Tag Archive: split


Where is the LFI drifting?

In April 2011, a left-wing faction in the LFI, the  Bolshevik Opposition, was bureaucraticaly expelled from the League for the Fifth International.  The majority of the faction were members of the Austrian Section, who went on to form the RKOB (Revolutionary Communist Organisation) – and recently founded a new international, the RCIT (Revolutionary Communist International Tendency).

The VOAG recieved a copy of  an open letter to all present and former comrades of  the LFI (published below). Whilst the VOAG doesn’t agree with everything in the letter, we support its general line and are in total accord with the specific criticisms levelled at Workers Power.

The VOAG is preparing a reply to the letter, which will appear on the blog shortly, but in the meantime, we have taken the step to publish this letter in full because it echoes so closely our own criticisms.

A Letter from the RCIT (Revolutionary Communist International Tendency) to the LFI comrades, 11.5.2012

Dear comrades of the LFI,
We address you in this letter because several of our cadre were member
of the LFI until recently. In the last 12 months we have seen divisions,
expulsion and splits in the League for the Fifth International. In April
2011 five cadres from the Austrian section, who have formed the
“Bolshevik Opposition” faction, were bureaucratically expelled by the
LFI’s IEC majority. Amongst them were two members of the International
Executive Committee (IEC) and three members of the leadership of the
youth organisation REVOLUTION in Austria. Around this time a Tamil
comrade from the central leadership of the Sri Lanka section,
responsible for the union work amongst the plantation workers, resigned
too. And several months later a number of members from the Pakistani
section (including a Central Committee member), who had formed the
“Left Opposition” faction, left the LFI. Together with other comrades
we have joined forces and formed — also with former LFI members in the
USA — an international organisation, the Revolutionary Communist
International Tendency (RCIT).

Politically our origin is in the struggle against the LFI’s majority
opportunist adaption towards the union bureaucracy, the reformist and
centrist left and its lack of orientation towards workers and nationally
oppressed.

However shortly after these expulsion and splits the LFI majority split
itself. Recently a number of members resigned from the LFI, amongst them
4 IEC members, central leaders from the British section and the central
leader of the Austrian respectively the Czech section. They are a
right-wing centrist, liquidationist split reflecting the pressure of the
progressive petty-bourgeois strata at the universities and in the
occupation movement.

So as a result, all in all in the last 12 month the LFI has lost half of
its IEC members and — since the congress in summer 2010 — up to 1/3 of
its total membership.

What are the main issues of this letter?
In this letter we point out that:
1. It is the duty of Marxists to make clear which class character
political forces have. The leadership of the LFI has /NOT/ made clear
which class character the liquidationist, petty bourgeois split has.

2. This happens because of the adaption from the leadership of the LFI
towards the petty-bourgeois milieu! In the united front Anticapitalist
initiatives projects which WPB joined they don’t have a sharp
revolutionary profile and are very soft in criticizing centrist forces
or don’t criticise them at all in public. They are even talking about
the “revolutionary left” when they mean the centrist left.

3. The LFI itself is in its composition dominated by activists coming
from petty bourgeois/intellectual layers or the upper strata of the
working class since many years. It has a massive lack of workers from
the broad mass of the proletariat and from the oppressed.

4. Therefore its political degeneration into centrism is related to the
reluctance over years to correct the bad class composition of the LFI.
The organisation has developed an opportunist approach towards the
politics of libertarian and other petty-bourgeois forces!

5. We characterise the reluctance to win workers and oppressed in deeds
(not only as promises and intentions) as part of the problem of
“aristocratism” that goes hand in hand with the opportunism. It means
the orientation to aristocratic layers and the accommodation to various
positions and prejudices of the labour aristocracy.

6. One expression of this was the rejection of the slogan “/For a
Socialist Tamil Eelam/” in Sri Lanka. It was a consequence of
accommodation towards prejudices amongst the petty-bourgeois
intellectuals and the aristocratic layers in the working class. We as
RCIT are demanding not only a Socialist Tamil Eelam but also an “Azad,
Socialist Kashmir” and an “Azad, Socialist Baluchistan” in Pakistan.

7. We sharply critisise the LFI leadership for pushing the organisation
to refuse participate in the August Uprising of tens of thousands of
working class youth in Britain in summer 2011. This was criminal
especially because it happened in London at the same time as the REVO
summer camp, where many comrades from the LFI and REVOLUTION came
together. Active participation was rejected by the leaders of the LFI
and they didn’t even sent a delegation of members to be in the
proletarian districts where the uprisings happened during the nights.
They rather preferred to have a summer camp with the slogan “summer,
sun, socialism” (this was the headline of their report) where the
focus was on discussions and drinking instead of being part of the class
struggle on the burning streets of London. It is a joke to agitate once
or twice in the proletarian districts during the day and to hide in the
camp by night when the uprising takes place. Such a leadership is not
capable to lead sections in semi colonial countries with sharp state
oppression. It demonstrated a lack of revolutionary audacity. This was
centrism in deeds and a betrayal of revolutionary principles.

8. Comrades, mistakes can happen, even grave mistakes can happen. But
the worst thing is not to make mistakes, but to fail in recognising
them, not to learn from them and not to make the necessary sharp
corrections.

9. The LFI has undertaken a sharp centrist degeneration. It is no wonder
that the LFI has shrunken massively.

10. We call all members of the LFI to break with the policy of centrist
degeneration which is dominating now the LFI. Comrades, correct these
fatal mistakes! Reorient the LFI towards the workers and oppressed!

Why did this happen?
Let us see how the LFI leadership characterises the split of the
right-wing liquidationists around Luke Cooper, Simon Hardy (both from
Britain), Roman Riedl (Austria) and Martin Mikula (Czech Republic). In
its Statement on Resignations from the British Section of the League
from 28.4.2012, the International Secretariat (IS) of the LFI correctly
criticises the right-wing splitters for their rejection of democratic
centralism and the need for a programmatically homogenous organisation.
The IS states: “Their argument was simply copied wholesale from the
quasi-libertarian critiques of Leninism and Trotskyism presently
fashionable on the English-speaking left.”  The IS also describes their
views: “The majority correctly characterised these proposals as
liquidationist, both in the political sense, in terms of dissolving our
programme and principles, and the organisational sense, in terms of
dissolving our tendency.”

It is however characteristic that the IS, while describing correctly
several features of this right-wing split fails to go beyond such a
description and to give it a clear political class characterisation.
As a result it fails to analyse, characterise and understand the context
of this split.

We characterise the group around Cooper, Hardy, Riedl and Mikula as a
right-wing, liquidationist split. As all political tendencies and
phenomena in a class society it has a class character. As Marxists we
have to point out what sort of class character the liquidationist split
has. It is a petty-bourgeois, extreme right-centrist current. It
reflects their capitulation towards the pressure of the progressive
petty-bourgeois layers (dominated by university students and (pseudo-)
intellectuals) who have an important influence in the occupation
movement and amongst the left-wing university milieu.

Adaption towards the petty-bourgeois milieu
However the LFI leadership does not give a clear class character of the
split and indeed is even incapable to understand the need of it. Why?
Firstly because it would force them to rethink their own orientation
since it orientates itself to the same petty-bourgeois milieu since
years as the right-wing liquidationists are doing. Secondly because it
would force them to ask themselves how it could happen that a
significant sector of its leadership and membership openly repudiates
Leninism and Trotskyism. And thirdly they would have to ask themselves
why the same leaders with whom together they enthusiastically expelled
future RCIT cadre in April 2011, why these same people desert the
organisation and Trotskyism only 12 month later (after they had started
in Britain an internal campaign for their liquidationist views for at
least half a year)!

For us in the RCIT this development is not surprising and only the
logical consequence of the process of centrist degeneration which the
LFI unfortunately has undergone in the recent past. Already in late 2009
today RCIT cadres who at that time had the majority in the Austrian
LFI section fought against the liquidationist tendencies which
comrade Riedl and others showed during the intervention in a mass
university strike in Austria. They rejected our proposals to intervene
openly as members of the LFI and they refused to publicly criticise the
wrong policy of the centrists and the left-reformist and libertarian
forces which provided the leadership of the movement. Similarly we
fought against the “new discoveries” of Riedl and others in 2010 that
the IMT (Grant, Woods, Lal Khan) and centrism as such “are a current of
Marxism”, albeit not a revolutionary one. And we emphasised against
Riedl and others that the reformist bureaucracy does not betray the
workers because of their “wrong ideologies and lack of understanding”.
This is a false, idealistic explain. As Marxists we say it happens
because as bureaucrats they have a material interest in controlling and
pacifying the working class, they are corrupted and they are therefore
also linked with the capitalist state and class.

These internal struggles dealt with questions touching the principles of
Marxism, in particular the relationship between the revolutionary
vanguard, its petty-bourgeois and labour reformist opponents and sectors
of the masses. These were debates which anticipated a number of issues
around which the splits/expulsion of the Bolsheviks by the LFI majority
occurred in 2011 and around which the split of the right-wing
liquidationists in spring 2012 took place.

The left-wing inside the LFI and later cadres of the RCIT defended the
traditional Marxist position which the LFI, when it was still a
revolutionary organisation, had defended too. But the majority of the
LFI leadership wavered. Several of them sympathised more with Riedls
positions rather than ours but they hesitated to openly wage a
political-ideological struggle against us. So they all agreed that the
LFI leadership should not take a position on these debates. In short
they proved incapable to understand the task of revolutionary cadres to
defend Marxist principles always and from the beginning. They only
started to formally defend some of these principles when the right-wing
proposed to dissolve the organisation and hence a split was already
around the corner.

It is indicative that the LFI majority planned and executed very quickly
the expulsion of the “Bolshevik Opposition” comrades only a few weeks
after they formed a faction in Austria. On the other hand they didn’t
see any reason to expel the right-wing liquidationists despite their
open renunciation of Bolshevism. Would the Cooper Hardy Riedl Mikula
group have been less determined to build their “undogmatic
anticapitalist networks” and would they have not resigned in mid-April
2012, they would still have a place in the LFI. In fact the LFI
leadership actively hopes to win them back as they wrote in their
“Statement on Resignations”.  “We can only hope that our former
comrades draw this lesson from their own experience quickly, and return
to our ranks to build a disciplined international organisation with a
clear programme”. In another statement of the LFI leadership this still
existing closeness to the right-wing liquidationist was made even clearer:

“We regret their decision, as they are all talented people, many of
whom played an important role in the student movement in 2010-11. While
we recognise that there has been a significant divergence in our views
over the last seven months, we had hoped that the debate we conducted at
our national conference last month and our International Council meeting
at Easter could have continued within our ranks. We were disappointed
that the comrades chose to leave after such a short discussion. We have
made it clear to Simon and the others that we will continue to work with
them wherever that is practical and principled. Given the continued
similarity of our political views we expect those occasions to be many
and frequent.” (Reply from Richard Brenner (LFI) to split statement of
right-wing, 14.4.2012,
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/a-simple-proposal-for-a-new-anticapitalist-left)

The practice of the past 12 month has shown that while the LFI
leadership is totally hostile to the Bolsheviks it is soft and
well-coming to the right-wing liquidationists. They see themselves much
closer to the later.

This is in itself an expression of the centrist character of the
present-day leadership of the LFI. In Trotsky’s days the centrist Stalin
leadership exclaimed that it is “fighting resolutely both against the
left-wing and the right.-wing danger” inside the Communist Party.
Trotsky explained that this equation of the currents to the right and to
the left of the Marxist line demonstrates itself a petty-bourgeois,
centrist position:

“The central idea of the present campaign, that Marxist politics in
general consists in a struggle against the right and against the left
with the same irreconcilable spirit, is thoroughly absurd. To the right
of Marxist politics stands the mighty world of imperialism with its
still enormous agency of collaborationists. There is the enemy. To the
left of the Marxist line there can be only wrong tendencies within the
proletariat itself, infantile disorder in the party, and so forth. The
most extreme expression of this false ‘leftism’ is anarchism. But
anarchism’s strength and influence are all the smaller and less
significant the more resolutely, the more determinedly, the more
consistently the revolutionary party fights against opportunism. That is
precisely the special historical merit of Bolshevism. In its annals, the
struggle against the left always bore an episodic and subordinated
character. The Stalinist formula of the struggle ‘with the same
intransigence’ against the right and the left is not a Bolshevik formula
but the traditional formula of petty-bourgeois radicalism, whose entire
history has been nothing but struggle against ‘reaction’ on one hand and
against the proletarian revolution on the other hand.” (Leon Trotsky:
Crisis in the Right-Center Bloc (1928); in: Leon Trotsky: The Challenge
of the Left Opposition (1928-29), p.  302f.)

In fact the present-day leadership of the LFI fought with a much more
“irreconcilable spirit” against the left-wing and expelled them when
their leaders posed a potential danger inside the IEC. On the other hand
they tried every possible compromise and still sending olive branches
and appeals to the right-wing liquidationists to come back.

The chimera and the truth about the Bolshevik united front tactic
What is the reason for this? It is because the LFI’s leadership itself
is politically confused and has become left-centrist in 2011. (Although
we would not say that all members have left the former Bolshevik
tradition of the LFI and thus it is possible that there might be future
internal struggles around key issues in the context of the degeneration
process of the LFI as a whole.) It is no accident that they and the
right-wingers together attacked and expelled us because of our as
they called it  “sectarianism”. They accused the Bolsheviks who later
formed the RCIT that they have an “ultra-left understanding of the
united front tactic.”

What the LFI and WPB leadership is hiding behind this chimera is its
own growing opportunism. As we have shown with a number of quotes (see
for this the preface to our essay on the Fifth International in our
English-language journal Revolutionary Communism No. 2, p. 26-28;
http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/what-sort-of-fifth-international-do-we-need)
the comrades see the reasons for the left-reformist trade union
bureaucrats failure in the recent mass struggles against the Tory LibDem
government in their  “refusal to think outside the box” and their
“fear of the anti-union laws” not their inability to struggle in
the interest of the workers because of their material interests as
bureaucrats. They also identify as the main problem of the left not
their petty-bourgeois, centrist or left-reformist policy and
subordination to the labour bureaucracy but their “divisions and
fragmentations”. In its latest proposal for a political platform of the
Anticapitalist Initiative WPB repeats this position:

“The leaders of the major unions have postponed and fragmented the
fight back called for by their members. The pensions struggle which
had the potential to unify the movement has been cynically sabotaged
by right wing union leaders, and discoordinated by ‘left wing’ union
leaders afraid of the anti-union laws. (…) The failure of the official
leaderships has been compounded by two key factors:                                                                                                                   withered and weakened state of workplace organisation, and                                                                                                             the inability of the revolutionary left organisations to transcend
their fragmentation.

Instead they project their division into the
anti-cuts struggle, building rival anti-cuts campaigns where a powerful
united front is needed. ” (Workers Power: Draft Proposal for Political
Basis for the Anti-capitalist Initiative, 21.4.2012,
http://southlondonanticapitalists.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/building-a-new-left-a-great-start/;
our emphasis)

In effect the remaining left-centrist WPB leadership spreads the same
nonsensical idea that there exists not a centrist left but a
“revolutionary left” and the problem is that it remains fragmented. In
the past we in the revolutionary LFI laughed about such nonsense. Today,
the Neo-LFI leadership repeats this stupidity itself! If the various
centrist groups would be united in one big centrist organisation … it
would be a unified obstacle, and not an instrument to overcome the
crisis of leadership. Why? Because the centrist left is not
revolutionary, it is centrist. This means they possess a wrong, centrist
method, strategy and tactic. It means that they are politically adapting
and dependent of the labour bureaucracy. THIS is the main reason why
“the left” cannot challenge the official labour movement leadership!

In addition to this the LFI/WPB leadership also adapts to the
libertarian sentiments which are strong amongst the petty-bourgeois
sectors of the university student and in the occupation movement. In
contrast to the past when we intervened in non-revolutionary
organisations, the WPB proposal does not deal with the question of power
and therefore lacks the slogan for a workers government.

The LFI WPB’s leadership whole orientation towards the “Anti-capitalist
Initiative” (ACI) is in itself opportunistically flawed. According to
all reports which have been published this initiative attracted less
people to its foundation conference on 28th April than the number of
people who attended the WPB Anti-capitalism event last autumn. About half
of the 70-80 people present were members of Workers Power and its two
right-wing splits (the Permanent Revolution group and the Cooper/Hardy
group). The rest of the participants were in their majority divided
between various organised and unorganised leftists and some libertarian
university students.

This ACI is neither a reflection of the radicalisation of sectors of the
working class or proletarian youth. Nor does it reflect sectors of
centrism which are moving to the left. It is rather a combination of
centrists moving to the right (who are questioning the “shibboleths” of
the revolutionary pre-party organisations, of Bolshevism, who are
wondering if Leninism might have been responsible for Stalinism etc.)
and some libertarian university students. In short according to all
accounts it is a small petty-bourgeois combination of right-wing
centrists and libertarian forces. While the LFI/WPB’s leadership
correctly criticised the right-wing splitters for their capitulation
towards libertarian views, they themselves orientate to the same milieu
and opportunistically adapt their propaganda to it.

How we did it in the past
This is a break from our revolutionary tradition in the past. While the
LFI majority (at that time the left-centrists and the right-wing
liquidationist were united against us, the Bolshevik wing in the LFI)
accused us of a “sectarian” approach to reformism and centrism, the
opposite was and is true. In the 2000s we had proven in practice by our
work in the Austrian section that we are capable much better than the
rest of the LFI in Europe to intersect with militant sectors of the
masses, putting demands on the bureaucracy and repeatedly force the
reformists and centrists into united front initiatives with us and
combine this with an intransigent revolutionary profile. We initiated or
co-initiated a number of demonstrations and school student strikes with
thousands of participants. As a result our leading comrades could
several times address in speeches thousands of workers and youth at
demonstrations. (Some of them you can see at our youtube channel
http://www.youtube.com revolutioncommunism
http://www.youtube.com/revolutioncommunism

We also played an
initiating and leading role in an electoral left alliance in summer 2008
(called “THE LEFT”). But in opposite to the LFI/WPB’s leadership policy
today we did this with a revolutionary programme and with a sharp
profile from the beginning. Our slogan “Expropriate the super-rich!”
enraged the bourgeois media and annoyed the left-reformists and
centrists inside the alliance. But we also won sympathises and through
our focus on on-the-ground agitation in a working class district in
Vienna we recruited a number of workers and youth. The reports about all
this can still be found in the section “Austria” on the LFI’s website.
And on the RCIT website you will find a report, photos and videos of the
internationalist MayDay 2012 demonstration in Vienna with 1.500
participants organised by a united front in which the Austrian RCIT
comrades played a leading role. In all these years we had not only a
sharp, revolutionary, public profile but also a sharp critic against the
centrist forces.

In contrast when WPB won a leading position in a mass movement as it
did in the university student movement in 2010 — it unfortunately
collapsed into opportunist adaption towards the petty-bourgeois milieu.
When the mass movement hit the streets against the austerity plans of
the Cameron government in autumn 2010 and the general strike slogan
became an important tactic, the WPB leadership rejected agitation for a
general strike and even criticised the SWP for raising this slogan as
“too advanced”! Instead of engaging in a sharp political struggle
against the various centrist and libertarian forces, the WPB leadership
looked for a peaceful co-existence with them in various left-wing
university student alliances. In the end LFI/WPB became centrist itself
and instead of growing it lost 1/3 of its members in Britain.

Similarly the LFI section in Austria nearly all of them university
students declined politically and organisationally after our
expulsion. They announced in public a self-criticism that they want to
correct the “one-sided”, “superficial” positions on Palestine and many
other issues which the Austrian section published under our leadership
in the past decade. Since then not a single document has appeared which
proved the so-called “one-sidedness” of our past positions or which
contained better, “more differentiated” positions. The ideological class
struggle against left-reformism and centrism has de facto disappeared
from the LFI Austria propaganda. No theoretical document has been
published. They also ceased the publication of their e-mail newsletter,
suspended the publication of its paper for half a year and hardly had
any public meetings in the past 12 months. At the same time the Austrian
RCIT section has not only published a monthly paper, two issues of its
theoretical journal, run a regularly updated website and newsletter but
also worked hard and successfully to recruit a number of workers and
working class youth (including migrants from the lower strata of the
working class). And at the same time it participated actively in the
formation process of the RCIT. In fact Austria is a model for the
charlatanry of the LFI majority’s critique against us. They argued for
our expulsion as a need “to prevent a damage of the section in Austria”.
Well, since they “saved” the Austrian section from the Bolsheviks, it
hasn’t produced any theory, hardly any kind of propaganda and hardly any
public meetings took place — this is the new work mode of the sections
since then. In addition to it, Riedl who was encouraged from the LFI to
lead the section played a central role in the liquidationist split, and
the one or other will follow him soon. If this is a successful way to
prevent damage, than we hope that we had not learn anything of it.

What is the cause of the centrist degeneration?
All these failures and adaption’s towards centrism are not accidently.
The right-wing split is just the most consistent form of the political
degeneration which the LFI has undergone in the recent past. These
fundamental problems are related to a wrong understanding of the tasks
of a revolutionary communist organisation in the present period.

A central task of a communist pre-party organisation is to speak out the
truth as it sees it. Unfortunately in the last years a number of LFI
cadres have shared the post-modernist, neo-Gramscian method of Luke
Cooper which is alien to the materialist dialectic. As a result the LFI
majority overthrew at its Congress in 2010 our traditional method of
characterising historical periods. Hence they rejected our analyses of
the period after 2001 as “pre-revolutionary” and of the present period
as “revolutionary”. The same petty-bourgeois method led them to reject
the Leninist position that the labour aristocracy is a small top layer
in the working class which is politically backward and bribed by the
bourgeoisie. They rather believe that the labour aristocracy is the best
organised and most militant sector of the class who gets privileges
because of its class struggle. While the LFI leadership
opportunistically overstate the progressive character of the labour
aristocracy, it underestimates the importance of the middle and lower
strata of the working class and of the national oppressed layers. This
is why they reject our analyses of migrants in imperialist countries as
“in their huge majority nationally oppressed and super-exploited layers
of the working class.” At the same time they tend to welcome
assimilation of migrants into the majority nation as progressive. This
is why we advocate the complete equality of languages of minorities and
the abolition of the state language as the Bolsheviks did (again against
the opposition of a substantial minority at the LFI congress in 2010).
This is why we advocate support for an independent state of oppressed
nations if they have demonstrated in past struggles that they wish for
this. We combine it with the perspective of working class power. This is
why the RCIT advocates a “Socialist Tamil Eelam” in Sri Lanka and an
“Azad, Socialist Kashmir” and an “Azad, Socialist Baluchistan” in
Pakistan.

This includes the propaganda and agitation of the necessary strategies
and tactics for the working class struggle. It also includes the warning
of the vanguard from its wrong friends — the right-wing and left-wing
labour bureaucrats and the centrists of various colours. It means
calling things by their name. That’s why the unambiguous advocacy of
revolutionary tactics, the sharp criticism of the reformist and centrist
forces, the class characterisation of movements and political formations
etc. are indispensable for a communist pre-party organisation.

Why did the LFI degenerate so quickly in the last years? Why did a whole
sector of its leadership cadre renounce Leninism and Trotskyism and
denounce the task of building revolutionary organisations? Of course
there are several reasons but the most important factor is that the LFI
in most sections has a bad class composition, a dominance of university
students, intellectuals and labour aristocrats since many years. It is a
joke to have such a composition over years in imperialist countries
where the working class (especially the lower and middle strata)
represents the absolute majority of the population. This is a serious
problem particularly in the new historic period where the class struggle
from above and from below is sharpening enormously. In such a period the
pressures not only from the bourgeoisie but also from the various
sectors of the progressive petty bourgeoisie and the labour bureaucracy
are increasing enormously. The worse the class composition of a
revolutionary organisation is, the more difficult it is to stand against
these political and ideological pressures.

Trotsky once remarked that  “..the more the party is petty-bourgeois in
its composition, the more it is dependent upon the changes in the
official public opinion.” (Leon Trotsky: From a Scratch To the
Danger of Gangrene (1940); in Leon Trotsky: In Defense of Marxism, New
York 1990, p. 113;
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/21-scratch1.htm)

Indeed the recent degeneration of the LFI is a living proof for Trotsky
observation. The right-wing liquidationist split and the shift of the
LFI to the right is a reflection of the public opinion in the labour
movement and the petty-bourgeois intelligenzija (via the occupation
movement etc.).

A bad class composition is not a disaster in itself … under the
pre-condition that the organisation recognises this situation as a
serious weakness which leads to degeneration if it is not overcome after
a certain, rather shorter than longer, period and therefore undertakes
bold and decisive measures to improve the class composition. This is why
in the years before our expulsion from the LFI — we proposed and
fought for a number of measures for the proletarisation of the LFI and
the Austrian section. As well as we not only argued but also tried to
initiate projects to win more young proletarian people, migrants and
women to the LFI. One of these projects was the building of womens
collectives, followed by a womens organisation in Austria which focused
on building roots of the organisation in a proletarian district. While
several LFI leaders expressed agreement in general for some of the
positions and projects no serious steps were undertaken and in the end
we were denounced as “workerists”. The LFI leaders even made sure to
dissolve the women organisation in Austria.

The leadership explicitly rejected the idea that a bad class composition
is a problem for the LFI. It claimed that in small organisation the
class composition is necessary and unavoidable like this. In a letter to
the LSR conference in February 2011 the leadership of the German section
wrote that the social composition of the fighting propaganda group like
the LFI sections “will have a disproportional high share of university
students or better educated, political interested workers (skilled
workers)”. The reason they gave is: “because of the dominant role of
propaganda”. The Austrian supporters of the LFI majority argued
similarly in a statement: “It is perfectly natural that fighting
propaganda groups tend because of its very high requirements for a
membership tendentially not to be dominated by the lowest layers.”

In other words fighting for the working class interest with a communist
programme requires … “education”, i.e. bourgeois education. Therefore,
according to the LFI leadership, the mass of the global working class —
particularly in the semi-colonial world — which posses a relatively
lower level of education it is rather difficult to meet the requirements
of the type of communist organisation the LFI wants to build. For the
LFI leaders, the well-educated intellectuals and labour aristocrats (of
whom disproportionally many live in the imperialist countries) are more
fit. For us this is no Marxism. Is it really “perfectly natural” to
build an organisation which should make the future revolutionary party
possible, that has the goal to free the working class and all oppressed,
that such an organisation is not lead, not even dominated in its
composition by workers, women, migrants, oppressed nations although they
are the absolute majority in the world? It is only “perfectly natural”
in the halls of the universities in the imperialist countries, but in
the rest of the world it is just “perfectly pervert”.

As a side note it is not without irony that exactly those people who
lectured us about the difficulty for workers from the lower strata to
meet the “very high requirements for a membership”, that exactly the
same people who authored these lines deserted the LFI only one year
later. The truth is the opposite: it is much more difficult for the
petty-bourgeois intellectuals to meet the “very high requirements for a
membership/” than for the workers! The truth is that for workers
(excluding the small layer of bribed aristocrats) it is easier to
understand the Marxist Weltanschauung of their class and to fight for
it than for the non-proletarian layers. We have to ask ourselves: Is it
healthier to have an organisation of mainly workers and working class
youth, even if some of them leave the organisation due to their hard
living conditions and therefore the lack of energy and time? Or should
Marxist prefer an organisation of petty-bourgeois intellectuals and
labour aristocrats who do not carry Marxist positions into the working
class but push the organisation to break with Bolshevism and try to
reconcile the political activity with their lifestyle? Ours is the first
option. And the LFI? Did we not see in the last years a huge increase of
mainly university students who instead of dedicating their life to the
cause of working class liberation struggle preferred to reconcile the
political activity with their lifestyle?!

Trotsky on the question of the class composition of communist pre-party
organisations
In contrast to the views of the LFI leadership Trotskyadvised the
Bolshevik-Leninists in all phases in the 1920s and 1930s to orientate
themselves mainly to the workers and here in particular the mass of the
workers and not to the privileged layers or even the university
students. For example in 1929 — immediately after the foundation of the
Communist League of America — he wrote about the need to find a way to
the oppressed layers of the proletariat:

“The trade union bureaucrats, like the bureaucrats of false Communism,
live in the atmosphere of aristocratic prejudices of the upper strata of
the workers. It will be tragedy it the Oppositionists are infected even
in the slightest degree with these qualities. We must not only reject
and condemn these prejudices; we must burn them out of our consciousness
to the last trace; we must find the road to the most deprived, to the
darkest strata of the proletariat, beginning with the Negro, whom
capitalist society has converted into Pariah and who must learn to see
in us his revolutionary brothers. And this depends wholly upon our
energy and devotion to the work.” (Leon Trotsky: A Letter to the
American Trotskyists (1929), in Trotsky Writings 1929, p. 133f.)

In another document in 1932 he argued in favour of a different approach
towards intellectuals than towards workers, in particular from the lower
strata. What he said would be most likely denounced as “workerism” by
the present-day LFI leaders if it would come from our pen and not
from Trotsky’s:

“When ten intellectuals, whether in Paris, Berlin, or New York, who
have already been members of various organizations, address themselves
to us with a request to be taken into our midst, I would offer the
following advice: Put them through a series of tests on all the
programmatic questions; wet them in the rain, dry them in the sun, and
then after a new and careful examination accept maybe one or two.

The case is radically altered when ten workers connected with the
masses turn to us. The difference in our attitude to a petty-bourgeois
group and to the proletarian group does not require any explanation. But
if a proletarian group functions in an area where there are workers of
different races, and in spite of this remains composed solely of workers
of a privileged nationality, then I am inclined to view them with
suspicion. Are we not dealing perhaps with the labor aristocracy? Isn’t
the group infected with slave-holding prejudices, active or passive?

It is an entirely different matter when we are approached by a group of
Negro workers. Here I am prepared to take it for granted in advance that
we shall achieve agreement with them, even if such an agreement is not
actual as yet. Because the Negro workers, by virtue of their whole
position, do not and cannot strive to degrade anybody, oppress anybody,
or deprive anybody of his rights. They do not seek privileges and cannot
rise to the top except on the road of the international revolution.

We can and we must find a way to the consciousness of the Negro
workers, the Chinese workers, the Indian workers, and all the oppressed
in the human ocean of the colored races to whom belongs the decisive
word in the development of mankind. (Leon Trotsky: Closer to the
Proletarians of the Colored Races (1932), in: Trotsky Writings 1932, p. 112)

In a discussion Trotsky had during his visit in Kopenhagen 1932 he
advised comrades about their attitude towards a student or an academic,
that “the workers movement for its part must regard him with the
greatest scepticism. (…) When he has worked with the workers movement
this way (for three, four or five years), then the fact that he was an
academican is forgotten, the social difference disappear. (Leon
Trotsky: On Students and Intellectuals (1932), in: Trotsky Writings
1932, p. 333)

We in the RCIT have the view that a communist pre-party organisation
should orientate itself to the working class and not the petty-bourgeois
intellectuals and labour aristocrats. Unfortunately the LFI rejects this
and has become a victim of what wecall “aristocratism” the
orientation to aristocratic layers and the accommodation to various
positions and prejudices of the labour aristocracy.

This is related to the distortion of the concept of the “fighting
propaganda group” by the present-day leadership of the LFI. In their
recent “/Statement on Resignations…” they described their view of the
“fighting propaganda group” as follows: “We stand by our
self-understanding as a group whose principal task is to defend and
develop the revolutionary programme and to address the major questions
of strategy and tactics facing the working class in its living struggles./”

This reflects a completely one-sided, un-dialectical understanding of
the tasks of a Bolshevik pre-party organisation. Yes, of course its task
is to “defend and develop the revolutionary programme and to address
the major questions of strategy and tactics”. But this alone is not
sufficient and even a passive propaganda circle could do this. What is
the value of a programme and of strategies and tactics IF they are not
transmitted into the class and its vanguard, IF they are not translated
into recruiting workers and proletarian youth members who are fighting
for this programme and who have roots in the class, IF they therefore do
not lead to a communist pre-party organisation with a mainly working
class composition?!

If a communist organisation does not achieve this, it is not a “fighting
propaganda group” but rather a “commenting propaganda group” which is
isolated from the working class and the oppressed layers.

*Ignoring the August Uprising in Britain as the synthesis of theory
and practice of Aristocratism*

The wrong analysis of the class positions of the labour aristocracy and
the lower and middle strata of the working class as well as the nature
of national oppression of migrants on one hand and the wrong
understanding of the tasks of a communist pre-party organisation on the
other hand found their culmination, its test in practice, in the
position of the LFI/WPB/REVOLUTION leadership during the August
Uprising in Britain in summer 2011. This was an Uprising of the working
class youth, black and migrants after the police killed a black father
of four children, Mark Duggan. According to figures of Scotland Yard,
more than 30.000 youth participated in this uprising which lasted for 5
days. As a completely spontaneous uprising it included a number of
lootings. But in the first line it was an uprising against police
repression. (Our analysis, perspectives and tactics can be read on our
website: Nina Gunic’ and Michael Pröbsting: The strategic task: From
the uprising to the revolution! These are not “riots” this is an
uprising of the poor in the cities of Britain!,
http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/britain-uprising-of-the-poor;
The August Uprising in Britain – A Report of the RKOB delegation on its
visit in London in August 2011.
http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/britain-report-from-uprising;//Michael
Pröbsting: What would a revolutionary organisation have done? August
uprising of the poor, the nationally and racially oppressed in Britain.
http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/britain-august-uprising/;
Michael Pröbsting: Five days that shook Britain but didn’t wake up the
left. The bankruptcy of the left during the August uprising of the
oppressed in Britain: Its features, its roots and the way forward,
http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/britain-left-and-the-uprising/)This character was, despite some wavering, occasionally acknowledged
even by the LFI/WPB leadership itself. After the Uprising the British
comrades wrote in a statement “The August 2011 riots will be remembered
as a working class youth uprising against repression, racism and the
recession. Workers Power stands solidly with the youth and against the
police.” (Workers Power: The political situation in Britain after the
August uprising; Resolution on the political situation after the riots,
19.8.2011,
http://www.workerspower.co.uk/2011/08/political-situation-after-the-august-uprising)

However despite this literary recognition of the character of this mass
uprising (which was contradicted in other statement), the
LFI/WPB/REVOLUTION leadership strongly opposed any participation and a
call for this in this Uprising. During the same time as the Uprising
took place REVOLUTION had its international summer camp close to London.
Given the progressive and mass character of the uprising a number of
young members of REVOLUTION wanted to join and support the uprising. But
the leadership — including Hardy, Cooper, Riedl and the present-day LFI
leaders — all categorically opposed any practical support and
participation in the uprising. Despite the words quoted above, in fact
the leadership saw the uprising as a predominately backward,
un-political, and criminal or even reactionary event. This abstention
from an important class struggle event was even legitimised by the
argument that one does not know the conditions in the area. Leaving
aside that not knowing the concrete circumstances in a city did not stop
us in the revolutionary past of the LFI to intervene in mass struggles
(for example in Genoa/Italy in 2001, in Gleneagles/Britain in 2005 or in
Heiligendamm/Germany 2007), it is a damaging acknowledgment if the
comrades do not know and don’t have any connection to the area in an
important working class district in London (Tottenham) where the LFI has
its strongest branch since more than 35 years!

In fact this event demonstrated the practical consequences of
aristocratism and a petty-bourgeois decadence of middle class people. In
a report called “Summer, sun, socialism – that was our international
summer camp this year'”  the comrades told the public about
“interesting workshops” and the “opportunity of sports and leisure
facilities of the camping grounds”. “Every day we watched the events
of the ‘riots’ in London and discussed about it at the Camp plenary. So
we adopted for example a resolution and an international united front
call against police violence and about the conditions for the British
youth. Since as a youth organization we also like to fete, we had in the
evening parties at a big camp fire or in the community tent.” (see
http://www.onesolutionrevolution.de/?p=1645) How can an organization
call itself “revolutionary” if it prefers to have parties and drink a
lot every evening, while at the same time thousands of youth fight
against the police on the streets only a few kilometers away!?

Conclusion
Comrades, mistakes can happen, even grave mistakes can happen. But the
worst thing is not to make mistakes, but to fail in recognising them,
not to learn from them and not to make the necessary sharp corrections.
If this happens a constant repetition and deepening of the mistakes are
unavoidable. And indeed as we have shown in this letter and in other
documents this is what happened with the LFI in the last year. This is a
shame given the enormous possibilities of class struggle in the present
period to build a strong international revolutionary organisation. But
one cannot achieve this without an unambiguous Bolshevik method and a
revolutionary programme which is applied to the concrete practical and
theoretical questions of the class struggle. We have summarised our
analysis, our lessens and our programme in “The Revolutionary Communist
Manifesto” (which can be read online at the moment only in English
and German language on the RCIT website http://www.thecommunists.net
http://www.thecommunists.net). We would welcome to debate this
programme with you.

Comrades, we have drawn our conclusions from the past experience. After
the bureaucratic expulsion of the “Bolshevik Opposition” in April 2011
and the left-wing splits in other countries comrades in Pakistan, Sri
Lanka, USA and Austria have joined forces with other militants and
founded the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT). We
stand for the continuity of the revolutionary tradition which the LFI
represented in the past. We call all members of the LFI to break with
the policy of centrist degeneration which is dominating the LFI.

Bolshevik Greetings,
Michael Pröbsting and Shujat Liaqat (for the RCIT)

Further Reading:  Workers Power Conference 2012: Divisions, Expulsions, Appeals And Split – The VOAG Investigates.

What Is Centrism

Intro
This document was first published by the UK Workers Power /LFI group in its Trotskyist Discussion Bulletin, No1, 1986. http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/what-centrism.

In December 2011 – just three months prior to more than half of the membership walking out – the Central Committee sent a copy to all its members.

The cover said: “Recent discussions have raised the issue of what we in Workers Power and the L5I understand by the term centrism. A good starting point is our article What is Centrism? from the 1980s. This was written during the debates that followed the collapse of the Workers Revolutionary party in Britain in 1985”.

The essay reproduced below is indeed a good starting point to understanding the term centrism; however the article is an ironic warning of the dangers of formalism. The VOAG has little argument with the essay formally, however can’t help thinking that the essay’s criticisms and characterisation of centrism are the same criticisms and characterisation that the VOAG directs at Workers Power themselves. Thus the essay is not just a summary on centrism, but also reads like a self criticism of Workers Power and its own centrism.

 What’s absolutely unjustifiable is attributing the label “centrism” to the methods and approaches of the Workers Revolutionary Party prior to its split in 1985/86 . The WRP may have had its flaws, but it certainly wasn’t centrist. Indeed, it was the only British post-war Trotskyist group that was not centrist.  Workers Power throws the phrase around at its political rivals

What Is Centrism?
“One may state it as a general rule that antipathy toward the concept centrism, and toward all further subdivisions of centrism is typical of tendencies that are either centrist themselves or have not yet finally freed themselves from their intellectual amorphousness”. Trotsky Writings 1933/34 p169 [See what I mean when I say this essay will read like a Workers Power self criticism!]

Two attempts have been made so far to draw up a political balance sheet of the Workers Revolutionary Party’s degeneration. Despite the sharp disagreements of Hunter and Banda over the history of the Fourth International, one thing unites them: an “antipathy toward the concept centrism”.

This is not unique on the British left. Whilst the word “sectarianism” is generally bandied about as an insult, the term “centrism” is seldom heard. Militant, for example, refer to all their political opponents as tithe sects”, The SWP in turn characterises Militant as “revolutionaries with centrist tendencies”. The RCP refer to us all as the “radical left”,

In recent years the WRP itself worked with only two political categories: “dialectical materialist” and “police agent”. [Unfortunately, although this essay is a useful discussion of centrism, it is somewhat marred by such sectarian slanders so common in the Workers Power tradition. We just have to ignore them]

Before this, the International Committee characterised its rival the USFI as “Pabloite revisionist”. The Thornett group and its former international affiliates were similarly unwilling to call degenerate Trotskyism “centrism” unless of course it was “centrism with special features”. (GBL Theses on the Crisis of the Fourth International, 1979)

For us, on the other hand, an understanding of the Fourth International’s history, and of the fragments which today clutter the ground between reformism and revolutionary communism is impossible without understanding centrism and its different subcategories.

Can We Define Centrism?
Trotsky’s writings on centrism in the mid 30’s contain the most developed understanding of centrism, its different features, stages of development and laws of motion. Yet, whilst Trotsky wrote in 1935; “the concept of centrism has a precise meaning in a Marxist dictionary” (Writings 35/36 p 153) he also warned repeatedly about the difficulty of positively defining centrism.

He wrote, for example, that centrism “is characterised to a much greater extent by what it lacks than by what it embraces” (Writings 33/34 p232) This is because “centrism”, like every Marxist concept, embraces a process. It is not a motionless category. Outside of metaphors, there is no “Marxist dictionary.” For this reason, Trotsky wrote, any general definition of centrism: “of necessity always has a conjunctural character.” Trotsky Writings 33/34 p233

We must however start with a provisional definition of centrism. For Workers Power centrism is a current which stands between reformism and revolutionary communism, often borrowing from both or vacillating between the two, or confining its revolutionism to theory and its reformism to practice. It is also essentially a transitional phenomenon, moving either towards or away from Marxism. Paradoxically, its transition can be swift or it can take the form of years of ossified, motionless centrism. Unlike reformism and Marxism centrism has no historic class basis, but it has, nevertheless material root in the class struggle itself.

We think the whole Fl collapsed into centrism between 1948 and ’51, and that the split of 1953 which formed the IC, was an incomplete break with centrism, [Actually, of course it was a complete break with the centrism of Michel Pablo and the Forth International]. Unlike Banda, who says the IC “fought Pabloism with Pabloism” we prefer the more scientific formula: they fought centrism with a different kind of centrism. We have explained this in detail elsewhere. The task of this document is to develop an understanding of centrism, by looking at the historical development of the concept itself,

As Trotsky wrote in 1940: “Dialectical thinking gives to concepts by means of closer approximations, corrections concretisation, a richness of content and flexibility.” Trotsky In Defence of Marxism New Park p65

Whilst centrism entered the Marxist lexicon after 1914, it was explained with the greatest “richness of content and flexibility” by Trotsky in the 1930s. The degeneration of two internationals was the material premise for this. The degeneration of yet another, Trotsky’s Fourth International calls for even more “dialectical thinking” on the subject of centrism. We can rise to this task only if we reconquer the gains of understanding embodied in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky on centrism.

The Second International
The concept centrism was first developed in relation to the Marxist “centre” of the Socialist International after 1914. From the end of the 19th Century the main conflict in the Second International was that between “orthodoxy” and ‘revisionism”. Bernstein, the chief revisionist attacked the Marxist goal of a revolutionary transition to socialism. He argued that capitalism had become more stable, and that the struggle for social reforms within capitalism had to replace the Second International’s formal commitment to abolishing it.

Against Bernstein, “orthodox” Marxism was defended by a number of writers, and most consistently by Karl Kautsky, the main theoretician of German Social Democracy, The problem was, however, that the Trade Union and ‘Parliamentary right wing of the Second International was perfectly willing to stand by “orthodox’ Marxism in theory, whilst being thoroughly reformist in practice.

Trotsky wrote of Kautsky’s orthodoxy: “Kautsky untiringly defended the revolutionary essence of Marx and Engels’ doctrine, although the initiative in repelling revisionist sallies was often taken by the more derisive elements (Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Parvus). In the political arena, however, Kautsky made total peace with the Social Democracy in the form it had acquired, never commenting on its profoundly opportunist nature and, never responding to the efforts to make the party’s tactics more resolute. As far as that went the party, i.e. the ruling bureaucracy also made peace with Kautsky’s theoretical radicalism.” Trotsky, Portraits Political and Personal (1922) p31

The nature of the right wing’s commitment to orthodox Marxism was summed up in the famous comment of Ignaz Auor to Bernstein: “My dear Edo the sort of thing you ask for is not done by passing a resolution; one does not say it, one does it.” H Grob, History of German Labour Movement p 82

Prior to the outbreak of the First World War the weakness of the “Kautskyite centre” was that it  was able to defend orthodoxy, but not apply it consistently in practice. The emergence of Imperialism, the threat of war, the appearance of revolutionary crises, all demanded that revolutionary Marxism develop a new kind of programme different to the Maximum and Minimum programme of Social Democracy, and a new kind of party, based on class combat and with disciplined organisation, as opposed to the electoral broad church of the Socialist Parties.

Marxism developed these new tools partially, separately and in a one sided way before 1914, often with the “centre” taking a more or less correct position in the debates. However when war broke out in August 1914 the whole of the “centre” sided with the social chauvinists. Under pressure from the left and the right the Kautskyite “centre” vacillated between the two. At the anti war conferences of the left in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, the centre sought to reconcile the left with the old reformist bureaucracy. Clearly the concepts “orthodox” and “revisionist” were no longer adequate to describe the conflicting political tendencies, or to understand the betrayal of the centre.

The war drew a balance of the leaders of the Second International. It required the Marxist left to evolve a new characterisation of the Kautskyite centre. This characterisation was put into place by Lenin alongside the other key elements of the communist programme for the Imperialist epoch, at the end of the war.

Writing in 1917 Lenin described three distinct tendencies within the labour movement: The social chauvinists, the revolutionary left and the “centre”. Referring to the third group, Lenin outlined the fundamental features of Kautskyite centrism:

“Historically and economically speaking they do not represent a separate stratum but are a transition from a past phase of the labour movement the phase between 1871 and 1914, which gave much that is valuable to the proletariat, particularly in the indispensable art of slow, sustained and systematic organisational work on a large and very large scale to a new phase. A phase that became objectively essential with the outbreak of the first imperialist world war, which inaugurated the era of social revolution.” Lenin, Tasks of the Proletariat In Our Revolution- September 1917. He continued: “The Kautskyans, the “centre” are revolutionaries in words and reformists in deeds, they are internationalists in words and accomplices of social chauvinists in deeds,” Lenin, ibid.

Two important points spring immediately from Lenin’s initial understanding of the concept centrism. First, he sees it as a transitional phenomenon, from one kind of politics to another. Secondly, he tries to explain its material roots in history and the class struggle. These two qualities, discovered in Kautskyanism by Lenin, were to form the basis of the later, more generalise concept of centrism.

It is important to note also, that in dealing with Kautsky and co, labelling them centrist, Lenin is not simply lumping them together with the social chauvinists. Neither is he insulting them, He describes their contribution as ‘valuable”, despite their inability to adapt Marxist orthodoxy to the new epoch. In the same way when we describe the Socialist Labour League, the precursor of the Workers Revolutionary Party as “centrist” we are not implying that it could not make correct and “valuable” criticisms of Pabloism, nor that its history of intervention in the class struggle should be “written off”.

What we are saying is that even at its point of origin, the concept centrism better describes the process of degeneration of Marxism toward reformism, a process that was to be repeated several times after Kautsky, than the labels “orthodox” and “revisionist” It does so because, in the 20th century, Marxism is not a series of truths and theories to be defended against bourgeois professors and systematically explained to the working class: it is a guide to revolutionary action. In our epoch working class leaders no longer stand or fall by their ability to read “Capital” to the masses, but by their programme. Centrism encompasses better than any other concept the process of programmatic degeneration which was a feature of Kautsky, and was to be a feature of the Stalinist Comintern and the post war Fourth International.

From 1917 to 1923
To describe the emergence of Kautskyite centrism is not to exhaust the subject of centrism and the Second International. Towards the end of the war a different kind of centrism emerged the centrism of the masses. Under pressure of defeat and extreme privations masses of workers in Europe were pushed away from their old social chauvinist political leaders in the direction of the newly founded Comintern. Often too, a section of the old leadership was likewise propelled leftward by the pressure of the newly radicalised mass.

Rather than fading away, as might be implied from Lenin’s original definition of centrism, centrism was renewed by the leftward surge of the workers. Centrist parties and centrist factions within parties now emerged. The Comintern leaders saw them correctly as both an expression of and an obstacle to the movement of large numbers of workers towards communism.

In combat with such forces, the Comintern developed the concept of centrism from a specific characterisation of Kautsky (one of the earliest centrist formations in this period was the SPD led by both Kautsky and Bernstein!) to a more general concept. In particular the Italian “maximalists” of Serrati and later the Frossard-Cachin tendency within the French Communist Party were characterised as centrists.

Summing up the period of the Comintern’s programmatic struggle with leftward moving centrism, Trotsky wrote, in March 1923: “After the war, an irresistible leftward movement set in amongst the working massed the genuine revolutionary section of the working class was unable in the space of a few months either to find or educate new leaders it must be recognised that during its initial years the Communist International had many sections headed by some leaders who were revolutionary but inexperienced and not firm enough; and by others who were semi revolutionary and eternally vacillating but possessing considerable authority and political aptitude… the qualitative sameness of the politics of Paul Levi, of Frossard and the rest shows that involved here are not at all peculiarities inherent in any specific situation which of course must be carefully taken into account – but a wholly internationalist tendency in the spirit of left centrism, which is prepared to adopt the external ritual of the Communist International, to swallow 21 and more conditions without a grimace, but all on the sole condition that everything go on exactly as before.” Trotsky, Balance Sheet of the completed period First 5 years of the Comintern, Vol 2 p33

With the crystallisation of a revolutionary communist programme and International, also came the crystallisation of “centrism” as a concept describing a whole series of tendencies with the same essential features. Like the centrism of Kautsky, the centrism of 1917 to 1923 also had its material roots in the transition of the masses from reform to revolution. As with Kautsky, this centrism was not dust derided and written off: over and above attempting to win the masses and their leaders away from. centrism, Trotsky recognised the “political aptitude’ of the leaders, as well as their political ineptness.

The defeat of the revolutionary wave after the First World War had the effect of stabilising the mass movement. Where organised centrist currents continued to exist separately from the Second or Third Internationals they did so by virtue of their marginalisation from mass pressure

However the defeat and stabilisation post 1923 also, in an indirect way provided the conditions for the emergence of yet another form of centrism: with different material roots to that of the Second International but exhibiting many of the same features. This form of centrism emerged from the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist International itself.

The Centrist Comintern 1923 1933
Even before 1923 the Comintern’s sections committed centrist errors. It is very important to understand the qualitative difference between these mistakes and the systematic centrism of the Comintern after 1923. As we saw above, it was necessary to incorporate leftward moving centrist elements into the early Comintern. Later, even before 1923, the Executive Committee of the Communist International itself presided over centrist vacillations, such as that of Zinoviev and Kun on the question of the “revolutionary offensive”, and the mistakes of Levi in Germany.

Despite this however, we describe the period of the first four congresses of the Comintern, from 1919 to 1923, as a healthy, revolutionary period. Why? Because in this period the Comintern was creating a revolutionary programme against which centrist errors could be judged, and a leadership capable of judging them. The revolutionary legacy of the early Comintern is thus embodied in the theses and resolutions of the first four congresses and in the work of the Comintern sections in this period.

After 1923 a qualitative break occurred. Starting with the German events of 1923 the Comintern leadership became seriously disoriented. Between 1924 and 1925 the Comintern endorsed ultra left, adventuristic “putsches” in Germany, Bulgaria and Estonia. At the same time it also developed bureaucratic and opportunist pacts with non proletarian forces (e.g. the foundation of the Peasant International). This right wing tendency increased and was consummated with the disastrous adaptation of the British CP to the TUC “lefts” in the 1926 General Strike, then in the liquidation of the Chinese CP in the Kuomintang, which led to the crushing of the Chinese Revolution in 1927.

Following this defeat, and the expulsion of the Trotskyist opposition, the Comintern, again veered left, inaugurating the Third Period”. This again combined strident ultra-leftism (where Social Democracy was equated with fascism and the United Front rejected) with accommodation to certain right wing and bourgeois democratic figures; in the case of Germany even to right wing national chauvinism.

The end result of the “Third Period” was the defeat of the German proletariat at the hands of Hitler, and the rise of fascism. This in turn provoked a new opportunist swing, i.e. the Comintern’s popular (or people’s front) line. First of all in France, then as a generalised tactic, the Comintern elaborated the Popular Front strategy. For Stalinism, the rise of fascism made necessary an alliance with so called democratic capitalist parties, and with capitalist countries where “democracy” held sway because this involved the conscious and open betrayal of the workers of the “democratic” countries such as the Stalin/Laval pact of 1935 which endorsed the ‘defence and security” of French Imperialism. The Popular Front policy signalled the end of the Comintern’s centrist period. Its evolution into a counter revolutionary, reformist international was complete, and its self liquidation in 1943 already inevitable.

The Trotskyists, who formed the only consistent opposition to the Comintern’s centrism, were able to pinpoint the material roots of this centrist evolution in the state and party bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. The 1936 theses on “The Evolution of The Comintern” outlined this understanding.

“The two methods adopted by the Comintern for handling the masses on the one hand, unprincipled, adaptation to existing circumstances and the bourgeois democratic and petty bourgeois reformist parties, and on the other the sudden unprepared appeals to the revolutionary instincts of the masses have their roots in the social position of the Soviet bureaucracy ( the Comintern bureaucracy being its obedient appendage). Owing to its social character, the Soviet bureaucracy inclines towards adapting itself to the privileged and exploiting sections of Soviet society (Kulaks, intellectual strata, labour aristocracy). However as soon as the development has reached a critical point, where these strata become so powerful socially that they threaten the bureaucracy’s position of political privilege, the latter saves itself only by an appeal to the masses…” The Evolution of the Comintern Documents of the Fourth International p 119-120 Pathfinder

For this reason Trotsky adopted the label “bureaucratic centrism” for the Comintern in the period 1923 1935. Although originating in the vacillating petty bourgeois interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, Comintern centrism exhibited all the classic features of previous centrist groupings. It vacillated between reformism and revolution, violently swung between ultra left and right opportunist errors, elevated Leninism into a rigid orthodoxy whilst departing from it at every turn. Like previous centrist formations however it also contained competent leaders, was able to make correct criticisms of reformism, syndicalism anarchism; it educated cadres in Marxism and provided thousands of heroic martyrs for the revolutionary cause.

As well as illustrating yet another type of centrism, the Comintern contains other valuable lessons. The tactics of the International Left Opposition toward the centrist Comintern passed through different stages, taking account of the qualitative phases within the Comintern’s centrist evolution.

Throughout all the defeats which the Communist International presided over, through all the left and right zigzags, and even despite their official expulsion in 1928, Trotsky and his followers remained loyal to the Comintern. They argued this was necessary as long as the possibility of reforming the Comintern existed. They argued that the existence of masses of subjectively revolutionary workers, particularly in Germany, within the Communist Parties, offered, under the pressure of those masses, the possibility of a return to the revolutionary programme elaborated in the first five years. Following the defeat of the German workers in 1933 Trotsky abandoned this perspective. Not simply because of the defeat itself, but because no section other than the International Left Opposition criticised the Comintern’s errors from a revolutionary standpoint. With the destruction of the KPD, the Comintern’s biggest section outside the USSR, it was not possible to regenerate the International from within. From July 1933 Trotsky argued for the creation of a new International.

It is important to understand here that Trotsky’s break with the Communist International did not come at the point it became centrist; neither did he declare for a new International because the Communist International had “crossed class lines” (it was not to do that until two years later in France) in the manner of the second International in 1914. The break occurred because the Comintern had proved itself incapable of being reformed from within. It was irredeemably centrist. This fact has important implications when we come to look at the Fourth International after the war.

1933 – 1938 Trotskyism Versus Centrism
The task of building the Fourth International was made especially difficult by the need to combat the various shades of centrism which now existed. On the one hand there remained the Comintern, on the other there were elements of the “right opposition” who had been expelled from the Communist International in the “Third Period” and who had, because they too were centrists, made some correct criticisms of the Comintern. As well after 1933 there occurred yet another mass movement of the Social Democratic workers towards the left, under the threat of fascism and during severe economic depression. This new turn created centrist formations within and on the fringes of the second International: the followers of Pivert in the French SFIO, a section of the British Independent Labour Party, A. J. Muste in the USA, etc.

Faced with such a panoply of centrism, Trotsky was driven to write in 1934: “For a revolutionary Marxist the struggle against reformism is now almost fully replaced by the struggle against centrism.” Trotsky, Writings 1933/34 p235

In the struggle against centrism of the mid 1930s Trotsky further concretized and developed the Marxist understanding of centrism. This mature conception, outlined in the writings of the period as well as in the day to day tactical relationship of the Movement for the Fourth International to various centrist groups, is extremely useful to us today.

In his article “Centrism and the Fourth International”, Trotsky outlined the general features of centrism as it existed in 1934. Despite the difficulties outlined before of precisely defining centrism, it is worth quoting this passage in full. It will strike a chord immediately with any critical observer of the British left, and of the SLL/WRP tradition in particular:

1. In the sphere of theory centrism is impressive and eclectic. It shelters itself as much as possible from obligations in the matter of theory and is inclined (in words) to give preference to “revolutionary practice” over theory; without understanding that only Marxist theory can give to practice a revolutionary direction.
2. In the sphere of ideology, centrism leads a parasitic existence: against revolutionary Marxists it repeats the old Menshevik arguments (those of Martov, Axelrod, and Plekhanov) generally without re valuing them: On the other hand it borrows its principle arguments against the “rights” from the Marxists, that is, above all, from the Bolshevik Leninists, suppressing, however, the point of the criticisms, subtracting the practical conclusions and so robbing criticism of all who object.
3. Centrism voluntarily proclaims its hostility to reformism but it is silent about centrism more than that it thinks the very idea of centrism “obscure”, “arbitrary”, etc.: In other words centrism dislikes being called centrism.
4. The centrist, never sure of his position and his methods, regards with detestation the revolutionary principle: State that which is; it inclines to substituting, in the place of political principles, personal combinations and petty organizational diplomacy.
5. The centrist always remains in spiritual dependence upon right groupings, is induced to court the goodwill of the most moderate, to keep silent about their opportunist faults and to regild their actions before the workers.
6. It is not a rare thing for the centrist to hide his own hybrid nature by calling out about the dangers of “sectarianism”; but by sectarianism he understands not a passivity of abstract propaganda (as is the way with the Bordigists) but the anxious care for principle, the clarity of position, political consistency, definiteness in organization.
7. Between the opportunist and the Marxist the centrist occupies a position which is, up to a certain point, analogous to that occupied by the petty bourgeoisie between the capitalist and the proletariat; he courts the approbation of the first and despises the second.
8. On the international field the centrist distinguishes himself, if not his blindness, at least by his short-sightedness. He does not understand that one cannot build in the present period a national revolutionary party save as part of an international party; in the choice of his international allies the centrist is even less particular then in his own country.
9. The centrist sees as outstanding in the policy of the Communist International only the “ultra left” deviation; the adventurism, the putchism, and is in absolute ignorance of the opportunist right zigzags. (Guomindang, Anglo-Russian Committee, pacifist foreign policy, anti-fascist bloc, etc.).
10. The centrist swears by the policy of the united front as he empties it of its revolutionary content and transforms it from a tactical method into a highest principle.
11. The centrist gladly appeals to pathetic moral lessons to hide his ideological emptiness, but he does not understand that revolutionary crisis can rest only on the ground of revolutionary doctrine and revolutionary policy.
12. Under the pressure of circumstances the eclectic centrist is capable of accepting even extreme conclusions but only to repudiate them later indeed. Recognizing the dictatorship of the proletariat he leaves plenty of room for opportunist interpreters: Proclaiming the need for a fourth international he works for the creation of the two and a half international.

Notwithstanding it’s latter day period of sectarian isolation who can fail to see all these lines in the SLL/WRP? Who either can fail to distinguish the character traits of the Thornett group, the Socialist Labour Group, or the Spartacists in Trotsky’s pen portrait of centrism. [Everyone one these points can be ascribed to Workers Power, and exposes the root cause for its recent split. However anyone who knows the history of the WRP can only fail to recognise it in this list of traits]. In addition to this general definition of centrism we also find Trotsky exploring, in the 30s, some of the “further subdivisions” of centrism which are also important for an understanding of today’s centrism:

a) Left And Right Centrism
Under the pressure of the masses some of the Social Democratic leaders were prepared to step out of their reformist garb and. put on the clothes of centrism. In his 1934 Manifesto “War and the Fourth International” Trotsky drew a distinction between “masked reformist or right centrists” and the “left centrists who are distinguished in turn by a great number of shadings.”

Trotsky exposed the right centrists (such as De Man) as wanting to drag in the defence of the fatherland “under the cover of a socialist plans”, whereas the Left centrists “arrive in words at the denunciation of the defence of the fatherland. But from this bare denunciation they do not draw the necessary practical conclusions.” (Writings 33/34 p311)

b) The Direction Of Centrist Formations
On top of the characterisation “left’ and “right”, Trotsky also carefully distinguished, between rightward and leftward moving centrism. This is crucial, since a concept which encompasses transition would be useless if it didn’t have a sub category which told us the direction of transition. As Trotsky wrote: “In front of each centrist group it is necessary to place an arrow indicating the direction of its development from right to left or from left to right.” Trotsky Writings.

In turn the ability to distinguish between leftward and rightward moving centrism dictated the tactics the Fourth International adopted towards the various groupings. For example Trotsky bitterly criticised the POUM of Spain which was the result of Nin and Andrade’s evolution away from Trotskyism and did not flinch from a split with Nin, and advocated the formation of an independent nucleus in Spain. Towards the American Workers Party of A. J. Muste however, a leftward moving organisation, the Trotskyists carried through a tactic of fusion. “We took a liberal and conciliatory attitude on the organisation questions, reserving our intransigence for the question of programme” wrote Cannon of the Communist League of America’s fusion with Muste. Cannon, History of American Trotskyism, p181.

c) The Centrism Of The Masses
Trotsky often contrasted the spontaneous and temporary centrism of the working class with the systematic centrism of the leaders and of small groups. He wrote in the war manifesto for example: “For the masses centrism is always only a short transition stage.” The consciousness of the working class evolves rapidly and under fire; its centrism, its uncertainties, are very quickly put to the test.

On the other hand, despite the fact that centrism is essentially a transitional phenomenon, it is possible for centrist tendencies to exist for prolonged periods, provided the class struggle doesn’t confront them with a decisive choice between revolution and counter-revolution; defeatism or chauvinism, etc.

As early as 1925 Trotsky had described this type of centrism, with regard to the British ILP: “The main feature of socialist centrism is its reticence, its mediocre half and half nature, it keeps going as long as it does not draw the ultimate conclusions and is not compelled, to answer the basic questions set before it point blank, … as a rule centrism is most typical of small organisations which precisely through their lack of influence absolve themselves from the need to provide a clear answer to all questions of politics and bear practical responsibility for this answer. Just such is the centrism of the Independent Labour party.” Trotsky, Where is Britain Going? p112

He returned to the subject of centrism again in 1935 in more general terms: “In our epoch there are to be found a good many circles in various countries that have acquired a Marxist programme, most often by borrowing it from the Bolsheviks, arid who then turned their ideological baggage into a greater or lesser degree of ossification.” Trotsky, Writing 35/36 p154

The concept of “ossified” centrism is important in our analysis of post-war Trotskyism. It is an apparent contradiction in terms: a transitory phenomenon frozen by objective circumstances in its process of transition. However, neither for us nor for Trotsky does this contradict the essential feature of centrism – i.e. that it is a process of change from reform to revolution or vice versa. Neither is such a phenomenon unknown elsewhere in Marxist theory: one immediately calls to mind the dictatorship of the proletariat as it exists today in the USSR: frozen, blocked in its transition to socialism.

Trotsky wrote of the Independent Labour Party, which had assumed office in the Labour government of 1924-5: “From the very moment that centrism became a political force it had to pass beyond the bounds of centrism, that is either draw revolutionary conclusions from its opposition to the Imperialist state or openly enter its service. The latter of course is what happened ” Trotsky, Where is Britain Going.

In this instance the ILP’s prolonged centrist existence came to a close when it assumed power. However, returning to the ILP which by 1932 had become again a. distinctly centrist current (it had split with the Labour Party) Trotsky wrote: “The bureau suffers the fate of all centrist organisations in times of acute class struggle; it is destroyed by the release of centrifugal forces within itself. History could not arrange a better demonstration of the correctness of our understanding of centrism,” Trotsky, Writings 35/36 p27 [This is exactly what happened to Workers Power in March 2012]

Unlike the masses’ centrism, which is always transitory, it is possible for small organisations to exist as centrist currents relatively ossified, stabilised by their isolation from the class struggle. However when decisive questions are posed in action such forces must complete their evolution either in the manner of 1923 (by crossing class lines) or in the manner of the 1930’s (when the ILP’s centrifugal forces propelled a section towards the Fourth International).

The Concept Of Centrism
We have reviewed at length the history of the concept centrism. So much has been lost or given away by the post-war epigones of Trotsky that such a review is absolutely necessary before we attempt to employ “centrism” as a tool to understand the degeneration of the Fourth International In this way we can make analogies and comparisons, but avoid the dangers of complacent” and “facile” comparison referred to by Mike Banda.

Let us sum up what we mean by centrism:
1) Centrism, is a political current in transition between reformism and revolutionary communism.
2) It can emerge from either Marxism or reformism and travel in either direction.
3) Insofar as it exists separately from these two currents, centrism borrows from and vacillates between both, always blinding an obstructing the political development of the working class.
4) Centrism cannot exist forever in this state, however where material circumstances absolve it from practical’ responsibility for its politics, centrism can exist in a prolonged “ossified” state
5) Centrism has no historic roots in either the bourgeois or proletarian classes.
6) It is necessary to understand the different phases, types, and directions of centrism in order to operate Marxist tactics towards it.

Now let us turn to the Fourth International after Trotsky’s death

The Fourth International From Trotskyism To Centrism
Mike Banda was correct to warn against facile analogies in his article “27 Reasons…”. How often have we heard the Mandelites whine, during yet another “unity” drive: “when did we commit our August 1914?” But we cannot abandon analogies and comparisons; only complacency.

The problem with Banda’s document, to date the most critical account of the post war Fourth International to emerge from the WRP, is that it fails to distinguish between the various stages of the Fourth Internationals degeneration. It is not much more than a list of crimes committed not only by the IC and IS, but also the post war Fourth International, the Fourth International after 1940, and in the case of Cannon, apparently as early as 1934/5. What is missing is precisely the concept centrism and an understanding of its different sub-species and phases.

We believe that the Fourth International in 1938 was the one and only revolutionary party. Whatever the mistakes made by the constituent groups of the Movement for the Fourth International, whatever mistakes made after 1938, and there were some during Trotsky’s lifetime, the Fourth International was a revolutionary organisation precisely in the same way as the early Comintern: by virtue of its programme and the existence of a leadership which embodied that programme, put it into practice, checked the errors and vacillations of its members against this programmatic criterion.

The outbreak of war disoriented the Fourth International as did the murder of Trotsky and some of his most capable followers by Stalinism and Fascism. Cannon committed centrist errors on the proletarian military policy, and the French and British sections mirrored each other in opportunist and sectarian application of the programme of revolutionary defeatism.

By 1944 however, at the International Conference the Fourth International was able to reorient itself on a revolutionary basis. It set about reconstructing an international leadership and intervening in the post war upsurge. In the maelstrom from 1938 to 1948 the Fourth International’s revolutionary programme was a beacon to the workers of the world. Whatever mistakes it made in this period it was fundamentally revolutionary.

After 1948 however, the Fourth Internationals again became disoriented. It had failed to revise its perspectives to take account of the post war political stabilisation of Stalinism and imperialism. As a result it saw in the Tito-Stalin split and the Cold war only a confirmation of the old perspective of imminent collapse, imminent revolution correct in 1938, but no longer accurate ten years and a world war, later.

Based on a perspective that saw first Tito and then Mao as “no longer Stalinist”, that saw the Yugoslav events as a slightly imperfect proletarian revolution, and that predicted the imminent War/Revolution, the Pablo leadership of the Fourth International revised the Marxist programme. The lack of time to build real Trotskyist parties, the necessity of long term deep entry into Stalinist and petty bourgeois movements, the  possibility of an epoch of “workers governments of workers parties” i.e. Tito style social overturns, all were enshrined in the Yugoslavia resolution of the Fourth Internationals 1951 Congress

Unlike the Comintern the Fourth International had never been in reality a mass organisation. Its strength lay in its programme alone. The utter negation of Trotskyism which it adopted, in 1951, and the fact that no tendency or section correctly criticised the Yugoslav Resolution, signalled the passing of the Fourth International decisively into its centrist phase. From then on it would have been necessary to form a faction, conduct an open fight for leadership and not to flinch from a split and the formation of a new international organisation.

It is undoubtedly correct to label Pabloism centrism, Whilst proclaiming allegiance to Bolshevik Leninism it accommodated voraciously, first to Stalinism and then to petty bourgeois nationalism. Whilst in possession of the banner of the Fourth International it also projected long term entry into the parties of the dissolved Comintern. It was, in conformity with Trotsky’s definition, “Amorphous and eclectic”, it “substituted for a principled policy, personal manoeuvring and petty organisational diplomacy”. It “remained silent on the opportunist sins” of Tito and Mao, and “covered up their actions before the workers”. In transforming the entry tactic and the workers government demand into strategic aims, Pabloism embodied to the letter Trotsky’s dictum: “A centrist readily swears by the policy of the united front, emptying it of its revolutionary content and. transforming it from a tactical method, into a supreme principle.”

If it is correct to call Pabloism centrism however, is it not true that the International committee split with that centrism in 1953? Yes it split with “Pabloism” but not with centrism. The IC never criticised the 1951 Congress resolutions which were the programmatic basis of “Pabloism” If Pabloism was “revisionist” then the “orthodoxy” of the “Open Letter” and “Under a stolen flag” was the orthodoxy of  Kautsky and Zinoviev. It covered up rank adaptation to Bevanism in Britain and to Social Democracy in France. The insult ‘liquidationist’ aimed at Pablo disguised the liquidation by Healy of British Trotskyism into the Labour left. And by 1964 the Socialist Labour League was working with a perspective every bit as catastrophist as that of Pablo’s 1951 prognosis.

The 1953 split, as we have said before, occurred simultaneously too early and too late. It occurred without a principled fight within the International, and was largely prompted, by the breakup of the international non aggression pact that substituted for democratic centralism in the Fourth International. On the other hand it occurred long after the critical resolution on Yugoslavia was passed at the 1951 Congress.

One objection to this analysis which often arises is the following: “if you are quick to abandon the Fourth International, to call for the formation of a new International after 1951, how do you explain its existence as a centrist current for over 35 years. Is not centrism only a transitory phenomenon?”

The answer to this has two sides, both completely in accord with Trotsky’s definition of centrism. We describe the fragments and splinters of the Fourth International as “ossified’ or “petrified” centrism, i.e. centrism which by virtue of its isolation from the masses can remain in limbo between reformism and communism. The possibility and precedent for such a development is outlined in Trotsky’s writings on the ILP, in both early 1920s and mid 30s, reviewed above. To the question, how can centrism become “stable” in such a way, we answer; in the same way as reformism and Stalinism after the war: on the basis of the most gigantic economic growth in world history under capitalism, and on the basis of the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge after 1944.

On the other hand, such centrism cannot remain stable forever. After two decades of relative stagnation the splits and disintegration suffered by the centrist currents in Britain in the heat of a new period of crisis testify to this. Under the pressure of key events it is possible for “ossified” centrism to dissolve in either direction. The example of the LSSP in Sri Lanka whose historic “August 1914” occurred in 1964 when they entered the bourgeois Bandaranaike government proves this.

The SLL/WRP As Centrism
We have outlined elsewhere our criticisms of the SLL/WRP. That it “made mistakes” is for us, not in dispute. The question still at issue however is: what was the character of those mistakes? The answer to this question is linked fundamentally with the question of the WRP’s future.

By trying to prove the SLL/WRP was centrist we are not implying that the whole history of the organisation must be written off; we are not attempting to deliver the WRP the ultimate insult; neither are we simply trying’ to “stick a label” on the WRP. Lenin and Trotsky’s understanding of centrism was able to encompass its positive as well as its negative elements. When the SLL/WRP criticised Pabloism, it built strikes and shop stewards organisations, defended Trotskyism against “state capitalist” theories, they were fighting a necessary fight; they were on the right side of the battle lines, but fighting with inadequate political weapons. That is why the fight against Pabloism evolved into a criminal slander campaign, that is why the fight against “liquidation” ended up with the assertion that no revolutionary party was needed in Libya etc. That is why the ATUA became a sterile and sectarian shell; that is why the SLL itself ended up with a form of state capitalist analysis of Cuba.

The alternatives to understanding centrism as the root of the WRP’s political crisis still not resolved decisively six months after the expulsion of Healy were demonstrated graphically in the original Banda/Hunter exchange. For Banda the Fourth International’s demise was the product of totally subjective factors; the inadequacy of the cadre, etc. Hunter was right to label this a “bad men” theory of history. For this, however, Hunter substituted a “bad circumstances” theory. “The Fourth International’s degeneration was seen as the inevitable result of adverse objective conditions. The boom, the isolation from the masses, the strength of Stalinism and reformism mean for Hunter that we made mistakes but we could have done it no other way”. Both positions are fundamentally one sided and undialectical. Both are fatalistic.

The concept centrism on the other hand is profoundly dialectical. It allows us to see the material roots of the past mistakes without endowing them with “objective” inevitability. It also allows us to characterise the stages of the Fourth International’s degeneration in a way not attempted by Banda. It allows us to understand when and how quantitative mistakes become qualitative centrism and how centrism itself, posed in practice with vital questions, must make another leap either back into the camp of the proletarian revolution or into the camp of its enemies.

The WRP, posed with such vital questions during the miners’ strike, entered into a period of political crisis still not ended. The key to projecting a revolutionary future for the WRP, for resolving positively its centrist period, lies in the re elaboration of a transitional programme for today’s class struggle. One of the most vital prerequisites for this is a scientific understanding of the WRP’s past as centrist.

Centrism is the concept which developed in the epoch of revolution, in the epoch of transitional programme. It developed to cope with the reality that a correct understanding of Marxist “orthodoxy”, of economic theory, even of the materialist dialectic was no guarantee of programmatic correctness. As a concept it developed historically, as we have outlined. It developed, like all human thought ‘post festum’ after the event. This incidentally explains why the charge that we call Lenin or Trotsky “centrist” before 1914 is completely unfounded. To measure the leaders of the past against programmatic yardstick which could only exist in the present would be completely anti-Marxist.

However with the post war Fourth International it is a different matter. In the case of Pablo; in the case of Cliff and Grant, Mandel and Cannon, in the case too of Healy, Banda, Hunter and co. [Bollocks] the “yardstick” already existed. It was the Transitional Programme and the whole history of Trotsky’s fight with Stalinism and reformism. The task we face is to re-erect it, re elaborate it for today. We cannot do this unless we understand how it was possible for these loaders to proclaim allegiance to that programme in words and systematically negate it in deeds. In this lies the burning importance of the concept centrism and its “further subdivisions” for the current debates in the WRP. [Or rather Workers Power]
The VOAG is watching - The VOAG is everywhere!!

Workers Power Conference 2012: Divisions, Expulsions, & Appeals – The VOAG Investigates. 

Workers Power, a small communist group had its conference over the weekend. The conference was dominated be factionalism and division. Two people were expelled, and although as yet there have been no formal splits, resignations from the National and Political Committees surely herald one in the coming days.

The conference began on Saturday 24th, March with two members formally appealing against their expulsions. In true Weekly Worker style, the VOAG (Voice Of Anti-Capitalism in Guildford) publishes the first of the two expulsion appeals – Delivered to the conference as a speech.    

Bureaucrat Expulsion
I went to two meetings in Manchester where I met with half a dozen people from the RSO, Socialist Fight and others. There were two subsequent meetings in Manchester, but neither I nor Cde B. attended them.

Like all members of Workers Power, I attend meetings organised by a number of different groups. I didn’t consider my attendance at this meeting any different than attending an SWP or SP meeting or indeed holding discussions with local Anarchists or anti-cuts campaigners.

There was a variety of attitudes regarding what might be achieved by the discussions. Opinions ranged from formalising a new group to continued informal discussions. I made it clear that my interest in the meetings was from within the framework of an Anti-Capitalist project

I recall prior to joining Workers Power, speaking to the 2009 Anti-Capitalist event. I told the conference:”What we really want is local groups, we have to come together at a local level because we don’t believe that political groups are capable of achieving a meaningful unity on a National basis”. “An Anti-Capitalist Party must be built from below, as an umbrella organisation connecting local Anti-Capitalist groups with the flexibility and freedom to react and adapt to local conditions”.

“However “, I added: “The Anti-Capitalist Party was not a replacement for existing groups, but a way for existing groups – along with non-aligned activists and anti-cuts campaigners – to work together” It was the feeling of the Surrey United Anti-Capitalists, “that a federal approach to a new Anti-Capitalist Party may provide the break-through to a successful ‘unity project”. This continues to be my belief. It is surely imperative to maintain ideological coherence by struggling for a clear programme via democratic centralism, a paper and our identity.

Late in the evening before the NC meeting in January, I received a phone call from Cde B. He told me he had received an email from the NC regarding the meetings inManchester. He forwarded an email to me, which had been sent from Simon Hardy to the members of the NC. The email contained correspondence between Cde B. and Gerry Downing. The emails addressed issues that arose out of the Manchester meetings and included a discussion about what kind of an organisation, if any, might arise out of them.

I too have had similar discussions. If the Anti-Capitalist Party is to be a Party of the working class, it must encourage the entire labour movement to sign up- and be a forum where theories and practices are put to the test. As Richard Brenner asked rhetorically in Workers Power 341, (Winter 2009): “Do we say that we want it to be a pluralist party? We want a democratic party in which everyone can say what they think. But another feature is that we want to win the argument in the party for revolution”.

It should be obvious that winning the argument for revolution requires a functioning group, faction or caucus to consistently argue for revolutionary Trotskyist politics inside the Anti-Capitalist project. Only Trotskyism has the programme that can defeat and replace the existing leadership of the working class by the method of the transitional programme. Bringing down the government and leading the working class to a socialist future.

I was aware that discussions were continuing between the participants of the Manchester meetings. Naturally, I too discussed these meetings. However, neither I nor Cde B. participated in the e-group where the emails Simon presented to the NC originated. Indeed, I didn’t know of the existence of the e-group.

Simon Hardy was leading the proposal for my expulsion. No accusations regarding a breach of discipline were leveled against me. Simon’s sole charge was that I “attended a meeting of a group hostile to Workers Power and the Anti-Capitalist project”.

My answer to Simon was, and still is: “that we all attend meetings with groups hostile to Workers Power. However, I didn’t discuss or impart any privileged information regarding Workers Power and I don’t believe Cde B. did either”.

I must add to this now, that Simon is wrong regarding the caucus’ hostility to “Anti Capitalism”. It is my understanding that Socialist Fight, and the other participants in Manchester, with the exception of the RSO, were in favour of joining an Anti-Capitalist project.

Cde B. may have made references to divisions in Workers Power, but I do not believe any details beyond what was in the public domain, were ever discussed. I do not accept Cde B. or I broke discipline or any democratic-centralist principle.

Cde B. has consistently been one of the most active members of Workers Power inLondon. He is well known and respected for his work within the GRL. He has been involved in numerous campaigns, the electricians and bus drivers’ disputes being recent examples. Billy is also the most consistent recruiter. There are people in this conference today that Billy either recruited or introduced to Workers Power. Indeed, I believe it would be foolish for any rump that may continue after this conference not to actively recruit Billy to it.

No, I think it is obvious to us all that the real splitters are those who have finally broken cover at this conference to propose liquidation. It is they who have been undermining Workers Power, and as we shall see – in their rush to promote their vision of an Anti-Capitalist formation – have already broken from democratic centralist methodology. Far from seeking to split Workers Power, Cde B. was looking for ways to save its politics and programme, the very reason Cde B. and I joined the group in the first place.

Libya
The first major retreat from the programme was over Libya. Unlike the majority of Workers Power, I saw no basis to believe that a popular or progressive uprising was unfolding. Indeed, behind the headlines there was plenty of reason to assume the opposite. Whilst Workers Power rapped their support for the NTC in the flag of Permanent Revolution, I felt those same arguments correctly applied to the forces supporting Gadaffi.

The most disturbing aspect of Workers Power’s support for the NTC was that the NTC was openly courting the patronage of the imperialist powers. It even promised western companies “preferential treatment” in what amounted to another arms for oil deal.

Leon Trotsky, “On the Sino-Japanese War”, wrote: “The Trotskyists, they say, ‘want to serve Chiang Kai-shek in action and the proletariat in words’. To participate actively and consciously in the war does not mean ‘to serve Chiang Kai-shek’ but to serve the independence of a colonial country in spite of Chiang Kai-shek. And the words directed against the Kuomintang are the means of educating the masses for the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek”. “You cannot advance Imperialism’s victory and the victory of the working class at the same time”.

The leadership’s justification for their Libyan position was in the name of democracy and abstract liberal freedoms. In the early days of the conflict, I questioned the leadership about the lack of reliable evidence substantiating claims that it was a genuine popular uprising. Where was the general strike? Where were the mass demonstrations? In terms of numbers, it appeared that the rallies in support of Gadaffi were always larger than NTC organised events. Indeed, apart from a couple of small demonstrations, the only forces that the NTC commanded were rag-tag militias backed up by a few tribes and foreign interventionists”.

I find it Ironic that I’m appealing my expulsion, when those that are most keen on it are seeking to dissolve Workers Power anyway. It appears I am accused of breaking democratic centralism. However, it is my feeling that democratic centralist discipline broke down in WP some months ago.

The paper has ceased to be a coherent representation of the group. Under Simon Hardy’s editorship the paper has become the arena for internal differences between an old guard, and a middle class clique, running to the right and away from the working class. Their duplicity and dishonesty is exposed by their inconsistent and ever rightward stances in the paper.

Occupy – The 99%
With regards to the Occupy movement: Sceptical comments such as “the 1% as they have been called by the occupiers”. Criticisms such as “[occupy’s] limitation of always talking about “the people”. And calls for “discussions as to who constitutes the main agency of change”. (November’s issue of WP) have disappeared from the pages of WP.

Such comments and criticisms have been gradually replaced by a populist, un-critical support for the Occupy movement. And has led to a banner reading “We are the 99%” on the top of the South London Anti- Capitalist Network blog.

In contrast, on the WP blog last week, Dave Stockton, referring to ‘Occupy’ notes the: “necessity of working class direct action –that is, strikes – seemed to escape the more doctrinaire horizontals”…”In fact horizontalism- is an expression of layers and classes whose position in capitalist society gives them no natural unity: the lower middle classes, students, long term unemployed and intellectuals, who seek to escape cut-throat capitalist competition but at the same time feel collectivity, especially discipline imposed by a majority, an intolerable violation of their freedom”.

Compare that to March’s Workers Power, ‘Next steps for the Occupy movement’ in which Anton Solka writes “We are the 99% has brought the issue of class to the fore, there really is an us and them.”

Personally, I consider myself to be working class and not one of the 99%. My interests run contrary to many of the 99%. – And I would expect Workers Power to argue for class politics; warn of the dangers and Stalinist origin of popular frontism, and expose the contradictions within the 99% movement.

As with Libya, elements of Workers Power, with scant sources of information provided by the bourgeois media, has jumped on to the populist bandwagon of democracy and freedom. Support for the autonomist, environmentalist and horizontalist forces – those that are described by the clique struggling to break up our group as ‘New Left’ – may have temporarily grown, but there is nothing qualitatively new in Occupy. This ideology and methodology has been part of the political scenery for decades. The leaders of London’s Occupy are not just of the same milieu, but in many cases are the very same people that were on the peace camps and convoys of the eighties, on the road protests of the 90’s, and on the occupations and climate camps of the naughties.

Anti-Capitalism
As far as the Anti-Capitalist project goes; the Workers Power paper rarely repeats the same line twice. In February’s Workers Power article, “Labour in the Unions” Dave Stockton appeals to the unions to “put their money behind building a new fighting, Socialist Party”…”It must be a party whose aim is not to court the selfish individualism of the middle classes, but to lead the working class in a struggle for power”.

Simon Hardy writes in February’s paper “It is the battle to unite the anti–cuts movement, to create a new sense of energy and activism that UKUncut and Occupy exemplified. Although in the Editorial of the same month he writes: “In Britain, too, after an initial breakthrough, Occupy has reached a dead end”. Such is the retreat to the right, that even the name Anti-Capitalist is too radical for some in Workers Power. The group set up in Brighton is called the New Left Initiative.

In Conclusion
In conclusion, there are several common threads running through Workers Power at present.
In Libya WP elevated bourgeois democratic demands over the economic needs of the working class. With little information to support the position, WP opportunistically rode the wave of populism and supported the NTC. Its position sacrificed the security of the Libyan people, its welfare state, and its resources for democratic freedoms that will never be achieved and for the illusion of parliamentarianism.    

Again in the paper’s coverage of the Occupy movement and its 99% slogan, a faction of WP showed itself to be impressionistic. With little first-hand experience of the occupations, WP used second hand reports to analyse occupy. Here again elements in WP bent to populist sentiment and degenerated into uncritical support for the occupy movement. They sacrificed class analysis for democratic demands, popular frontism and horizontalism. As Dave Stockton said above: “These are the politics of the petit-bourgeois”.

It seems to me that the reason for the inconsistencies in the paper of late is not just the result of arguments on the PC, largely hidden from the membership. It is the result of a middle class clique in Workers Power looking for a way out and using Anti-Capitalism as their vehicle. Why else are they suddenly so enthusiastic about a project that’s been talked about for years. Why else would they be rushing headlong in to forming Anti-Capitalist groups before WP has decided the nature of this Anti-Capitalist project?

The rub, the elephant in the room, is finally exposed on paragraphs 20 and 21 of the draft proposal to the NC (included in the pre-conference IB.). Regarding Anti-Capitalism it says: “We will not declare a formal tendency or platform” – [But somehow] “will remain members of the League”. I don’t really think these people have thought this thing through. Does this clique really expect to reconcile plurality and democratic centralism within the same organisation? Or indeed, expect to remain members of the League, whose rules of affiliation insist on a regular paper. Read the rules of the League! You’re so gone. It’s these inconsistencies, and there are many, many, more, that make me realise the clique’s sudden enthusiasm for Anti-Capitalism is an unprincipled retreat into petite-bourgeois acceptability. We’re lefties, but harmless, and oh so intellectual they tell their peers. After-all, they’re reaching that age.

A post-script: Today – 9th April
It’s just two weeks after the above speech was delivered to the WP Annual Conference. News is reaching the VOAG that Workers Power is splitting. The VOAG believes that it totally vindicates everything that the two comrades who were expelled told the conference.  It follows a complete breakdown in the democratic centralist principles professed by Workers Power, mentioned above. Those of the ‘central tendency’ who claim to remain Leninists, saying they want to continue to build WP as a tendency in the worker’s movement, could have and should have put a stop to the machinations of the right-wing splitters long ago. Their refusal to do so shows their opportunism, and has led to this unnecessary impasse.  The right-wing, liquidationist splitters should have been expelled long ago for breaches of discipline and democratic centralism. The fact that they were not proves the degeneration and right-wing,
petite-bourgeois
trajectory of the entire group.