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(Posting the whole thing since it appeared only on FB.)
ARASH AZIZI·WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2016
“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brain of the living.” — Karl Marx
A few months ago, I left the International Marxist Tendency, an
organization of which I had been a member for more than seven years.
Many friends and comrades wrote to ask me to outline the reasons for
this decision. I write these lines primarily for them. As someone who
had recruited many to the ranks of the IMT, I felt responsible to
explain why I had left it and what path do I see ahead in the fight for
socialism. I don’t claim to have found a magical formula or the answer
to all my questions but hope that these humble lines will be of interest
to some.
I should start by saying that the sad ultra-left turn that IMT has taken
in the last few years surely did accelerate my decision. Abandoning of
the fundamental orientation to the Labour Party in Britain (signaled by
the change in the paper’s masthead) which happened to come only months
before the historic election of Jeremy Corbyn; similar distancing from
the traditional organizations of the working class in other countries;
advocating abstention in the Brexit referendum; and the refusal to
endorse Bernie Sanders’s campaign are just some examples. But it would
be dishonest if I pretended that this turn was my ultimate reason and
that all I long for is a pre-turn IMT or a similar Trotskyist
organization. It is true that by reflection on my years of political
activity, and by taking into account the developments of the last few
years, I have come to the conclusion that orthodox “Trotskyism”, as we
know it, is no longer the path forward for the working class and for the
cause of a better world. We need new political strategies for the epoch
we are in.
My Trotskyist Experience
When I joined the IMT in late 2008, few months after I had left my
native Iran for Canada, this wasn’t out of a whim. For about five years
I had been a member of WPI, an Iranian organization that could be
described as belonging to the Left Communist and Council Communist
tradition. I had joined it at the age of 15 for the simple reason that
it was the only Marxist organization I knew that dared to organize under
the authoritarian Islamist regime that reigns in Iran. As I had started
a process of questioning the WPI, and as I needed a political home in
Canada, I embarked on a study of international left from the times of
Marx and Engels down to the currently existing international
organizations and their branches in Canada. I chose IMT because it stood
on unapologetic socialist politics (of much importance to me, it didn’t
follow much of the international left by supporting the Tehran regime),
because the Trotskyist Anti-Stalinism appealed to me, because its
political strategy of working inside the NDP to win a majority for
Marxist ideas in the country’s main working-class party seemed plausible
and because it boasted many hard-working people who took their politics
seriously.
I haven’t changed my mind on any of those reasons but it is only after a
sustained period that you start finding holes and problems; you can try
to fix some of those problems and tolerate others (since I never
believed that membership in an organization should be tantamount to
agreeing with every single thing about it) but you then recognize that
some of the problems are in the DNA of the group. It has inherited them
from a political tradition and, unless there is a commitment on part of
a significant number of its leaders, they are not going to change.
What are these problems, where do they come from and how can we overcome
them?
Basis of unity — the problem of sectarianism
Any political group has a criteria for its membership, a basis of unity
that brings people together as they strive for a goal. Getting such a
basis right is a difficult task and easier said than done, especially
for a Marxist organization. How do you gather around the largest
possible number of people possible while making sure that your group is
not diluted in the goals it pursues? How can you ensure the maximum
amount of discipline and seriousness in work while also letting people
who can’t commit as much time or resources participate?
I have always believed that this basis of unity needs to be political
and around the goals that we all strive for. If people share the
fundamental socialist goal (a world free of classes where production is
organized on the basis of need not profit) and basic strategies and
stances of a political group in any given period, they should be
encouraged to join.
As members of IMT would concede this isn’t the real basis of unity for
this organization. To be a member of the IMT, you’d need to share in an
article of faith that I’ll try to honestly summarize as such: “IMT [with
a membership that is today probably around 2000 worldwide, at most] is
the only genuine Marxist organization on the planet. It alone has the
“correct ideas” [an astonishing term that even the Catholic Church
doesn’t use with such certitude], which are encapsulated in the ideas of
Marx, Lenin, Engels and Trotsky [maybe, a book or two by Rosa
Luxembourg] and those continued by Ted Grant and the IMT. It alone can
offer the workers the revolutionary leadership that is needed to win
power and build socialism.”
If you believe in this Article One, it would follow that since the only
organization that is capable of leading the workers to power is yours,
and since it is currently minuscule, your strategy is simple: Build your
own organization, around that very narrow basis of unity, even if it
means recruiting only a handful of people every month. You are building
a “cadre organization” which means you’ll only wants as members those
who are ready to commit themselves to the article of faith in its entirety.
From such self-applause, bizarre conclusion will follow: In IMT, you’d
often hear that if a revolutionary movement happens while IMT is still a
small organization this is a bad thing since “we need time to prepare”.
It also follows that work of no Marxist writer or theoretician after
Trotsky’s death in 1940 is worth considering, except for the few fellows
that have had the honor of working with the IMT. I remember asking a
leading member of the Italian section if he could he recommend any good
Italian Marxist writers? Surely, with such a strong communist party with
millions of members and the allegiance of the majority of the country’s
intelligentsia, there should be some bright names. The response was
shocking: None. No one. He jokingly said: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky!
This is Sectarianism 101. Instead of defining your political identity
and basis of unity around goals and ideals in which others can share,
you define it in a way that is akin to a narrow religious organization.
Every organization will have some traditions and some historical
identity of which it is proud. Every organization should believe in its
own unique ability to do grand tasks and great things (otherwise, why
bother?) But it is all a matter of degree. Are you flexible enough to
concede that not all the truth might rest with you? Will you keep
yourself current by taking in the developments in the world around you?
Are you ready to grow and change, while keeping true to your basic
goals, by embracing the new membership that each generation brings? Are
you able to keep yourself intact after you reach a certain number?
2) A history of failure
This last question is one that few Trotskyist groups have ever been
forced to ask. Being scattered into small groups of usually no more than
a few dozen individuals is the curse that has followed Trotskyism since
the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. At its foundation, the
FI didn’t have many more members than IMT does today and same is
basically true for all of a dozen or so international Trotskyist
organizations during their entire history, with minor exceptions.
Now, for much of this period, this smallness was due to a brutal policy
of oppression. Trotsky and his followers were some of the most
persecuted people on the planet in the post-war period. Imagine being
active in a situation in which, in addition to the usual animosity of
the state and the capital, you’d have to battle large socialist states
and massive communist parties around the world who, at times, would even
go to the length of physically exterminating you. This wasn’t only
political competition!
But it is perhaps precisely because of this that Trotskyism ended up
developing a strange martyrdom complex where you take solace in being
‘correct’ (as your founder was, after all, one of the most brilliant
Marxists and revolutionaries to have ever lived) and don’t mind your
small size much.
It is unlikely that Trotsky himself, who only saw two years of FI’s
activity before being brutally murdered on the orders of Stalin, would
have ever agreed that, in the long-term, such a perspective (of
maintaining small organizations at any rate) makes sense.
When FI was founded in 1938, Trotsky believed that within a decade, it
would come to encompass millions of workers and surpass both the second
and third internationals. It was perhaps obvious falsification of such a
perspective by history that confused the founding leaders of the FI and
led into split after split in the organization, leaving it with the
often-comical legacy of many grand sounding names and a few members.
Should FI have ever been founded as a separate organization or should
Trotsky’s supporters have organized differently? What would have been
the correct strategy in the post-war period? These are questions of
history and I don’t intend to pursue them here. I also don’t want to
pretend there are any easy answers. But the question we must ask
ourselves is not for 1945 but for 2016.
If the policy of building a small cadre “Bolshevik” organization from
three members up has consistently failed, why continue it? Why spend all
your energy on maintaining for your group a political identity that has
never been successful and that belonged to a specific period? Why
maintaining a Bolshevik reenactment group instead of an organization
that seeks to unite the highest number of people in fight for a
socialist world?
3) McDonald Internationalism
A corollary of the belief that only your organization has the “correct
ideas” is the belief that if you are not present in a country, the
correct way to advance there is to build a new group. Instead of taking
into account the traditions of leftist organizing in other countries and
attempting to learn from it, you’ll operate around what I’ve termed the
McDonald Internationalism. This isn’t a perspective of internationalist
proletarian solidarity but a mentality of a franchise restaurant, like
the McDs, which is trying to raid other markets and open up shop in new
places.
In the case of Iran, I have seen the tragic results of such
‘internationalism’. Along with a couple of other Iranian comrades, I was
tasked with building an Iranian group for the IMT. One of these comrades
was a full-time worker for the IMT with no political past in Iran since
he had lived abroad almost his entire life. Any attempt to build a group
that was independent, able to stand on its own feet, develop its own
thought and strategies and be steeped in the political traditions of the
Iranian left was stymied. “There are no Marxists in Iran other than us,”
he’d often say. The Iranian communist movement goes back to 1920 and it
has had all sorts of experiences, including that of state power in short
periods. According to the IMT, this rich tradition offered nothing and
all we had to do was translating the articles of the international to
Persian.
This sort of McDonald internationalism, when coupled with the IMT’s
sectarianism, makes a mockery out of the real process of international
relations between socialist organizations in different countries.
4) Basic questions of strategy
But what of the central question of the strategy? What is the basic IMT
strategy and what do I see wrong with it?
The founding document of the Trotskyist movement, the Transitional
Program (1938), is known for a bold claim: “The historical crisis of
mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”
As it happens, I still agree with this basic sentence. As much as
Anarchists or other lovers of “from below” processes might not want to
believe, the role of political leadership (which I see as a political
party or, to use Marta Harneceker’s term, a political instrument) is
indispensable to historical change. In Trotsky’s lasting image, the
political party is like a piston box that guides the steam-like energy
of the masses.
But if we are to go beyond this level of abstraction and this ‘basic
truth’, what are the specific strategies that are needed today in
fighting for improvement in the lives of the working people and for the
ultimate overthrowing of capitalism and building of socialism? Linked
with this question is our conception of socialism. How is it going to
look like? And how do we move from A (today’s world) to B (the
post-capitalist, socialist world)?
Since a healthy democratic socialist society that could last more than a
short period has never been built in human history, much of this remains
ground for fresh thinking and contribution. IMT’s answers, however, are
rather simple. The model of successful organization and strategy is that
of the Russian Bolshevik Party and conception of socialism that of the
early Soviet regime.
Before even attempting to criticize such notions, I’d ask you to think
of this: Isn’t it shocking that in 2016, our conception of a political
instrument should be based on a political party that had to operate in a
vastly different environment? And based on a regime that, ultimately,
led to the nightmare of Stalinism? (To say that the Bolshevik regime
‘led’ to the Stalinist nightmare is not to repeat the bourgeois
assertion that Leninism would have inevitably led to Stalinism. But it
is to acknowledge that there were probably some flaws in the system that
made the victory of Stalinism possible and for the ‘river of blood’ to
flow and separate the early genuine revolutionary state from Stalinism).
But such questions are not even asked in most Trotskyist organizations.
Elections are dismissed as ‘bourgeois democracy’ and civil and political
rights decried as ‘bourgeois formality’. All experiences of 20th century
socialism, from China and Tanzania to Italy and Japan, are decried as
“Stalinism”. And there is a pretense that there are easy answers to
questions of building a successful socialist economy, polity and
judicial system. If only the men with “correct ideas” were at the helm!
The last thing the revolutionary left of the 21st century needs is such
stymied thinking that bases itself only on the writing of a few men. We
need to instead face reality and offer strategies, different ones in
different countries, that are meant for 2016 not nostalgias of the past.
This would also be in true spirit of the great giants of the past like
Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, not upholding of everything they’ve ever said
as unchangeable dogma.
What is to be done?
The above doesn’t amount to anything like a coherent criticism of the
IMT and its Trotskyist model and it didn’t intend to. As I said at the
outset, these are merely some humble personal thoughts.
And what of the way forward?
Without pretending to have easy, thorough answers, these are, again,
some personal thoughts:
Marxists and those (like myself) who have an affinity for the 1917
tradition need to unite with others around the political and practical
double goals of A, improving the lives of the working people and the
oppressed here and now, B, striving at a radical transformation of
society and building of a socialist alternative to capitalism.
The strategies toward these goals will differ in different countries,
based on their political conditions, the balance of classes and the
existing organizations and traditions. In general, however, there is a
basic fact that the revolutionary left needs to come to peace with: It
needs to win power by convincing a majority of a population to support
its vision. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean basically turning into
an electoral machine. To slightly paraphrase Eugene Debs, elections are
to socialism what menu is to a meal. It is a fact, however, that the
liberal democratic order, a system in which the government of the day is
elected on the basis of universal suffrage, is now dominant across much
of the globe (it is worth remembering that in Lenin’s time, it was
almost entirely non-existent, hence a long Marxist struggle for
universal suffrage) and wherever it isn’t, it is probably an imperative
for us to unite with liberals for democratic goals. Democratic
conditions can actually offer an excellent opportunity for socialists:
Build support for our vision; convince a majority that we can offer a
workable, real socialist alternative; and come to power and start
implementing it! Of course, there would be resistant from the capitalist
class and, of course, our strategy needs to take that into account too.
But to move against a democratically elected government is not an easy
task, especially if it is based on an active support of millions of
workers.
This might seem very mundane at the first glance but, ask yourself, how
many socialists and revolutionaries are asking themselves: How can we
build an organization that is ready to win support of the majority and
form a government? How many are telling themselves: “The test of
socialist politics is how I can win over large numbers of people, which
is possible by meeting them where they are at, not by trying to be the
most left-wing guy in the room”?
In asking such questions, we’d need to be forward-looking and accept
that not all differences need to be solved for leftist to unite in an
organization. It is silly for socialists not to be organizationally
united in pursuit of goals today because they disagree over the class
nature of the Soviet Union or because they have a slightly different
take on the Palestinian struggle.
Building of leftist institutions that are something beyond their name,
real organizations that can represent a significant portion of a
country’s politics, is a very difficult task but it is rewarding at the
end. It will influence the lives of the working people here and now, it
will consolidate our power and it will offer a clear route to power. It
will also create a space that could help blossom the kind of thinking
that is needed to address the massive questions that we will face if we
are to actually conduct the mammoth task of transition to socialism.
Needless to say, in building such vehicles we should never abandon the
organizations that the working class has already built which, almost all
over the world, means the parties that historically belong to the second
or third internationals. One of the mistakes of the left has been
prematurely abandoning these organizations whereas the recent victory of
Corbyn in the UK shows that even if your organization is led by the
likes of Tony Blair, there is a chance that the left could come to power
in them and start their transformation.
What we need more than ever is an end to the mentality of small circles
and an audacity to prepare for real socialist change in our own
lifetimes. It is time to offer the working people, our people, the
political instrument that it deserves.
November 8, 2016
--
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