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The Trotskyists in this country are relatively well known for their ultra-left opposition to the strategy of revolution by stages in the colonial countries.
To the anti-imperialist united front, aimed at forming a transitional new democratic state and led by the proletariat, they counterpose the line of immediate transition to the proletarian dictatorship.
What is less apparent, however, is that the Socialist Workers party, the largest Trotskyist group in the U.S. and representing the main trend in Trotskyism internationally, puts forward just the opposite strategy for revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.
In fact, despite their fulminations against the revisionist Communist party, they go a long way toward advocating a two-stage “anti-monopoly coalition” strategy, flirt with the idea of “peaceful transition” and scrap the theory of the proletarian dictatorship.
But there is actually a unity between the SWP’s “two lines.” In both cases they set the democratic movement and the class struggle against each other by denying the leading role of the proletariat in the united front against imperialism.
The Trotskyist position raises the question: What is the fundamental contradiction in the U.S.? “The irrepressible antagonism,” writes SWP theoretician George Novack in his book, Democracy and Revolution, “between the dominant monopolists and the strivings for equality, social justice and even for life itself among the masses of the American population holds out two opposing lines of long-range development for American politics.”
Thus it is not the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the contradiction between the “masses” and the “dominant monopolists” that is the determining factor in the development of the proletarian revolution.
There is no’ doubt among Marxist-Leninists that the development of the democratic struggles of the masses can serve to advance the class struggle and even in certain periods play a leading role in raising mass anti-imperialist consciousness. This is the meaning, for instance, of Mao Tsetung’s statement that the Afro-American people’s struggle has served as a “clarion call” to all the oppressed and exploited to rise up against the imperialists.
But when all is said and done, it is also the “ABC” of Marxism-Leninism that it is the development and resolution of the class struggle that determines the development and resolution of She ~r democratic struggles, including the struggle against national oppression. This is the meaning of Mao’s statement that, in the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle and the reason why Marxist-Leninists place in the forefront the struggle for leadership by the proletariat in the national liberation movements and all other democratic anti-imperialist struggles.
The position of the SWP is completely opposed to this view. Their approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the “vanguard” leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the “vanguard of the vanguard” in each sector is presently made up of the student youth.
Another SWP theoretician, George Breitman, makes this subordination of class struggle to democratic struggle clear in his pamphlet, How a Minority Can Change Society. “The Negro people,” he writes, “although a minority, can, with consistent leadership, lead the American working class in the revolution that will abolish capitalism.”
Breitrnan then sums up the Marxist position that oppressed nationalities cannot win full democratic rights under capitalism, thus making their struggle a revolutionary question. Then he adds: “But that is not what I am discussing here. What I am talking about now is something else – the capacity of the Negro people to lead the working-class revolution to replace capitalism.”
This is backed up with a sleight of hand maneuver. Breitman first says Black people are a “racial minority” that is “overwhelmingly proletarian” in composition. Next he states, “Negroes are an important section of the working class as well as a racial minority.” Then he concludes that “unless we are blind” we can see that Black people are “the most radicalized section of the working class.”
But Breitman is the one who is blind. He has distorted the elementary truth that Black workers stand at the center and play a leading role in both the national and class struggles into the false claim that all Blacks are workers, thus liquidating the national question, the class divisions among the Black people and then demagogically topping it all off with an absurd analogy with the Russian revolution, where he casts the Black people in the role of the proletariat and the masses of the white workers as the peasantry.
That the SWP does not see this line as any special attribute of the national question is evident in their course since Breitman’s statement was first put forward in January 1964. Since then they have applied the same line of reasoning to the youth movement, the women’s movement, the Chicano movement and finally to the gay liberation movement.
How does the SWP propose to lead each of these “independent forces” to power? Again, the initial line is stated by Breitman in his attitude toward forming an all-Black political party with a “transitional” reformist program. “Without Negro votes, the present two-party system will pass from the scene and be replaced by something different, out of which Negroes may be able to acquire new and more reliable allies than up to now. And all of this can be accomplished by the simple device of forming a Negro party and running independent Negro candidates.”
What is the “something different” that will so miraculously replace the two-party system? The next step would be the formation of a reformist parliamentary labor party, which the SWP would try to join as dual members. The labor party and the Black party would then form an alliance with a Chicano party and possibly, although this has only been raised in SWP internal bulletins, a women’s party.
All these together, of course, would make a bid for a parliamentary majority. The SWP’s role would be to make them “consistent” in their fight for reforms by pursuing the path of “anti-capitalist structural reform” put forward by the revisionist Italian Communist party. “The fundamental goal of these reforms,” writes Ernest Mandel in his Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, “would be to take away the levels of command in the economy from the financial groups, trusts and monopolies and place them in the hands of the nation, to create a public sector of decisive weight in credit, industry and transportation and to base all of this on workers’ control.”
Mandel calls this “stage” where the “nation” has “taken command” of the monopolies through its governmental “public sector”, a period preceding the development of “dual power” which “could” precede socialist construction.
Even his slogan of “workers control” – to which the SWP would add their version of “community control” – is a reformist fraud, paralleling on the factory floor his approach on the floor of parliament.
Workers’ control, says Mandel, “is a refusal to enter discussions with the management or the government as a whole on the division of national income, so long as the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists cook the books when they talk of prices and profits. In other words, it is the opening of the books and the calculation of the real production costs and the real profit margins by the workers.”
Why the importance of the calculations? So the workers can accurately determine their productivity and thus achieve a “socially just distribution” in wages.
Despite the obvious clash with Marx’s famous statement, “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ let us emblazon our banners with the revolutionary watchword, abolition of the wage system,’ ” Mandel goes all the way and suggests to the capitalists that his proposals would help them run their system more rationally “... From the standpoint of anti-cyclical policy, it is more intelligent to reduce profits and increase wages. This would permit the demand from wage workers and consumers to come to the relief of investment in the interest of maintaining the conjuncture at the high level.”
Marxist-Leninists have long maintained that the dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists in the proletarian movement is on the question of the proletarian dictatorship, on the necessity to smash the bourgeois state apparatus and to create a new proletarian state in its place; a state that would insure democracy for the workers and their allies and dictatorship against he exploiters for the entire period of transition between capitalism and the classless society of communism.
Not only do Mandel and his SWP co-thinkers put forward in essence a reformist anti-monopoly coalition line for the first “stage” of their revolution in the capitalist countries, they also join with the modern revisionists in liquidating the proletarian dictatorship in the second stage.
George Novack managed to write an entire book on the subject of democracy and the various forms of state in slave, feudal, bourgeois and socialist society without even once using the term or explaining its essence in other words. Novack, in fact, claims the “dividing line” between reformists and revolutionaries is on the question of democracy, “the one viewing democracy as a means of disposing of capitalism, the other as an excuse for maintaining it indefinitely.”
Novack also joins the CP in putting forward the necessity of armed struggle as a hypothetical statement. “In order to protect all such – democratic institutions, Marxists are ready to fight, arms in hand if need be, against ultra-reactionary movements.”
Finally, Novack admits that during the Civil War following the October revolution, “dictatorial enactments were directed exclusively against the class enemies of the revolution” and that these were necessary at the time. But then he adds, “It was not to be considered the permanent and normal state of affairs throughout the period of the transition to a classless society, as Stalinism and Maoism later preached.”
Here Novack joins hands with the Khrushchev revisionists in asserting that while the proletarian dictatorship might have been necessary earlier, what is now required is a “state of the whole people.
What Novack is combating, of course, is not only Stalin and Mao, but also Lenin, thus joining the revisionists and social democrats in a common counter-revolutionary swamp. It is followed through in the Trotskyist view of the party.
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Last updated on 13.11.2002