“Bolshevik policy is characterized not only by its revolutionary scope, but also by its political realism. These two aspects of Bolshevism are inseparable. The greatest task is to know how to recognize in time a revolutionary situation and to exploit it to the end. But it is no less important to understand when this situation is exhausted and is converted, from the political point of view, into its antithesis. Nothing is more fruitless and worthless than to show one’s fist after the battle. That, however, is just where Bukharin’s speciality lies.” (p 169)
In fact, Trotsky, also, erred in his evaluation. He was right that the revolutionary wave had ebbed, in China, but it was not just in China. Moreover, whilst Trotsky held out the prospect that this ebb was one running for a number of years, the reality was that it was ebbing for a couple of decades, consonant with the turn in the long wave cycle. In The Curve of Capitalist Development, Trotsky had, himself, set out the underlying, objective basis of that, residing in the long-wave cycle. But, unfortunately, he had placed too much weight, within the mechanism of that cycle, on subjective factors, and, particularly, of the revolutionary party.
The reality was that the crisis phase of the cycle, at the conjunctures of which, as he set out, wars and revolutions occur, had begun in 1914. By 1926-7, that phase was already transitioning into the stagnation phase, during which counter-revolutionary tendencies predominate. A new long wave upswing would not occur until after WWII. It provided the material basis, from 1949 to 1974, for workers to rebuild their strength and confidence, to renew their organisations, leaders and ideas. But, its only at the conjuncture, in the mid 1970's, as the boom phase of the cycle transitions into a new crisis phase, that a new revolutionary wave arises.
It starts to manifest in the late 1960's, in May '68, in France, with also The Prague Spring, the Civil Rights Movements in the US and Northern Ireland, as well as the rash of national revolutions across Africa, and similar movements in Latin America, but its proletarian character is more clearly manifest, in the 1970's, as large-scale, industrial conflicts continually spring up across Britain and Europe, and North America. The inadequate, economistic, syndicalist and reformist nature of the leadership, still heavily influenced by Stalinism, failed to utilise that period to take workers forward, politically, and, by the mid 1980's, as the cycle moved again into the stagnation phase, not even the sectional, industrial victories were possible, and workers were put on the back foot, as a new, counter-revolutionary period began.
That was the kind of period, also, that began in the mid 1920's, seen in the defeat of the British General Strike, the Chinese Revolution, defeat of Italian workers, and rise of fascism, in Italy, and later in Germany, Spain and elsewhere, as well as the consolidation of the conservative, petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic caste in the USSR, and its reflection in the Communist Parties globally.
Trotsky, speaking again of Bukharin, notes,
“In so far as he did nothing but amend or “complete” Lenin, his caricatured aspect did not exceed certain modest limits. In so far as he pretends to give leadership himself, profiting by the total lack of knowledge in international questions on the part of Stalin, Rykov and Molotov, little Bukharin swells up until he becomes a gigantic caricature of Bolshevism. His strategy reduces itself to finishing off and mutilating, in the epoch of decline, that which escaped alive in the abortive and besmirched revolutionary period.” (p 169)
He notes that, contrary to the position of the ECCI, there was a counter-revolutionary, not revolutionary period, in China. Only in the sense that all of the contradictions lead to, and are only resolvable by revolution, was it true that a revolutionary situation existed in China.
“But from this point of view, there is not a single country in the world where there does not exist a revolutionary situation which must inevitably manifest itself openly with the exception of the USSR, where, in spite of five years of opportunist back-sliding, the soviet form of the proletarian dictatorship still opens up the possibility of a renascence of the October revolution by means of reformist methods.” (p 170)
Even in this latter evaluation, Trotsky was soon to change his mind, and to conclude that it had experienced Thermidorean counter-revolution, requiring a political revolution to oust the petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic caste, and restore the political regime of proletarian democracy.
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