In this issue
- Editorial
- The Labour government, the Left and the elections
- AUEW elections: Broad Left debacle
- ‘Unity’ manoeuvres: a critique
- Anti-Nazi League: This way for a Popular Front
- The fight for a Working Class Women’s Movement
- Lenin and Luxemburg against opportunism
- Review: Eurocommunism and the state by Santiago Carrillo
- Review: The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894-1933 by RJ Evans
- Review: Engels by David McLellan
- Review: The Theory of Permanent Revolution by the Trotskyism Study Group of the CPGB
- Review: Women and the Unions by Sheila Lewenhack
- Review: A Worker in a Workers’ State by Miklos Haraszti
Editorial
Ten years on from the eruption of the German students, the French General Strike and the massive demonstrations against the American embassy in London, the European left is celebrating the ‘rebirth of revolutionary politics.’ On first sight there may be much to celebrate. In the wake of the anti-Vietnam war mobilisations and the massive upsurge of the French workers came the Italian upsurge of 1969, the sharp rise in the tempo of the class struggle in Britain between 1971 and 1974, the final expulsion of American Imperialism from Vietnam, the overthrow of the 40 year old dictatorship in Portugal, the victory for the national liberation struggles in Mozambique and Angola and the break up of the Francoist regime in Spain. These events, coinciding with the first serious world recession since the Second World War, have definitively broken up the relative Imperialist stability which marked the last 25 years and which condemned the Trotskyist movement to crushing isolation. Significant self-proclaimed revolutionary organisations now exist in most European countries, in North and Latin America and in Asia.
Yet closer analysis reveals that most of these organisations have run headlong into the limits of their own politics, revealing a chronic absence of revolutionary programme — an inability to deploy tactics which form part of an effective strategy for breaking the mass of the working class from the old social democratic leadership. The bankruptcy of the anti-Trotskyist ‘new left’, with its eclectic combination of elements gleaned from Maoist and Guevarist neo-popularism and third-period Stalinism — with borrowings from libertarianism and Syndicalism, is now manifest. Organisations like Lotta Continua and Avanguardia Operaia in Italy, the MIR in Chile and the PRP(BR) in Portugal, having oscillated towards guerillarism and armed struggle, have since retreated headlong into the arms of popular fronts, left-wing Generals and the old Stalinist and Social Democratic parties. The principal current on a world scale claiming the mantle of Trotskyism — ‘The United Secretariat of the Fourth International’, though avoiding the grosser excesses of these ‘new’ groupings, has proved time and time again incapable of operating revolutionary tactics which maintain total independence from the reformist and centrist parties, whilst breaking sections of workers from these formations in struggle. In Chile, Argentina and Portugal the USFI sections have made opportunist concessions to popular frontist combinations and to left-Bonapartist figures like Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. In Europe today we find the USFI coquetting with Eurocommunism, a social democratic tendency within Stalinism. In Britain the IMG makes systematic opportunist concessions to the left wing of the Trade Union bureaucracy (the ‘class struggle left wing’), to petit-bourgeois feminism (the ‘autonomous women’s movement’), to bankrupt right centrism and liberal tarianism (the ‘unified revolutionary organisation’) and to popular frontist ‘Anti-fascism’ (the ANL). They thus liquidate in theory and in practice the Leninist party and the method of Trotsky’s transitional programme.
In part three of our Party and Programme series, we deal with the analysis of and struggle against centrism waged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks within the Second International. We believe that the historical experience of the revolutionary communist movement and the experience of today’s struggles both point to the necessity of a sharp struggle against centrism. We are aware that we will be accused of sectarianism for this, but we remember Trotsky’s words in a similar situation, ‘Reformists and centrists readily seize upon every occasion to point a finger at our “sectarianism”. Most of the time they have in mind not our weak but our strong side; our serious attitude towards theory; our effort to plumb every political situation to the bottom, and to advance clear cut slogans; our hostility to “easy” and “comfortable” decisions, which deliver from cares today, but prepare a catastrophe on the morrow. Coming from opportunists, the accusation of sectarianism is most often a compliment.’ Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International — October 1935.
Thus on a world scale we can see that the end product of the last ten years is a glaring disproportion between the enormous opportunities which capitalism in economic and social crisis presents would-be revolutionaries with, and the political crisis of the centrist currents, able only to mouth the formulas and catchwords of revolution whilst collapsing time and time again into reformist actions. Whilst heightened periods of class struggle throw these assorted tendencies to the left, downturns, such as experienced in Britain since the advent of the Labour Government, lead to a sharp right turn. In this journal we deal with these tendencies — on the question of elections, on women’s liberation, on the struggle against fascism and on left unity.
Workers Power — July 1978