On 4/11/21 11:03 AM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
I’ve wondered all my adult life about this question. But I think every
Trotskyist groupuscule had its own version. To take on the task
seriously and with humility, thinking about the contingencies of
thought and Trotsky’s combination of stubbornness and feeling for
reality would be more than difficult.
I spent 11 years in the SWP, a group that Trotsky regarded as his
flagship section. I saw it degenerate into a bizarre cult-sect that
adapted to the Trump presidency.
After leaving the group in 1978, I became part of a informal tendency
trying to leave sectarianism behind. As much of Trotsky's Marxism sticks
with me, he never grasped how damaging Zinoviev's "Bolshevization"
Comintern was. Organizational principles have to flow from the mass
movement, not from schemas or formulas such as Zinoviev cooked up.
Over 20 years ago I began grappling with the "organizational" question,
with 117 articles collected here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization.htm
This
<http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/lenin_in_context.htm>
will give you a flavor for my approach:
Let us review the aftermath of the 1928 world congress of the Comintern.
Bukharin lost power to Stalin. Stalin then unseated Jay Lovestone,
Bukharin's supporter and leader of the American Communist Party, and
turned over party leadership to William Z. Foster, a Stalin loyalist.
There was another American Communist leader by the name of James P.
Cannon who went his own way and aligned himself with the Trotskyist Left
Opposition.
Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas in 1890 and joined the Socialist
Party in 1908. He then also joined the anarcho-syndicalist IWW three
years later. In the IWW Cannon worked with Vincent St. John, "Big Bill"
Haywood and Frank Little as a strike organizer and journalist. He
switched allegiance to the newly formed Communist Party in September
1919 and won an election to the Central Committee in 1920. He served on
the Communist International Presidium from 1922 to 1923. Next he headed
the International Labor Defense from 1925 to 1928.
After he declared for Trotskyism, the CP expelled him. Along with Max
Shachtman and Martin Abern, he went on to form the Communist League of
America, the first American Trotskyist group. This group eventually
developed into the contemporary Socialist Workers Party, a tiny group
that has disavowed any connection with Trotskyism.
Cannon set the sectarian tone of American Trotskyism at its infancy. In
a speech to the New York branch of his movement, on December 23, 1930,
Cannon defined the relation of the opposition to "class" and "vanguard".
1. The Communist Party was still the vanguard, but the Trotskyist
opposition was the "vanguard of this vanguard."
2. The task of the opposition was to make the "opposition line the line
of the proletarian vanguard."
Cannon invoked Trotsky's words to support his approach. "The
revolutionary Marxists are now again reduced (not for the first time and
probably not for the last) to being an international propaganda
society....It seems that the fact that we are very few frightens you. Of
course, it is unpleasant. Naturally, it would be better to have behind
us organizations numbering millions. But how are we, the vanguard of the
vanguard, to have such organizations the day after the world revolution
has suffered catastrophic defeats brought on by the Menshevik leadership
hiding under the false mask of Bolshevism? Yes, how?" ("The Militant", 1929)
Has there ever been an "ideological" vanguard, Trotskyist or otherwise?
The answer is no. This is an idealistic conception of politics that has
been disastrous for Trotskyism throughout its entire existence. A
vanguard is a goal, not a set of ideas. The goal of the vanguard is to
coordinate the revolutionary conquest of power by the workers and their
allies. Building a true vanguard will require correct ideas but these
ideas can only emerge out of dialectical relationship with mass
struggles. To artificially separate a revolutionary program from the
mass movement is a guarantee that you will turn into a sectarian.
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