Trotsky and the Epigones

Twelve months ago, I published an article by Llin Davies What If The AWL Quoted Trotsky Correctly . It was, in fact, made up of a series of comments she had made to an AWL discussion on the potential of Israel bombing Iran, and what attitude Marxists should adopt, if they did - What If israel Bombs Iran . As part of that discussion the AWL had referred to Trotsky and Trotskyists position in relation to WWII, trying to claim Trotsky for the argument that in such conflicts Marxists recognise the progressive nature of bourgeois democracy as against fascism.

In many articles, from the mid 1920’s on, Trotsky had meticulously documented the way in which Stalin, and his faction, had, systematically, distorted Lenin’s writings and positions. Trotsky labelled them “The Epigones”. The Epigones, distorted Lenin’s position in order to try to make it fit their own particular current positions. They did it by selectively quoting Lenin, by taking his statements out of their historical context, using statements made in one context as though they had actually been made in relation to another, by chopping off, or out, sections of quotes that changed the meaning of his statements, and, ultimately, by outright fabrication. Llin’s article shows how the AWL used similar methods to distort the position of Trotsky in relation to WWII, in order to fit the AWL’s current politics, in this case its disgraceful argument that if Israel bombed Iran, then there was no principled basis on which Marxists could condemn it!

A year later the AWL have come back to the argument, reprinting the article – Trotsky’s reply to Palestinian Trotskysists – which Llin used as the basis of her argument against the AWL. For the original see: Bulletin of the Russian Opposition

Interestingly, the AWL’s foreword to the article strikes a completely different note to the argument they were using a year ago. What that signifies in terms of the internal politics and developments inside the AWL is open to interpretation. The changed stance is to be welcomed, yet even now the AWL is unable to drag itself away from its fundamental distortion of Trotsky’s ideas, on which is based its adoption of petit-bourgeois, Third Campism.

In the original discussion, Mark Osborn wrote,

“Nevertheless, the Trotskyists who followed Trotsky’s lead on this clearly recognised that, while they could not support the Allies, there was a real difference between, for example, German Nazi imperialism and the imperialism of the US.”

As Llin demonstrated, this was a blatant distortion of Trotsky and the Trotskyists position. It may have been true, of course, of the anti-Trotsky Trotskyists of the Third Camp! In fact, the document that the AWL reprint again now shows that that statement was clearly false. And, in the foreword their position is now subtly different. They write now,

“Trotsky recognises the huge difference between bourgeois democracy and fascism but argues that there is no reason to be sure that the war line-up would be “democracies against fascism”; or that democracies would remain democracies in the war; or that fascism would better be overthrown by foreign conquest than by internal revolt.”

And this is, of course, correct, as Llin had argued. As against the Stalinists, who, in the Third Period, had argued that anyone who was not a Stalinist was some variety of fascist, Trotsky had argued that there was within any political regime a significant difference between Fascism and Bourgeois Democracy. But, the recognition of that WITHIN a particular regime could not dictate Marxists attitude to conflicts BETWEEN states! In fact, as Llin cites in her article, Trotsky even argued that in a conflict between Brazil with its fascist regime, and Britain with its democratic regime, he would support Brazil! Why, because the nature of the political regime is secondary to the question of the nature of the State itself, and what flows from that. As an imperialist state, Britain in a war with Brazil, would have as its aim the domination of a weak non-imperialist state. Were it victorious it would probably only replace one fascist dictator with another. Under those conditions Marxists had to side with Brazil.

Today, a similar situation can be seen in relation to Iraq. It was an open secret that, faced with an ungovernable situation, the US and UK, were, and possibly still are, looking to the installation of some new Saddam like strongman to take control of the situation. Of course, given the AWL’s posiiton on Iraq, of acting as cheerleaders for imperialism, in hoping that it would deal with the fascists and introduce democracy, it is not surprising that they would want to distort Trotsky’s position so as to make it fit their current politics.

That approach was not confined to Iraq. Although the AWL proclaim, as central to their Third Camp politics, their commitment to fighting for an independent working-class solution to political problems, nothing could be further from the truth. Consistent with the tradiiton of the Third Camp, which saw one of their mentors, Max Shachtman, steadily descend, until he ended up supporting the US, in Vietnam, the AWL have logically been driven by a view, that bourgeois demcoracy is historically progressive, versus various kinds of Bonapartism or dictatorship not to advance the cause of a working-class “Third Camp”, but the cause of the first camp of “democratic imperialism”, just as Trotsky had forecast would happen. As Trotsky pointed out, this is the method not of the Marxist, but of the bourgeois subjectivist. It is to base your politics not on the material fundamentals, but on the superficial form and superstructure. As that form can change rapidly and unpredictably, whilst the material fundamentals remain constant, the result is that any organisation basing itself on such an approach loses all grounding, and is tossed about from position to position like flotsam on the tide.

Instead of an independent working class position, and solution what such organisations are left with is the role of cheerleader for other more powerful forces. In the case of the AWL, it is a supposedly progressive, democratic imperialism. So, it supported Yeltsin and his imperialist backed counter-revolution in Russia, they supported NATO’s attacks on Serbia, and its carving out of Kosovo – though they adopted a completely opposite position in the identical case of Russia’s response to the genocidal attacks of Georgia on South Ossetia, one of their leading members even acting as an apologist for the odious Saakashvili, who even the West has lost faith in – although they opposed the invasion of Iraq, they refused to call for the removal of its forces once the invasion had happened, they ran stories effectively backing Britain when its troops were found to have been entering Iranian waters, and they argued that Israel would have good reason to attack Iran, and that Marxists could have no principled reason to oppose such an attack!!!

Nowhere, in any of this, is there any suggestion of an independent working class position. All we have is the working-class being asked to sit back and allow a supposedly progressive democratic imperialism to deal with the workers other enemies, its only role being to critiise this or that action by imperialism. In reality this kind of politics has nothing in common with the politics of Lenin or Trotsky. It is the politics of Stalinism, and Reformism pure and simple. It is so for two reasons. The first reason is that such an approach amounts to what Trotsky called “stageism”. It means a view that workers facing such a Bonapartist or dictatorial regime have to struggle not for a socialist revolution, but merely for a democratic revolution. That is what all of the above instances were about. It was most stark in the AWL’s arguments in relation to its position on Iraq, where we were told that imperialism was creating a breathing space for the Labour Movement, and was introducing democracy, and so could not be opposed other than on purely Economistic grounds of Trade Union issues!

It is so for the second reason too. Such an approach amounts to nothing more than the Stalinist policy of the Popular Front, whereby the working class is asked to align its interests with those of the bourgeoisie in order to fight fascism. The consequences of that were most visible in the Spanish Civil War. It amounts to basically leaving things up to the bourgeoisie, and its greater muscle to fight these battles, with the workers role being merely to act as a pressure group, trying to influence or control various aspects of that activity. Trotsky summed up the approach in his criticism of the Stalinists during the 1930’s when he wrote,

“When a working class party proclaims that in the event of war it is prepared to “control” (i.e., to support) its national militarism and not to overthrow it, it transforms itself by this very thing into the domestic beast of capital. There is not the slightest ground for fearing such a party: it is not a revolutionary tiger but a trained donkey. It may be kept in starvation, flogged, spat upon it – it will nevertheless carry the cargo of patriotism. Perhaps only from time to time it will piteously bray: “For God’s sake, disarm the Fascist leagues.” In reply to its braying it will receive an additional blow of the whip. And deservingly so!"

An Open letter To French Workers .

In fact, the lie to the AWL’s original argument is given in another post they have produced alongside the one above. They reprint Trotsky’s interview with the Daily Herald setting out his position on the war - Only Revolution Can End war - in which Trotsky states openly and clearly,

“The attempt to represent this brawl of interests and appetites as a struggle between “democracy” and “fascism” can only dupe the working class. Chamberlain will give all the democracies in the world (there are not many left) for a tenth part of India….

“I can give counsel only to the workers. My counsel to them is not to believe for a single instant that the war of the two imperialist camps can bring anything else but oppression and reaction in both camps. It will be the war of the slave-owners who cover themselves with various masks: “democracy,” “civilization,” on the one hand, “race,” “honour,” on the other. Only the overthrow of all slave-owners can once for all end the war and open an epoch of true civilization.”

In the original discussion as Llin demonstrated, Sean Matgamna had completely distorted Trotsky’s position by deliberately chopping out part of what Trotsky said. He quoted only Trotsky’s statement,

“If there were any grounds for believing that a new victory of the familiar and slightly senile Entente (minus Italy) can work miraculous results, i.e. those counter to social-historical laws, then it is necessary not only to ‘desire’ this victory but to do everything in our power to bring it about. Then the Anglo-French social patriots would be correct.”,

and went on to say, Imperialism DID bring about democracy in Germany and Italy, and Japan after WWII!

But, first of all, he chops off from this quote, the next sentence where Trotsky says,

“As a matter of fact they are far less correct today than they were 25 years ago, or to put it more correctly, they are playing today an infinitely more reactionary and infamous role.”

Which, of course completely changes the meaning of Trotsky’s words by 180 degrees!

In the current version, the AWL foreword actually adopts the correct stance in this regard. It says,

“On the face of it, history gave Trotsky the lie.

The victory of the “democracies”, Britain and the US, did in western Europe lead to the restoration or installation of bourgeois democratic systems. But democracy was not restored without mass working-class struggles in Italy, Belgium and France. And the western democracies were allied with Stalinist Russia which, ruling through puppet states, was to crush the working class in Eastern Europe, as thoroughly as fascism did, for another half century.

Above all: could the Trotskyists possibly have been right to bank on that outcome in advance? Democratic France would vote full powers to the fascistic regime of Philippe Pétain in June 1940: were the Trotskyists wrong to warn against the danger of similar moves in Britain?”

And, as Llin Davies correctly stated in her article this “democracy” had to be taken with a large pinch of salt. In Germany, imperialism not only recruited many ex-Nazis into its service in the West, but completely turned a blind eye to the Nazi industrialists, as well as many Nazis taking up prominent positions in the judiciary and state apparatus, whilst the activity of the Left was heavily circumscribed by the berufsverbot etc. In Italy, the occupying armies acted against the Left, and the “democracy” in Japan was a strange kind of democracy installed under the influence of a huge occupying force, and which led to the one party rule of the Right-wing LDP for more than 60 years!

And, if the reality was that “democratic-imperialism” was progressive vis a vis fascism, if it DID hold out the potential for installing bourgeois democracy, then surely as Trotsky says, Sean should have been arguing that, “it is necessary not only to ‘desire’ this victory but to do everything in our power to bring it about. Then the Anglo-French social patriots would be correct.”, just as given their arguments in relation to Iraq, they should have been arguing in favour of an invasion, and the victory of imperialism!

The new poistion of the AWL on this is to be welcomed. It does, of course, undermine the arguments they have raised in relation to Iraq, and other issues such as the potential Israeli attack on Iran – perhaps again something that has been influenced by the current rise of opposition within Iran, again an instance of a supposedly Marxist organisation being tossed about on the sea of history by changes in events. It perhaps is also tied to Martin Thomas’ recent article arguing for Troops Out of Afghanistan, which performs logical acrobatics in order to justify this position in contradiction to their position of opposing that slogan in Iraq. Of course, perhaps the difficulty of arguing for not calling for imperialist troops to leave Afghanistan, when the AWL’s predecessors had called so vociferously for the USSR to leave, might have been a bit too difficult a circle to square too. But, the AWL’s new foreword cannot get away from the ties that bind it. They say,

“The Palestinian socialists also assumed that the USSR would oppose Germany in the war (as it did from June 1941). For them, the Soviet Union, having been the historical product of the Bolshevik-led workers’ revolution, and retaining the nationalised property, was still a “workers’ state”, albeit one which had largely “degenerated”.

Trotsky himself still adhered to that formula, though he was reshaping his views.”

But, that is a complete fabrication, and one around which the AWL have even produced a whole book trying to claim Trotsky for the position of the anti-Trotsky Trotskyists of the Third Camp, a ridiculous venture given Trotsky’s many writings setting out his total opposition to the Third Campists, not just in relation to the class nature of the USSR, but on the basic philosophical and methodological premises of Third Campism, as a petit-bourgeois, anti-Marxist trend, on which it arrived at its incorrect conclusions on the USSR and other issues!!!

The argument that Trotsky was “reshaping his views” on the class nature of the USSR is based on an argument that rests on one very unsteady leg. It rests on a quote by Trotsky that the AWL ocne agin take out of context and misrepresent. In the process of arguing AGAINST the AWL’s predecessors – Burnham and Shachtman – Trotsky wrote,

“Some comrades evidently were surprised that I spoke in my article (The USSR in the War) of the system of “bureaucratic collectivism” as a theoretical possibility. They discovered in this even a complete revision of Marxism. This is an apparent misunderstanding. The Marxist comprehension of historical necessity has nothing in common with fatalism. Socialism is not realizable “by itself,” but as a result of the struggle of living forces, classes and their parties. The proletariat’s decisive advantage in this struggle resides in the fact that it represents historical progress, while the bourgeoisie incarnates reaction and decline. Precisely in this is the source of our conviction in victory. But we have full right to ask ourselves: What character will society take if the forces of reaction conquer?”

See: Again And Once More Again On The Nature of The USSR .

Taken on its own, this statement might, indeed, be taken as Trotsky saying that he was reconsidering, in the light of events, what the class nature of the USSR was. But, it can be so if, and only if, you do precisely that – take it entirely on its own! The very fact that this statement is a small part of an article, arguing the exact opposite, arguing vehemently that the USSR was not “Bureaucratic Collectivist”, and that such a “theoretical possibility”, for it to become such, depended upon the following years creating the thorough crushing of the working class, throughout the world, the victory of fascism and reaction, should give the lie to any intelligent and honest person that this is the least likely interpretation of what Trotsky was saying here!!!!

In fact, Trotsky makes clear even in the next few lines after this statement just how pessimistic you have to be to arrive at the potential for this “theoretical possibility” coming to reality. He says,

“The march of events has succeeded in demonstrating that the delay of the socialist revolution engenders the indubitable phenomena of barbarism-chronic unemployment, pauperization of the petty bourgeoisie, fascism, finally wars of extermination which do not open up any new road. What social and political forms can the new “barbarism” take, if we admit theoretically that mankind should not be able to elevate itself to socialism? We have the possibility of expressing ourselves on this subject more concretely than Marx. Fascism on one hand, degeneration of the Soviet state on the other outline the social and political forms of a neo-barbarism. An alternative of this kind – socialism or totalitarian servitude – has not only theoretical interest, but also enormous importance in agitation, because in its light the necessity for socialist revolution appears most graphically.

If we are to speak of a revision of Marx, it is in reality the revision of those comrades who project a new type of state, “nonbourgeois” and “non-worker.” Because the alternative developed by me leads them to draw their own thoughts up to their logical conclusion, some of these critics, frightened by the conclusions of their own theory, accuse me ... of revising Marxism. I prefer to think that it is simply a friendly jest.”

In other words, the condition for the establishment of some new type of class state is the inability of the working class to fulfil its historic mission!

“I endeavored to demonstrate in my article The USSR in the War that the perspective of a non-worker and non-bourgeois society of exploitation, or “bureaucratic collectivism,” is the perspective of complete defeat and the decline of the international proletariat, the perspective of the most profound historical pessimism.”

And, of course, this defeatist attitude is precisely what characterises the petit-bourgeois Third Camp. Having lost faith in the ability of the working class to carry thorugh its historic mission, other than in continuing to proclaim that role in its mantras kept for Sunday Best in its “What We Stand For” columns, it is led to pin its hopes on other forces – petit-bourgeois studentism, environmentalism and so on in which petit-bourgeois radicals might be encouraged to join its organisations fleetingly before carving out a lucrative career for themselves, or else acting as cheer leaders for other more powerful forces – “democratic-imperialism” for some, “anti-imperialist” forces for others. Its what leads the AWL to argue not for a working-class solution in the USSR, but to back Yeltsin and the imperialists, and in Yugoslavia, and in Iraq, and Israel against Iran and so on.

Trotsky continues,

“Are there any genuine reasons for such a perspective? It is not superfluous to inquire about this among our class enemies.

In the weekly of the well-known newspaper Paris-Soir of August 31, 1939, an extremely instructive conversation is reported between the French ambassador Coulondre and Hitler on August 25, at the time of their last interview. (The source of the information is undoubtedly Coulondre himself.) Hitler sputters, boasts of the pact, which he concluded with Stalin (“a realistic pact”) and “regrets” that German and French blood will be spilled.

“But,” Coulondre objects, “Stalin displayed great double-dealing. The real victor (in case of war) will be Trotsky. Have you thought this over?”

“I know,” – der Fuehrer responds, “but why did France and Britain give Poland complete freedom of action ?” etc.

These gentlemen like to give a personal name to the spectre of revolution. But this of course is not the essence of this dramatic conversation at the very moment when diplomatic relations were ruptured. “War will inevitably provoke revolution,” the representative of imperialist democracy, himself chilled to the marrow, frightens his adversary.

“I know,” Hitler responds, as if it were a question decided long ago. “I know.” Astonishing dialogue.

Both of them, Coulondre and Hitler, represent the barbarism, which advances over Europe. At the same time neither of them doubts that their barbarism will be conquered by socialist revolution. Such is now the awareness of the ruling classes of all the capitalist countries of the world. Their complete demoralization is one of the most important elements in the relation of class forces. The proletariat has a young and still weak revolutionary leadership. But the leadership of the bourgeoisie rots on its feet. At the very outset of the war which they could not avert, these gentlemen are convinced in advance of the collapse of their regime. This fact alone must be for us the source of invincible revolutionary optimism!”

This does not sound to me like a Trotsky who has appraised events in such a way as to have concluded that all is hopeless for the working class, the condition he set out as the fundamental requirement for the establishment of some new Bureaucratic Collectivist state in the USSR! And, of course, in a sense his revolutionary optimism was justified, though, perhaps in ways, he would not have desired.
The Workers’ State in the USSR, even in its deformed condition, even despite the criminal activities of Stalin in decapitating the Red Army and so on, proved to be such a powerful historical force, that, despite the initial massive disadvantage it stood at, despite the terrible and avoidable damage it suffered in the initial months of Operation Barbarossa, it was able within months to reorganise production, and to massively outproduce Nazi Germany both in materials, and in soldiers! At a time when Nazi Germany had within months overrun one of the leading imperialist powers – France – and had effectively defeated the other – Britain – which was holed up in its island retreat, only able to try to hold on to its colonies in India and Africa – and almost wholly reliant on supplies from the US for its very existence, the USSR not only stood alone in the fight against the Nazis, but effectively created on December 1941, the conditions for their defeat by turning them back from the gates of Moscow, and then continually driving them back, until they were able to overrun them, and most of Eastern Europe. And, from being a medieval society in 1917, in danger of being carved up by imperialism like China, the USSR, despite its massive losses during the following period – the USSR lost 30 million people in WWII, whereas the US lost just 300,000, the USSR lost 25% of its production and agriculture in the early part of the War, whereas the US was able to build up its production untouched throughout – in the space of just 30 years the USSR became the second super power on the planet!! If anything could justify Trotsky’s revolutionary optimism that was it.

But, it was justified in other ways too. Far from reaction setting in, workers and peasants undertook a revolution in China, in Yugoslavia, in Greece and elsewhere. Of course, given the lack of a real revolutionary party, and the treachery of Stalinism some of these revolutions were simply defeated, whilst others were born deformed, but that cannot take away from the fact of their existence, and what it meant in confirming Trotsky’s analysis. Even in Britain, it led to a massive change in workers class consciousness that led to the Labour landslide of 1945.
No, the AWL once again lie when they claim that Trotsky was moving in the direction of their anti-Marxist theories of new class societies. He was doing the exact opposite in opposing to the death those that proposed them, and whose defeatism was poison to the workers movement. And in that other document Trotsky refers to here he makes the position even clearer, he writes,

“If this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletarian revolution, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureaucracy in the USSR and regeneration of Soviet democracy on a far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918. In that case the question as to whether the Stalinist bureaucracy was a “class” or a growth on the workers’ state will be automatically solved. To every single person it will become clear that in the process of the development of the world revolution the Soviet bureaucracy was only an episodic relapse.

If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilization.

An analogous result might occur in the event that the proletariat of advanced capitalist countries, having conquered power, should prove incapable of holding it and surrender it, as in the USSR, to a privileged bureaucracy. Then we would be compelled to acknowledge that the reason for the bureaucratic relapse is rooted not in the backwardness of the country and not in the imperialist environment but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become a ruling class. Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting régime on an international scale.

We have diverged very far from the terminological controversy over the nomenclature of the Soviet state. But let our critics not protest: only by taking the necessary historical perspective can one provide himself with a correct judgment upon such a question as the replacement of one social régime by another. The historic alternative, carried to the end, is as follows: either the Stalin régime is an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois society into a socialist society, or the Stalin régime is the first stage of a new exploiting society. If the second prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class. However onerous the second perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia. It is self evident that a new “minimum” program would be required for the defense of the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society.

But are there such incontrovertible or even impressive objective data as would compel us today to renounce the prospect of the socialist revolution? That is the whole question.”

Of course, history provided another variant. Workers were neither defeated, nor seized power directly for themselves. Where I would disagree with Trotsky is in his definition of the USSR as a Degenerated Workers State. That implies that it was at one time a healthy Workers’ State, a position its not difficult to understand him holding. But, in fact I would argue the USSR always WAS a Deformed workers State, precisely because the workers never did hold political power themselves. From that perspective, the main difference between that revolution and the “revolutions” in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba etc. resided only in the political perspectives of the leaders of those revolutions, and the degree of “bureaucratism” with which that process was undertaken.

In fact, the basis of the theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism that a new bureaucratic/technocratic, managerial class was being created as a result of the changes in the productive forces, and the need to organise and control those forces via such a technical and bureaucratic elite, was precisely that set out by Burnham in his “The Managerial Revolution”, which logically concluded from that, that there would be a coming together of the USSR and Western societies towards such a model. The fact, that Capital had ceded a considerable degree of control over the production process to professional managers, and had seen the huge growth of a bureaucratic state apparatus, which developed along a corporatist route of tying together large Corporate interests manifested by professional managers with a similar sociological group in the form of State bureaucrats, appeared to give substance to such a theory.

But, in the end the Marxist critique of such theories held out. In the 1970’s Robin Blackburn and others showed fairly decisively that the Post-Capitalist thesis, which is a direct descendant of these Burnhamite theories, was false. It was ownership of the means of production, not control, which remains decisive. That was as true in the USSR as it is in the West. It was ultimately the inability of the working class in those states to utilise their ownership of the means of production, in order to exercise effective control, that led to that contradiction blowing apart. Its resolution was not eh establishment of some new class society based on some new set of property relations based on ownership and control by some new class, but that which Trotsky had suggested, the collapse of one workers ownership, and its replacement with a return to Capitalist ownership! Ultimately, control is only possible via ownership, even if ownership does not immediately imply control.

The AWL need to cling to this myth that Trotsky was moving towards a Bureaucratic Collectivist theory, because without that all of their legitimacy as an organisation that claims to stand in his tradition, and in the tradition, therefore, of those that they see as being in the same line – Lenin, Engels and Marx – disappears. That is why they put so much effort into such a re-writing of history, just as the Stalinists did, who wanted to claim the inheritance of Lenin, rather than simply saying – no Trotsky was wrong. They have to do that, because they have adopted the position of the Third Camp, whose fundamental premise is that Trotsky WAS wrong, and all of their politics follow from that. But, the fundamental difference lies in this, it is that the very basis of Trotsky’s arguments with the Third Campists was NOT really about the class nature of the USSR, that was simply the battleground upon which it was fought out. It was about that basic philosophical and methodological difference – on the one hand the bourgeois subjectivist, Moralism of the Third Camp on the other the objective, historical materialism of Marxism.

Trotsky summed it up like this.

“In his recent polemical article against me, Burnham explained that socialism is a “moral ideal.” To be sure, this is not so very new. At the opening of the last century, morality served as the basis for the “True German Socialism” which Marx and Engels criticized at the very beginning of their activity. At the beginning of our century, the Russian Social Revolutionaries counterpoised the “moral ideal” to materialistic socialism…

“The petty-bourgeois minority of the SWP split from the proletarian majority on the basis of a struggle against revolutionary Marxism. Burnham proclaimed dialectic materialism to be incompatible with his motheaten “science.” Shachtman proclaimed revolutionary Marxism to be of no moment from the standpoint of “practical tasks.” Abern hastened to hook up his little booth with the anti-Marxist bloc. And now these gentlemen label the magazine they filched from the party an “organ of revolutionary Marxism.”…

“The very first “programmatic” articles of the purloined organ already reveal completely the light-mindedness and hollowness of this new anti-Marxist grouping which appears under the label of the “Third Camp.” What is this animal? There is the camp of capitalism; there is the camp of the proletariat. But is there perhaps a “third camp” – a petty-bourgeois sanctuary? In the nature of things, it is nothing else. But, as always, the petty bourgeois camouflages his “camp” with the paper flowers of rhetoric. Let us lend our ears! Here is one camp: France and England. There’s another camp: Hitler and Stalin. And a third camp: Burnham, with Shachtman. The Fourth International turns out for them to be in Hitler’s camp (Stalin made this discovery long ago). And so, a new great slogan: Muddlers and pacifists of the world, all ye suffering from the pin-pricks of fate, rally to the “third” camp!…

“Only the other day Shachtman referred to himself in the press as a “Trotskyist.” If this be Trotskyism then I at least am no Trotskyist. With the present ideas of Shachtman, not to mention Burnham, I have nothing in common. I used to collaborate actively with the New International, protesting in letters against Shachtman’s frivolous attitude toward theory and his unprincipled concessions to Burnham, the strutting petty-bourgeois pedant. But at the time both Burnham and Shachtman were kept in check by the party and the International. Today the pressure of petty-bourgeois democracy has unbridled them. Toward their new magazine my attitude can only be the same as toward all other petty-bourgeois counterfeits of Marxism. As for their “organizational methods” and political “morality,” these evoke in me nothing but contempt….

“Advanced workers! Not one cent’s worth of confidence in the “third front” of the petty bourgeoisie!”

Trotsky - Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party