having made a decision to abandon journalism. I was free-lancing as a translator and in June of 1989 was offered three weeks of work as a vacation replacement writer at CNN's Spanish-language division. They liked me and so I stayed. 

The events recounted here took place a decade after I first started at CNN, when my previous life as a Trotskyist had long receded into the past and I had made a new life as a parent and television producer. And on a Saturday in August of 1999, my previous life came back to haunt me.

I posted this on the Marxism mailing list that had a lot of former SWP members, or people familiar with the group, as subscribers. I apologize that now people and things I name will seem obscure, but explaining them would only get in the way.

So there I am, outside CNN Center on a very slow Saturday smoking a cigarette when I see a familiar, smiling face.

"Nancy? Nancy Ronsenstock?"

I struggle to recall the name from a life long past.

"José," she says, smiling brightly. She's wearing a badge that says, SWP Trade Union Conference.

We start to catch up. "Your pamphlet is still a best seller," she says, meaning one in support of Puerto Rican independence I wrote a quarter of a century ago. She's quite at ease, friendly as ever.

Turns out the SWP is having some sort of national trade union fraction meeting at the complex where CNN center is located. They're on lunch break.

I walk back into the huge central courtyard at CNN Center, occupied by tables, sort of a large mall food court, and there they are, two at one table, four at another: the ghosts of Trotskyism past. Standing Fast. Eating lunch.

I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. There was Cappy, looking quite the prole with his neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard, who'd been kind enough to visit me in Sarasota (he was in Tampa) when I was just an itsy-bitsy trot neonate, having joined the YSA as an at-larger at the end of 1970. With him I went to my first national SMC conference, in 1971, which was what really drew me into the YSA. And there was John Staggs, looking barely a couple of years older than last time I saw him. What was he doing at a trade union fraction meeting, shouldn't he be in the print shop?

And Connie, who used to set all the type for Perspectiva, slim as ever, her blonde hair all gray but coiffed as ever in a style I associate with Junior High and American Bandstand. Jerry F., who had been my colleague in the YSA National Office and his diminutive long-time companion Patty. Susan, who'd been my prize Spanish Student at the second session of the SWP leadership school in 1980. And Peter and Nancy and many --well in reality, not so many -- faces from the past I'd hardly expected to have seen together in one place.

Warmest in her greeting was Olga, giving me a big embrace with her warm Chicana heart. Coldest, Doug Jenness, for many years my editor on  The Militant, who expressed --was it alarm?-- to see me in Atlanta. "I'd heard you were in Miami," he said quite pointedly. Where gusanos like me belonged, I thought. "No, I've been working here on Mr. Turner's farm for 10 years." It's safe Doug. This is just coincidence.

I talked to as many of the comrades as seemed inclined to chatting. Some were in a hurry. Late for the meeting, time to reconvene. Others --most-- were happy to take a moment for an old-timer.

"Do you still read the Militant," several asked. Must be time for the fall sub drive, I though.

"Yes, every week, I see it on the internet." Well, only a slight exaggeration. I do visit the gopher once or twice a month, usually. "Oh, I didn't realize we were on the internet," one said. She doesn't have a computer. I had a vision of her lighting a Coleman lantern as the sun set. "You know, Joe, we really might look into getting electricity put in. Even many of the comrades have it."

Things are going great, they all said. I smile appropriately as they recount some of their recent accomplishments, selling the Militant at this strike and that plant gate.

"That's great ... that's wonderful ... that's fantastic," I respond.

But no one has any stories to tell about their fresh batch of new recruits.

It was heartbreaking. I recalled the names of half the people with the white, stick-on badges, recognized the faces of virtually all the rest. There were three, perhaps five too young for me to have known them fifteen years ago. A paunchy, balding. graying crew -- though, or so it seemed, the years had been kinder to most of them than they had to me.

Going back to work, I imagined, looking down on the seating area of the food court from the second floor balcony, that I was some comrade who'd left in 1950, reappearing again in 1965. At this sort of meeting they would have seen, yes, the forty or fifty old timers. But sprinkled among them would be a baby-faced Jack Barnes and Mary Alice and Betsey Stone and the Britton brothers and Doug, Peter and Barry from Boston, Dan Styron before he killed himself, and so many others.

These are the last of the "Bolshevik-Leninists," I thought, looking down at them. The last of the Trotskyists. Heirs to the glorious October, keepers of the flame in the dark night of betrayal.

Then I thought better. The last of the Bolshevik Leninists died in a concentration camp decades ago. These, I reminded myself, had been a new generation of radicals, born of the post World War II prosperity, and now here because they are stuck with a decision made a quarter century ago to become something they were not, "worker Bolsheviks." When what they were, --American rebels-- seemed not quite enough to achieve their dreams.

It reminded me of seeing in a college labor history class a documentary about the Wobblies, including filmed interviews with some of the old timers. The last scene was of them at their Chicago headquarters, putting a new edition of their newspaper, the Industrial Worker to bed.

I remembered feeling a tremendous sadness as the announcer highlighted the surprising youth and vigor of these retirees. "But there are no young Wobblies," he said. "These are the last of the fellow workers.  Their kind we will see no more." I was determined that it not be so, wrote to Chicago, and was a member for a few months. But it was just a sentimental gesture. Their day was past. Their work was done.

I went back to my work, putting into Spanish a documentary series on the Cold War. I'm at the very end, Gorby has signed over the nuclear trigger to Yeltsin, a few mournful bars of the Internationale play over the lowering of the hammer and sickle over the Kremlin for the last time. It is time for Fidel --presented more or less as the last of the Communists-- to say his piece.

I had seen the whole interview with Fidel, not just the excerpts, and knew what had been left out, not just what had been put in. Asked by his American interviewer who had won the Cold War, he answered without hesitation. "You did. The United States did." It had been brought to mind by one of the comrades, who talked to me about some book by Jack Barnes, "U.S. Imperialism lost the Cold War."

That, I thought, would be a much better world to live in. I played the tape, with the excerpt from Fidel's interview that was in the documentary. Despite everything, he was sure of ultimate victory.

"Why believe that the ideals of socialism, which are so generous and appeal so much to solidarity and fraternity, will one day disappear? What would prevail -- selfishness, individualism, personal ambitions? That will not save the world; of that I am absolutely convinced."

I finished what I was doing, ejected the tape from the machine.

"De eso estoy absolutamente convencido," of that I am absolutely convinced. Fidel's words stayed with me. It is a stock phrase he uses when he speaks of his innermost convictions.

I remembered the first time I had ever seen Fidel in person, 20 years ago, at the inauguration of a theme park for the pioneers, Cuba's children. He had just told them it would be named for Ernesto Guevara, and the pioneers responded with their slogan, "Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che!"

"And you will be," Fidel responded, "of that I am absolutely convinced."

I walked out of the editing suite where I had been working to the shelves where I keep the tapes and put them away. It was time to go home. I walked out of the facility onto the balcony and looked down. The comrades were now on their dinner break.

These may be the last generation of SWPers, I thought, but not the last of their kind, just as the new generations of American rebels did not call themselves wobblies, but were heirs to the best of that tradition, just the same. The new generation of rebels isn't down here, but it is out there, or will be.

I went down to talk to the comrades. There would be no social at this conference, all Saturday night was taken up by meetings. To everyone I saw I smiled warmly, wished them the best. No hypocrisy there. If dedication to a cause is worth something, these had surely earned the best of luck by it. Soon enough it was time for them to reconvene.

I'd though they'd all gone, when someone came up from behind, and said, "Hello, stranger." I did not know why I hadn't spotted her before, she and I had been lovers, once, briefly, when she had been very young and I only a little older, just enough to make it seem, in her eyes, that I knew everything. Later we were fast friends, until I left the party, when we lost touch.

We talked for quite a while, she told me of her life for 15 years, I, of mine. She'd never understood why I'd left the party, I explained as gently as I could, too gently. She told me of all the exiting strikes and Militant sales, as if I were still a member, just a bit down in morale, or perhaps one considering rejoining.

"Things are really looking up--" and then she added, totally changing her tone,  "I really used to look up to you." She said it lightly, flippantly almost succeeding in hiding her feelings of abandonment and betrayal.

The conversation drifted to what I was doing now. I told her about the cold war series, the flag coming down above the Kremlin, followed by the excerpt of Fidel's interview expressing his faith that, some day, socialism will triumph.

"I hope some kid in Venezuela hears it, and it means something to him."

"Why Venezuela?" she asked.

Really, because it had been on my mind. The day before the bourgeois legislature had tried to reassert itself against the popularly-backed constituent assembly. There had been a very nasty clash outside parliament. I'd noticed the American papers --and CNN in English-- paid it to no attention, but CNN en Español had broadcast a lot of it live, as well as much of a speech by President Chávez defending the Assembly and denouncing the old corrupt political system. But I did not tell her this. I did not want to get into a political discussion of what people should be doing, and why. Least of all with her. I had been her mentor, once. Look where it had led her.

"Just to name a country," I said. "It could have been any of them."

She really had to go, she was late for her meeting. I hug her goodbye. On the way home, I listen to Silvio Rodríguez, on the cassette player. I'd introduced her to Silvio, some of his songs still remind me of her.

By happenstance, the tape I play is one I'd quoted on this list a few days ago, about how socialism was made by plowing the future with old oxen. I hadn't thought then about the first lines of that verse. Now I did.




Salgo y pregunto por un viejo amigo
de aquellos tiempos duramente humanos
pero nos lo ha podrido el enemigo
degollaron su alma en nuestras manos

absurdo suponer que el paraiso
es solo la igualdad las buenas leyes
el sueño se hace a mano y sin permiso
arando el porvenir con viejos bueyes
viejos bueyes.

Valla forma de saber
que aún quiere llover
sobre mojado

Vaya forma de saber
que aún quiere llover
sobre mojado.

* * *

I go out, and ask about an old friend
From those harshly human days
But the enemy has rotted him
They decapitated his soul in our hands

It's absurd to think that paradise
Is just equality and good laws.
The dream is made by hand and without permission
Plowing the future with good oxen, Good oxen.

What a way to find out
That it's going to rain
On what's already wet.*

What a way to find out
That it's going to rain
On what's already wet.

----------------

* "Quiere llover sobre mojado" is a Cuban dicho, or saying, for which I've fruitlessly searched for even a rough equivalent. It can mean slightly different things, of someone stating the obvious, or something happening again, but mostly it captures a feeling that you've been here before, you've gone beyond it, and now you find yourself back here again.