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Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary Party
Dianne Feeley, Paul Le Blanc, Thomas Twiss
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Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary Party
Dianne Feeley, Paul Le Blanc, Thomas Twiss
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About This Book
This is the first comprehensive examination of Leon Trotsky's view on revolutionary organizational principles, and the dynamic interplay of democratic initiative and principled centralism. Mostly in his own words, these writings are grounded in Trotsky's experience in Russia's revolutionary movement, as a leader of the International Left Opposition and Fourth International.
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Chapter 1
The revolutionary party: Its function and its consequent norms
In The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky discusses “the premises of a revolution”: the inability of the existing social structure to solve the country’s urgent problems; the resulting loss of faith of the ruling class in itself; the growing militancy and political consciousness of the working class; the intensifying discontent of the broad layers of the petty bourgeoisie. But these factors alone are not sufficient. Trotsky writes:
The proletariat can become imbued with the confidence necessary for a governmental overthrow only if a clear prospect opens before it, only if it has had an opportunity to test out in action a correlation of forces which is changing to its advantage, only if it feels above it a far-sighted, firm and confident leadership. This brings us to the last premise—by no means the last in importance—of the conquest of power: the revolutionary party as a tightly welded and tempered vanguard of the class.
Thanks to a favorable combination of historic conditions both domestic and international, the Russian proletariat was headed by a party of extraordinary political clarity and unexampled revolutionary temper. Only this permitted that small and young class to carry out a historic task of unprecedented proportions. It is indeed the general testimony of history—the Paris Commune, the German and Austrian revolutions of 1918, the Soviet revolutions in Hungary and Bavaria, the Italian revolution of 1919, the German crisis of 1923, the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927, the Spanish revolution of 1931—that up to now the weakest link in the chain of necessary conditions has been the party. The hardest thing of all is for the working class to create a revolutionary organization capable of rising to the height of its historic task. (History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. III, p. 175)
To understand the problem of creating such a revolutionary organization, one should look at the fate of the pre-World War I German Social Democracy. “For us Russians,” Trotsky wrote, “the German Social Democracy was mother, teacher, and living example. We idealized it from a distance.” (My Life, p. 212) Before the war,
the Social Democracy built up the unique structure of the political organization of the German proletariat with its many-branched bureaucratic hierarchy, its one million dues-paying members, its four million voters, ninety-one daily papers and sixty-five party printing presses. This whole many-sided activity, of immeasurable historic importance, was permeated through and through with the spirit of possibilism [i.e., of a reformist adaptation to capitalism].
On the theoretical level, this resulted in a fierce dispute between reformists and Marxists.
Marxism emerged from this theoretical dispute as the victor all along the line. But Revisionism…continued to live, drawing sustenance from the actual conduct and the psychology of the whole movement…. The parliamentarians, the unionists, the comrades continued to live and work in the atmosphere of general opportunism, of practical specializing and of nationalistic narrowness. (The War and the International, pp. 58, 60)
As early as 1905, Trotsky had the premonition “That the gigantic machine of the German Social Democracy might, at a critical moment for the bourgeois society, prove to be the mainstay of the conservative order. At the time, however, I did not foresee to what extent this theoretical presumption would be confirmed by the facts.” (My Life, p. 204)
The First World War and its aftermath provided the most shocking confirmation, when the party’s left-wing—seeking to remain true to the revolutionary principles of Marxism—was crushed by a party majority which had adapted only too well to the capitalist environment. While Lenin’s illusion in the German Social Democracy had been as great as Trotsky’s, his own organizational perspectives for the Russian movement had been far better able to prevent a similar degeneration. He grasped that, as Trotsky later remarked, “a revolutionary majority can be won only by a tendency which is capable in the most difficult conditions of remaining true to itself.” (Writings, 1929, p. 184) This meant not simply refusing to compromise over principles with outright reformists, but also refusing to compromise organizationally with seemingly revolutionary-minded currents that conciliated with reformists. This uncompromising attitude over the party’s revolutionary program naturally gave the Bolsheviks the reputation of being “divisive” and “unreasonable,” as Trotsky frequently stressed:
Lenin himself has more than once been accused of having forgotten about and helped the right in his struggle with the left centrists. I myself more than once made such an accusation against Lenin [before 1917]. It is in this, and not at all in permanent revolution, that the basic error of what is called “historical Trotskyism” lay. In order to become a Bolshevik not on a Stalinist passport but in actuality it is necessary to understand fully the meaning and significance of Lenin’s irreconcilability toward centrism, without which there is not and cannot be a road to proletarian revolution. (Writings, 1929, p. 186)
The essential first principle of Leninist organizational norms is the question of uncompromising political clarity and undeviating adherence to the revolutionary political program. The inseparable link, for Leninists, between the revolutionary program and party organization was explained by Trotsky in this way: “The significance of the program is the significance of the party…. Now, what is the party? In what does the cohesion exist? This cohesion is the common understanding of the events, of the tasks, and this common understanding—this is the program of the party.” (Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, p. 136) From this high seriousness over the revolutionary program flows an organizational centralism which is utterly at variance with the seemingly “freer” norms of classical Social Democracy. Trotsky discusses this while describing his own earlier inability to accept Lenin’s view on party organization:
Revolutionary centralism is a harsh, imperative and exacting principle. It often takes the guise of absolute ruthlessness in its relation to individual members, to whole groups of former associates. It is not without significance that the words ‘irreconcilable’ and ‘relentless’ are among Lenin’s favorites. It is only the most impassioned, revolutionary striving for a definite end—a striving that is utterly free from anything base or personal—that can justify such a personal ruthlessness….
I thought of myself as a centralist. But there is no doubt that at that time I did not fully realize what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order…. Independently I still could not see Lenin’s centralism as the logical conclusion of a clear revolutionary concept. (My Life, pp. 161-2)
Trotsky later scoffed at the idealized conception of the Stalinists that “Bolshevism came out of the laboratory of history fully armed,” explaining:
The high temper of the Bolshevik party expressed itself not in an absence of disagreements, waverings, and even quakings, but in the fact that in the most difficult circumstances it gathered itself in good season by means of inner crises, and made good its opportunity to interfere decisively in the course of events. That means that the party as a whole was a quite adequate instrument of revolution. (My Life, p. 226; History, Vol. III, p. 166)
Through the revolutionary unity of its program, its structure and its norms, the Bolshevik party sought to be an effective instrument of revolution. This instrument would be given life (and would, when necessary, itself be “corrected”) by the revolutionaries whose training was the party’s primary function.
Bolshevism created the type of the authentic revolutionist, who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, his moral judgments. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept up in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability, whose inspirer was Lenin. Lenin never tired of working with his lancet, cutting off those bonds which a petty bourgeois environment creates between the party and official social opinion. At the same time Lenin taught the party to create its own social opinion, resting upon the thoughts and feelings of the rising class. Thus by a process of selection and education, and in continual struggle, the Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it. Only this permitted the Bolsheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action that courageous determination without which the October victory would have been impossible. (History, Vol. III, p. 166)
This political culture of Bolshevism is based not simply on a revolutionary program, but also, as we have seen, on organizational centralism. But the centralism is, at the same time, necessarily fused with organizational democracy. As Trotsky explains: “The chief aim of the Communist Party is to construct the proletarian vanguard, strongly class-conscious, fit for combat, resolute, prepared for revolution. But revolutionary education requires a regime of internal democracy. Revolutionary discipline has nothing to do with blind obedience.” (Writings, 1932, p. 326)
The same thought appears in The History of the Russian Revolution regarding “how much a revolutionary party has need of internal democracy. The will to struggle is not stored up in advance, and is not dictated from above—it has on every occasion to be independently renewed and tempered.” This necessary fusion is reemphasized again and again, as in a declaration written in 1933:
A supporter of the theory of scientific communism does not take anything on word. He judges everything by reason and experience…. Bureaucratic and artificial discipline has crumbled to dust at the moment of danger. Revolutionary discipline does not exclude but demands the right of checking and criticism. Only in this way can an indestructible revolutionary army be created. (History, Vol. III, p. 165; Writings, 1932-33, p. 199)
Trotsky stressed that the organizational concepts of “democracy” and “centralism” had no value when abstracted from a revolutionary program for the working class. “Party democracy,” he wrote,
is not necessary in itself but as a means of educating and uniting the proletarian vanguard in the spirit of revolutionary Marxism…. A correct class policy is the main condition for healthy party democracy. Without this, all talk of democracy and discipline remains hollow; worse, it becomes a weapon for the disorganization of the proletarian movement. (Writings, 1932-33, p. 88)
It is worth noting that Trotsky did not conceive of “party democracy” as simply an educational device through which the party leadership transmits its political wisdom to the party membership. He stated in 1932, in the case of the Spanish section of the International Left Opposition, that
subjective arbitrariness in politics would be completely impossible if the Central Committee of the Spanish section worked under the control of their own organization. But this is not the case. In their own defense, several leaders of the Spanish Opposition pointed more than once to the insufficiently high theoretical and political level of the Spanish Oppositionists. Obviously an objection that will not hold water! The level of a revolutionary organization rises all the faster, the more immediately it is brought into the discussion of all questions, the less the leaders try to think, act, and behave as guardians for the organization. (Writings, 1932-33, p. 26)
Similar distortions of democratic centralism cropped up in other sections of the Opposition as well. For example, problems in the German section in 1931 elicited these comments:
We must not forget that even if we are centralists, we are democratic centralists who employ centralism only for the revolutionary cause and not in the name of the ‘prestige’ of the officials. Whoever is acquainted with the history of the Bolshevik Party knows what a broad autonomy the local organizations always enjoyed; they issued their own papers, in which they openly and sharply, whenever they found it necessary, criticized the actions of the Central Committee. Had the Central Committee, in case of principled differences, attempted to disperse the local organizations or to deprive them of literature (their bread and water) before the party had an opportunity to express itself—such a central committee would have made itself impossible. Naturally, as soon as it became necessary, the Bolshevik Central Committee could give orders. BuCt subordination to the committee was possible only because the absolute loyalty of the Central Committee toward every member of the party was well known, as well as the constant readiness of the leadership to hand over every serious dispute for consideration by the party. And, finally, what is most important, the Central Committee possessed extraordinary theoretical and political authority, gained gradually in the course of years, not by commands, not by beating down, but by correct leadership, proved by deeds in great events and struggles. (Writings, 1930-31, p. 155)
The inseparable components of Trotsky’s basic conception of party organization are: the revolutionary political program of Marxism, organizational centralism, internal democracy. These are the necessary ingredients for a political culture capable of producing an effective revolutionary vanguard of the working class.
Chapter 2
The challenge of the Left Opposition
“At the moment when it seized the power and created the Soviet republic,” wrote Lenin, “Bolshevism drew to itself all the best elements in the currents of Socialist theory that were nearest to it.” For example, in September of 1917 the central organ of the Bolsheviks published the words of Trotsky: “A permanent revolution versus a permanent slaughter: that is the struggle, in which the stake is the future of man.” (My Life, pp. 333, 332) As Trotsky reflected in 1922, his theory of permanent revolution “has been entirely confirmed. The Russian revolution could not culminate in a bourgeois-democratic regime. It had to hand power over to the working class.” At the same time that such ideas were being embraced by the Bolsheviks in 1917, Trotsky was won to the Leninist conception of the party, which he came to view as the “fundamental instrument of the proletarian revolution.” (1905, p. vii; Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1926-27, p. 349)
From its earliest years, the internal life of the Bolshevik party had been alive with controversies. “And, indeed,” ...