Recently I was glancing through Jim Percy’s copy of Leon Trotsky “The challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-1925)”, and happened to notice the sections that he had marked in the margin. This book by Pathfinder contains Trotsky’s “The New Course”, and it was from this text that Jim had quoted Trotsky in his October 1982 NC report, “Preparing the party to meet the crisis”, that I requoted in my party-building counter-report to the May 2006 NC. (The Activist, Vol. 16, #5, May 2006) (This report by Jim, and two others, one from 1980, and another from 1982, are in Socialist Worker Vol. 2, No. 3, the blue one. Grab it if you see it in a bookshop.)
Now remember the context in October 1982. We’d begun having differences with the US SWP a few years previously, and in 1982 realised something was going horribly wrong with them. There were also differences popping up within the leadership of our own party on a range of questions; some of these issues were resolved, but in 1983 we had to expel four members of our national committee who had formed a secret faction whose loyalty was to the US SWP and whose leadership came from Jack Barnes.
To understand what Jim really thought about factions and factional struggle it helps to see what he marked on “The New Course.” To read the whole Trotsky text, and get the political context of this work, if you don’t have the Pathfinder book or another version, it’s available on the Marxist Internet Archives, in a slightly different translation: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1923-nc/.> Remember, this was written in 1923, as the bureaucracy was starting to move against Trotsky and “Trotskyism.”
I’d encourage comrades to go back and read thoroughly the writings and experiences of Lenin and Trotsky when fierce debates arose in the Bolshevik party, as Jim did when debates surfaced in our party.
I think it contrasts with the knee jerk hostility to the very idea of factions that has been spread by the DSP majority leadership over the last two years. It contrasts with the attempt made at the May 2006 NC to ban the idea of tendencies and political groupings.(Activist, Vol 16, #5, p 42) This is a very strange hostility, given our tradition – Lenin’s faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; Trotsky’s faction in the Stalinised Russian Communist Party; Cannon’s faction in the American Communist Party; and our own experience with factions in the Fourth International in the 1970s.
“The question of groupings and factions in the party has become the pivot of the discussion. In view of its intrinsic importance and the extreme acuteness that it has assumed, it demands to be treated with perfect clarity. Yet, it is posed in a completely erroneous manner.
“We are the only party in the country, and in the period of the dictatorship it could not be otherwise. The different needs of the working class, of the peasantry, of the state apparatus, and of its membership, act upon our party, through whose medium they seek to find a political expression. The difficulties and contradictions inherent in our epoch, the temporary discord in the interests of the different layers of the proletariat, or of the proletariat as a whole and the peasantry, act upon the party through the medium of its worker and peasant cells, the state apparatus, the student youth. Even episodic differences in views and nuances of opinion may express the remote pressure of distinct social interests and, in certain circumstances, be transformed into stable groupings; the latter may, in turn, sooner or later take the form of organised factions which, opposing themselves to the rest of the party, undergo by that very fact even greater external pressure. Such is the dialectic of inner-party groupings in an epoch when the Communist Party is obliged to monopolize the direction of political life.
“What follows from this? If factions are not wanted, there must not be any permanent groupings; if permanent groupings are not wanted, temporary groupings must be avoided; finally, in order that there be no temporary groupings, there must be no differences of opinion, for wherever there are two opinions, people inevitably group together.” [pp78-79, Pathfinder version]
“In order to avert this, the leading party bodies must heed the voices of the broad party masses and must not consider every criticism a manifestation of factionalism, and thereby cause conscientious and disciplined party members to withdraw into closed circles and fall into factionalism.” [p. 80]
“The decision of the Tenth Congress prohibiting factions can only have an auxiliary character; by itself it does not offer the key to the solution of any and all internal difficulties. It would be gross ‘organisational fetishism’ to believe that whatever the development of the party, the mistakes of the leadership, the conservatism of the apparatus, the external influences, etc., a decision is enough to preserve us from groupings and from upheavals inherent in the formation of factions. Such an approach is in itself profoundly bureaucratic.” [p. 83]
“… those comrades who assert most flatly, with the greatest insistence and sometimes most brutally, that every difference of opinion, every grouping of opinion, however temporary, is an expression of the interests of classes opposed to the proletariat, do not want to apply this criterion to bureaucratism.” [p. 84]
“Nevertheless, there should be no oversimplification and vulgarization in the understanding of the thought that party differences, and this holds all the more for groupings, are nothing but a struggle for influence of antagonistic classes.” [p. 84]
“If there is today a serious danger to the unity or at the very least to the unanimity of the party, it is unbridled bureaucratism. This is the camp in which provocative voices have been raised. That is where they have dared to say: We are not afraid of a split! It is the representatives of this tendency who thumb through the past, seeking out everything likely to inject more rancor into the discussion, resuscitating artificially the recollections of the old struggle and the old split in order to accustom imperceptibly the mind of the party to the possibility of a crime as monstrous and as disastrous as a new split.”[p. 85]
“If we now take our Bolshevik Party in its revolutionary past and in the period following October, it will be recognised that its most precious fundamental tactical quality is its unequalled ability to orient itself rapidly, to change tactics quickly, to renew its armament and to apply new methods, in a word, to carry out abrupt turns. Tempestuous historical conditions have made this tactic necessary. Lenin’s genius gave it a superior form. This is not to say, naturally, that our party is completely free of a certain conservative traditionalism: a mass party cannot be ideally free. But its strength and potency have manifested themselves in the fact that inertia, traditionalism, routinism, were reduced to a minimum by a farsighted, profoundly revolutionary tactical initiative, at once audacious and realistic.” [p. 96]
“Marxism is a method of historical analysis, of political orientation, and not a mass of decisions prepared in advance. Leninism is the application of this method in the conditions of an exceptional historical epoch. It is precisely this union of the peculiarities of the epoch and the method that determines that courageous, self-assured policy of brusque turns of which Lenin gave us the finest models, and which he illuminated theoretically and generalized on more than one occasion.” [p. 96]
“The simple appeal to tradition never decided anything. As a matter of fact, with each new task and at each new turn, it is not a question of searching in tradition and discovering there a nonexistent reply, but of profiting from all the experience of the party to find by oneself a new solution suitable to the situation and, by doing so, enriching tradition. It may even be put more sharply: Leninism consists of being courageously free of conservative retrospection, of being bound by precedent, purely formal references, and quotations.
“Lenin himself not so long ago expressed this thought in Napoleon’s words: ‘On s’engage et puis on voit‘ (start fighting and then see). To put it differently, once engaged in the struggle, don’t be excessively preoccupied with canon and precedent, but plunge into reality as it is and seek there the forces necessary for victory, and the roads leading to it.” [p. 97]
“Leninism cannot be conceived of without theoretical breadth, without a critical analysis of the material bases of the political process. The weapon of Marxist investigation must be constantly sharpened and applied. It is precisely in this that tradition consists, and not in the substitution of a formal reference or an accidental quotation. Least of all can Leninism be reconciled with ideological superficiality and theoretical slovenliness.
“Lenin cannot be chopped up into quotations suited for every possible case, because for Lenin the formula never stands higher than the reality; it is always the tool that makes it possible to grasp the reality and to dominate it. It would not be hard to find in Lenin dozens and hundreds of passages which, formally speaking, seem to be contradictory. But what must be seen is not the formal relationship of one passage to another, but the real relationship of each of them to the concrete reality in which the formula was introduced as a lever. The Leninist truth is always concrete!” [pp 98-99]
“Leninism is, first of all, realism, the highest qualitative and quantitative appreciation of reality, from the standpoint of revolutionary action. Precisely because of this it is irreconcilable with flying from reality behind the screen of hollow agitationalism, with passive loss of time, with haughty justification of yesterday’s mistakes on the pretext of saving the tradition of the party.
“Leninism is genuine freedom from formalistic prejudices, from moralizing doctrinairism, from all forms of intellectual conservatism attempting to stifle the will to revolutionary action. But to believe that Leninism signifies that ‘anything goes’ would be an irremediable mistake. Leninism includes the morality, not formal but genuinely revolutionary, of mass action and the mass party.” [p. 99]
“Leninism is warlike from head to foot. War is impossible without cunning, without subterfuge, without deception of the enemy. Victorious war cunning is a constituent element of Leninist politics. But at the same time, Leninism is a supreme revolutionary honesty toward the party and the working class. It admits of no fiction, no bubble-blowing, no pseudograndeur!
“Leninism is orthodox, obdurate, irreducible, but it does not contain so much as a hint of formalism, canon, or bureaucratism.” [pp 99-100]
“Whatever the difficulties and the differences of opinion may be in the future, they can be victoriously overcome only by the party’s collective thinking, checking up on itself each time and thereby maintaining the continuity of development.” [p. 100]
“I shall not dwell here upon the juridical definitions of party democracy, nor upon the limits imposed on it by the party statutes. However important they may be, these questions are secondary. We shall examine them in the light of our experience and will introduce into them the necessary modifications. But what must be modified before anything else is the spirit that reigns in our organisations. Every unit of the party must return to collective initiative, to the right of free and comradely criticism – without fear and without turning back – and to the right of organisational self-determination. It is necessary to regenerate and renovate the party apparatus and to make it feel that it is nothing but the executive mechanism of the collective will.” [p. 126]
“A Bolshevik is not merely a disciplined person; he is a person who in each case and on each question forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it courageously and independently, not only against his enemies, but inside his own party. Today, perhaps, he will be in the minority in his organisation. He will submit, because it is his party. But this does not always signify that he is in the wrong. Perhaps he saw or understood before the others did a new task or the necessity of a turn….
“Yes, our party would be unable to discharge its historic mission if it were chopped up into factions. That should not and will not happen. It will not decompose in this way because, autonomous collectivity that it is, its organism resists it. But it will successfully combat the dangers of factionalism only by developing and consolidating the new course toward workers’ democracy. Bureaucratism of the apparatus is precisely one of the principal sources of factionalism. It ruthlessly represses criticism and drives discontent back into the depths of the organisation.” [p. 127]
– The Activist was as the internal discussion bulletin of the Democratic Socialist Party