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The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. today finds itself organizationally isolated from the rising trend of workers’ struggles.
At the same time it is in the position of tailing after – alternately – the trade union bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois nationalist trends in the struggles of the oppressed nationalities.
As a result, the Trotskyists can only respond negatively to What must be the strategy for proletarian revolution in the U.S. – the united front against imperialism, the fundamental alliance of which is between the multi-national working class and the oppressed nationalities.
The ideological reasons for this were present from the beginnings of the American Trotskyist movement and its rejection of Marxism-Leninism, particularly on the national question and the attitude to the trade unions.
The Trotskyists’ last major involvement in a labor struggle was also their first: the five-week union recognition struggle of the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1934. A number of members of the Communist League of America (Opposition), the predecessor to the Socialist Workers party, were also members of the Teamsters Local 574. While they did not hold any official positions of leadership in the union, the Trotskyists were heavily represented in the strike’s organizing committee and generally played the role of activist trade union militants in the day-to-day leadership of the struggle.
The problem is that they did not go beyond the role of trade unionists and in fact at one point answered red-baiting charges by denying that their militants were communists. James P. Cannon describes the outlook of his organization in Minneapolis in his History of American Trotskyism with an almost classic portrayal of tailism and bowing to the spontaneity of the masses:
“Following the general trend of the workers,” he writes, “we also realized that if we were to make the best of our opportunities, we should not put unnecessary difficulties in our path. We should not waste time and energy trying to sell the workers a new scheme of organization they did not want. It was far better to adapt ourselves to their trend and also to exploit the possibilities of getting assistance from the existing official labor movement.”
It would be a mistake, however, to view the trade union work of the Trotskyists as apolitical. One of its main ingredients was anti-communism in the guise, of course, of “anti-Stalinism.” In a 1940 discussion with Trotsky on whether or not to “critically support” Communist party candidates in the elections, Cannon claims “such a line would disrupt our work” in the “broad anti-Stalinist movement.”
We built our strength on opposition to Stalinist control of the union ... The Stalinists are the main obstacle. A policy of maneuver would be disastrous. What we gained from the Stalinists we would lose otherwise.
This policy was soon to bear its fruit. Tim Wohlforth, head of the Trotskyist Workers League, describes the period of the late 1940s in his own “left” history of the SWP, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States:
This was the period when the “progressive” caucuses, which had fought the Stalinists during the latter part of the war essentially on sound trade union lines, were now settling down to their bureaucratic control of the unions and establishing their relations with the capitalist government and its cold war drive. Faced with this situation the SWP trade unionists were in a very difficult situation. They could not support their allies of the previous period, they were wary of seeking any relationship with the Stalinist workers who were being witch-hunted in the unions and they did not have the strength to throw up independent third trade union caucuses ...
Wohlforth points out that the SWP now began losing many of the workers it had managed to recruit, especially black workers. He apologetically describes the SWP’s inability to deal with white supremacy:
This failure is understandable considering the short duration of the party’s direct experience in Negro work and considering that the overwhelming majority of the party came from a more privileged layer of the working class who in their daily lives had little contact with Negroes.
That the SWP “had little contact” with Afro-Americans was not surprising, since the U.S. “left opposition” ignored their existence for the first 10 years of its existence. Even Trotsky was moved to remark, in 1939: “It is very disquieting to find that until now the party has done almost nothing in this field. It has not published a book, a pamphlet, leaflets, nor even any articles in the New International.” Wohlforth even points out that in 1933 an SWP leader was unable to answer a question of Trotsky’s as to whether or not Black people in the South spoke a different language.
This can be contrasted with the work of the Communist party, which, together with the Comintern, had developed a revolutionary analysis of the Afro-American question from the perspective of viewing it as a national question. The Afro-American people in the “Black Belt” region of the South, they said, constituted an oppressed nation. Communists were duty-bound to support its struggle for national liberation. including the right to secede.
At the same time the CP saw the struggle for full democratic rights for black people throughout the country as part and parcel of the class struggle and a key component of the struggle against opportunism. As a result the CP made great gains in this area of work, as well as many worthy contributions to the struggle against national oppression in the U.S.
The Trotskyists have attacked this line as “imposed by orders from Moscow” and distorted it by claiming that the CP demanded a separate Black state (rather than the right of self- determination) without regard to the aspirations of the Black masses.
The Trotskyists were not helped out of their quandary by Trotsky. He responded to the SWP’s white blindspot by interpreting the Afro- American national question on a completely subjective basis. “We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation,” said Trotsky in 1939, “if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for.”
This repudiates any scientific approach to the national question which takes into account such factors as common history, territory, economic life and culture. The Trotskyists are thus unable to distinguish an oppressed nation from an oppressed national minority, or between the progressive democratic content of nationalist struggles and the narrow reactionary views of “cultural-national autonomy.”
This has led to considerable vacillation among the various Trotskyist groups. The Worker’s League, for instance, holds the view that “all nationalism is reactionary,” while the SWP falls into the “all nationalism is revolutionary” swamp. What unites the two is tailism. The first tails after the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy while the latter tails after the nationalism of the petty bourgeoisie. Both oppose proletarian internationalism in practice. The SWP is most explicit on its tailist line on the demand for the right of self-determination. “It is not,” writes Tony Thomas in the October 1970 International Socialist Review, “up to the revolutionary party to raise that demand, but only to support it once raised by Blacks.”
The SWP is aware, of course, that there are moderate, conservative and reactionary trends among Black nationalists. In their view, however, these are not “real” or “consistent” nationalists, since “consistent” nationalism is proletarian internationalism.
This is idealism and it is manifested continuously in the SWP’s outlook. On the question of trade unionism, for instance, Ernest Mandel states in the December 1970 ISR that “trade union consciousness is in and by itself socially neutral. It is neither reactionary nor revolutionary.” Mandel’s “in and by itself” stand takes him outside and “above” classes and class struggle and into the realm of pure thought. In the process he throws out the whole burden of Lenin’s What is to be Done, a work that Insisted that trade union consciousness was bourgeois and had to be struggled against, whether it played a progressive or backward role in certain circumstances.
This method extends to the SWP’s overall view of Marxism-Leninism. “Marxism,” says SWP leader Joseph Hansen, amounts to “empiricism systematically carried out.” Here Hansen views dialectical materialism as simply a quantitative and evolutionary development of pragmatism, the world outlook of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
What it actually means, however, is. that the Trotskyists have never broken with bourgeois ideology themselves, but jump back and forth between bourgeois rationalism and bourgeois empiricism. Both are forms of idealism and reflect their present-day petty bourgeois class character. One area in which this becomes most apparent is the SWP’s approach to the woman question.
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Last updated on 13.11.2002