Articles liés à The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: The Fate of...
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When did it start to go wrong for the classical Marxist tradition, which had reached such a flowering with Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks? And what were the alternatives, the roads not taken or barely trodden, which might help orientate Marxists today in the situation we start from? The AWL s new book, a second volume of documents from the early Trotskyist movement goes a long way towards answering those questions. The short answers are clear and deserve repetition. Between 1917 and 1923 working class movements could have taken power into their own hands and built socialist societies across the globe. The rise and development of Stalinism obliterated this generation of worker-militants. Although this was resisted by the tiny band of Trotskyists who remained true to the potential of the Russian workers revolution of 1917, after 1940 these forces too succumbed to Stalinist and semi-Stalinist politics. What was codified as orthodox Trotskyism after the Second World War even those like the British SWP that appeared to different in fact largely collapsed into Stalinoid totalitarian conceptions of socialism, revolution, the party and much else. This orthodoxy displaced the working class from the irreplaceable role as the self-conscious agency for its own emancipation making Stalinist states, peasant armies, military despots and religious fanatics the substitute progressive force with the revolutionary left reduced to a cheerleading satellite. The AWL s book, The Fate of the Russian Revolution, Volume 1 (1998) included a substantial selection of documents from the 1939-40 split in the American SWP, the most significant Trotskyist group in the world at the time. The new book adds to this record, for example by publishing the set-piece debate between Cannon and Shachtman. This was a gladiatorial contest that suggests a higher level of political culture at the time on both sides of the debate, something the left tday must learn again if it is to progress. Long-forgotten documents show the responses of participants to the Russian invasion of Poland, then Finland and later the Baltic states. The divisions between Cannon s and Shachtman s factions are shown to be very different to the impression from books such as Trotsky s In Defence of Marxism, or Cannon s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. These books present Cannon s group as the consistent Trotskyists, united in their political assessment of the USSR as a workers state and resolute in their political conclusions to defend the USSR. In reality they were heavily dependent on Trotsky s conjunctural and often mistaken analysis of swiftly moving events, deeply divided themselves between supporters and opponents of those invasions and highly intolerant of engaging the minority politically. The short term result in 1939-40 was not a rational debate about the expansion of the USSR, its class nature or what political stance to take on its foreign policy. These matters were scarcely discussed adequately at all. Instead there was a botched, truncated debate, with the minority smeared as petty-bourgeois and then expelled because it wanted to produce a public bulletin articulating its politics. This split sparked the development of apparatus Marxism within the Trotskyist movement, combining the same political dogmatism and organisational monolithism that Zinoviev had provided for Stalin s rise to dominance decades earlier. --http://www.workersliberty.org/node/25524
Présentation de l'éditeur
Uniquely, this book traces the decisive political divisions within the broadly-defined Trotskyist movement by presenting key texts from both sides of the political debate as it happend. The book's overall thesis, argued in a substantial introduction, is that by the late 1940s there were two Trotskyisms. They had separated, fundamentally, through their different responses to events neither "side" expected: the transition of the Stalinist USSR from unstable, beleaguered semi-outlaw state to a continent-bestriding world power, stably self-reproducing at least for some decades to come. The other issues were many, but, so the book argues, mostly linked to that fundamental division. They included different conceptions of what a revolutionary party should be and do, and what Marxism is and how it is developed. The once-dominant "orthodox" variant of Trotskyism has been in disarray since the collapse of European Stalinism in 1989-91. Today's revolutionary socialist politics, struggle to regain ground after the long triumph of neoliberalism, needs to nourish itself by studying these long-shelved debates at the hinge of 20th century politics.
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- ÉditeurWorkers Liberty
- Date d'édition2015
- ISBN 10 1909639176
- ISBN 13 9781909639171
- ReliureBroché
- Numéro d'édition1
- Nombre de pages790
- ÉditeurMatgamna Sean
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