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Close Encounters with the Trots: A Sort of Socialist Mini-Memoire

By Karl North | September 12, 2010

“What do two Trotskyites do on a deserted island? They found two Trotskyite parties!”

Taking their riddle seriously, Trotskyite parties tend to be fairly small, but there are many of them.

My acquaintance with the Trotskyite perspective has been a matter of brief glimpses over a forty year period. My friends in SDS in the sixties fingered as a “right wing Trot” a guy who flitted in and out of our chapter at Indiana U. Some believed him to be a mole from YPSL (Young People’s Socialist League) that SDS spurned as little more than Young Republicans pinked over. In my vague recollection, the YPSL guy viewed us and our tendency toward direct action as unwarranted interference in the affairs of the working classes, which ought to be left alone to make their own politics. That was my first encounter.

After I moved my enlightening but ill-fated grad school aka political activist activities to Rochester, a guy from Progressive Labor Party faction of SDS (PL) tried to recruit several of us who had become somewhat tired of the obsessive quarrels that plagued the U of Rochester SDS chapter. He said we needed to study Marxism, forget the counter culture and student politics, don the garb of the working class, get real (working class) jobs, and start organizing the workplaces. A black friend from Harlem who had been president of Rochester SDS went as far as creating a project to organize hospital workers on the outside, while his white Jewish girlfriend – also from Harlem – organized inside as a nurse assistant. Although not Trotskyite, the PL left wing of SDS came to represent for me some of the purism and working class idealism that led Trotsky to break with the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the 1970s, after I became a shepherd in the French Pyrenees, I met a family of Trotskyite teachers from Paris who summered in our village. The teaching profession in France had been a hotbed of socialists since the French Revolution created a centralized, secular public educational system. The teacher family patronized my peasant aspirations because I could speak some of the language of the Left. But my focus at the time was on sheep, so I did not explore their politics, and in fact tended to keep my distance from all urbanized society. Their son was something of a dandy whose main interest in me was to gossip about who was doing what recreational drugs and where to get them. As good aspiring peasants, we grew our own, keeping the bourgeois marketplace at arm’s length, so quickly lost interest in his overtures.

None of this has been very enlightening, but since then my interest in Cuba has led me to read commentary of the various twists of the Cuban revolution, including some by Socialist Worker Party (SWP) people and others influenced by the works of Trotsky. Since the end of the Soviet Union and its support of Cuba, Cuban revolutionaries have become more open to Trotskyite writers, and the latter have used the opening to try to nurse the Cuban revolution toward a more radical communism.

The relationship of the Trots to the Cuban revolution is but another expression of the unavoidable tension that has always existed on the left between the radical purists and those who must actually lead revolutionary regimes, or just attempt to organize revolutionary change in a capitalist world that is dangerous and threatening to such activities. In my view it is a good tension. The idealistic left-wingers need to understand the sacrifices of ideals that pragmatists must sometimes make, and the pragmatists need the purists to hold them to their ideals. Cuba has always practiced a politically free-ranging socialism, but has made unnecessary mistakes and gotten bureaucratically lazy, and can always benefit from pressure from a more radical left.

This pressure is the positive role the Trotsky wing of the left has played for nearly a century, chiding most attempts at socialism as “deformed workers states”, reminding us that socialism must be built internationally not just in one country, and that that full bore egalitarian socialism will require armed overthrow of capitalist rule. They also still believe that only the working class can bring about the revolution, to which, as an aspiring peasant, I must object. Putting all their eggs in the working class basket, the Trots naturally put little store by peasants and intellectuals as potential revolutionaries. I suspect it has always stuck in their craw that mainly peasants led by Che and Fidel, two intellectuals, accomplished the Cuban revolution, the only national scale socialist experiment currently in existence on the planet.

The Trots and the Greens

Understanding the role of the Trots in the history of the left helps explain their critique of the European Greens, who were an all-too-easy target.

As an outgrowth of the multidimensional movements of the sixties, the Greens have exhibited all the characteristics that the Trots hated about those movements: déclassé posturing, dismissal of the working class, cultural revolution über alles, petty bourgeois consciousness…

The US Green Party would fare no better, as a close friend’s frustrating attempts to work within its New York State chapter have demonstrated. Even more than the Europeans, too many US Green party members have secretly never cut their umbilical to the Democrats, the US equivalent of the German social democratic party, SPG, or are unreconstructed work-within-the-two-party-system environmentalists. The 1970s environmental movement bled itself dry trying to defend its legislative gains in the courts. The Trots would have said, “Of course you can’t win in the courts, it’s a capitalist justice system!”

On the other hand, the Trots can and do go overboard. They quote Marx:

“the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life”

But the key word here is “conditions”, which does not mean “determines”, a mistake typical of vulgar marxism. A proper interpretation of Marx’s statement opens the way to see other conditioning factors that might explain the growth of working class apathy in industrial societies that has frustrated the Trotskyite focus on the working class as the revolutionary vanguard. The current historical “condition” is that the ruling class has successfully “manufactured consent” (Chomsky’s famous phrase) in the working class and all other subservient classes to a whole raft of myths and habits that work against true class interests. The Trots tend to dismiss people like Che (new socialist man) and Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) who have demonstrated the need to understand and counter the mind control power of the capitalist class with cultural revolutionary work.

And regarding the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the Trots appear blind to its role in the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, and to the later 19th century writing of Marx himself, who said that, given the embryonic nature of the Russian working class, the best basis for a communist revolution in Russia may well be the communal traditions of the Slavic peasantry. Marx’s early writings emphasized the need to mend the “metabolic rift” between city and country, which from a political perspective implies an important political role for farmers. So far only farmers on the far periphery of the industrial empire seem to have heard the call….

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