The dishonest nature of the AWL's arguments is shown, in their response to Socialist Appeal, when they write, about the Spanish Revolution. They say,
“This is how Trotsky advocated military support for Spain’s Republican government in the Spanish civil war:
We accuse this government of protecting the rich and starving the poor. This government must be smashed. So long as we are not strong enough to replace it, we are fighting under its command. But on every occasion we express openly our nonconfidence in it…
“… we are fighting under its command”. And this in a situation where Spain, unlike Ukraine now, had a mass revolutionary workers’ movement not far off the possible conquest of power – a movement the Republican government attacked and ultimately suppressed.”
So, from Trotsky's words, here, such as “accuse”, “must be smashed”, “nonconfodience in it”, the AWL derive the conclusion that this amounted to Trotsky's “support” for this Popular Front government, and use as their only basis for this perverse conclusion, his acceptance of the obvious reality that the revolutionaries, i.e. the few hundred Trotskyists, were too weak to replace it, and so were forced to fight “under its command”! What did that mean? In WWI, revolutionaries and centrists, opposed to the war, also found themselves in a minority compared to the reformists and social-democrats. They continued to oppose the war, and argued the position that “The Main Enemy Is At Home”.
Yet, the contending states proceeded with the war, and drafted workers, many of whom were socialists, into the armies to conduct it. What was the position of the revolutionaries and centrists? They had no choice but to fight “under the command” of their own nation state, and to continue their struggle against it from within the ranks of the armies into which they had been drafted! They did not stop, for a minute, their argument that the main enemy was at home, opposition to the war, and for the workers to turn their guns on their own ruling class. That is precisely what the Bolsheviks did, and, as a result of it, were able to build up revolutionary cadres within the army and navy, which, in 1917, they were then able to turn against the Tsar, and ultimately against the bourgeois Popular Front government of Kerensky.
In what way does it make sense to call this “fighting under the command” of the Russian state, German state, French state, British state tantamount to “advocat(ing) military support” for those states?!! Compare that to the AWL/USC's position, not of opposing the war, but cheering it on, demanding more weapons be provided so that more workers can be killed, more destruction may be wrought! What is more, the position of workers in each state, forced into such a position is quite different to that of socialists, in other states, not in combat, and under no such compulsion.
The revolutionaries could have become conscientious objectors, or, as in the example of the Vietnam War, draft dodgers, but such an approach is wholly alien to Marxism, which sees that as treason to the working-class, to which we owe the duty of standing alongside it, even as it makes mistakes, so as to educate it in action. We do not support capitalism, but we do not become hippy drop-outs!!! We continue to work, and, indeed, as Trotsky says, to try to be the best workers, standing alongside other workers, leading by example, so as to win their confidence and support.
The idea that, because we go to work, and engage in the labour process “under the command of capital”, and continue to produce surplus value/profit for capital does not at all equate to us “supporting capital”! But, that is precisely the kind of sophistry that the social-imperialists of the AWL engage in, and that Trotsky attacks. It would be easy to say that the AWL have failed to Learn To Think, but these are people who once knew and understood these principles, and who now bowdlerise and pervert Trotsky's writings on such a systematic and industrial scale that it has to be concluded, as with the perversion of Lenin's writings by the Stalinists, that this is the deliberate and conscious behaviour of epigones.
Trotsky wrote, in relation to WWII,
“In the union I can say I am for the Fourth International. I am against War. But, I am with you. I will not sabotage the war. I will be the best soldier just as I was the best and most skilled worker in the factory. At the same time, I will try to convince you that we should change our society.”
Opposing pacifism and conscientious objectors, he writes,
“As for the escapists – including those in our own Party – we must speak about them with full contempt. They are deserters. Likewise with the conscientious objectors who accepted everything in peacetime but don’t want to accept war. Escapists are deserters from their class and their revolution.”
(ibid)
No comments:
Post a Comment