It is vital to understand this when considering the way Trotsky's “Learn To Think” is wholly distorted, by social-imperialists, in order to turn him from being a revolutionary, international socialist, into being a liberal-bourgeois-nationalist, and proponent not of revolutionary-defeatism, but of “defence of the fatherland”. Trotsky never argued in favour of the support for the intervention of imperialism into such struggles. On the contrary, in his writings on the Balkan Wars, he sets out why Marxists have to militantly oppose such intervention.
“This means that European democracy has to combat every attempt to subject the fate of the Balkans to the ambitions of the Great Powers. Whether these ambitions be presented in the naked form of colonial policy or whether they be concealed behind phrases about racial kinship, they all alike menace the independence of the Balkan peoples. The Great Powers should be allowed to seek places for themselves in the Balkan Peninsula in one way only, that of free commercial rivalry and cultural influence...
Democracy has no right, political or moral, to entrust the organisation of the Balkan peoples to forces that are outside its control – for it is not known when and where these forces will stop, and democracy, having once granted them the mandate of its political confidence, will be unable to check them...
Therefore an uncompromising protest against atrocities serves not only the purpose of moral self-defence on the personal and party level but also the purpose of politically safeguarding the people against adventurism concealed under the flag of ‘liberation’.”
(The Balkan Wars)
But, also, Trotsky's argument, as set out in “Learn To Think”, about a revolutionary, national liberation struggle, is that set out in The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, and which he reiterated against the Stalinists, in relation to China. That is that we only give support to those truly, independent, revolutionary proletarian forces engaged in such a struggle. We make a point of unmasking any other forces that seek to adopt such communist camouflage.
In other words, he took it for granted that, in saying that the Italian workers would ensure that weapons got to Algerian rebels, those rebels were, themselves, such truly independent, proletarian forces, organised by an Algerian communist party, to fight not only French imperialism, but also the Algerian bourgeois-democracy! Its why, the Theses speak not only of supporting only such revolutionary forces, but also, as Trotsky emphasises against the Stalinists and Mensheviks, the need to oppose and expose the bourgeois-democratic, and social-democratic, let alone reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalist elements that try to pass themselves off as communist.
Bolshevism, and permanent revolution means its possible for the revolutionaries to make temporary, practical alliances, in action, with those other forces, but it certainly does not require them to do so, and even less, to subordinate themselves to those forces, or make permanent alliances with them. Trotsky would never, and did never, call for imperialist governments to provide weapons to those bourgeois forces, engaged in such a struggle, just as he did not call on the USSR to arm the KMT, precisely because of permanent revolution, and the lessons set out back in 1850, by Marx, following the experience of the revolutions of 1848. Marx pointed out the need to arm, not the bourgeois forces, engaged in such struggles, but to arm the revolutionary workers, precisely so that they could defend themselves against that bourgeoisie when it inevitably turned on them.
In Spain, in the 1930's, Trotsky pointed to the hypocrisy of the so called “democratic imperialists”, and bankruptcy of the centrists and reformists in the Popular Front government of France, etc., as they adopted a neutral stance between the Republican government and Franco, when it came to supplying arms, but Trotsky, also, never called on those governments to arm the Republican government either. Why would he? It was a bourgeois government, which, whilst opposing Franco, was also attacking the Spanish workers, on behalf of the Spanish bourgeoisie, just as Zelensky's government does in Ukraine.
As Orwell pointed out, that Republican government, in so far as it had modern weapons, kept them to itself, rather than giving them to the workers actually fighting Franco's forces.
“[The infantry were far worse armed than an English public school Officers' Training Corps with worn out Mauser rifles which usually jammed after five shots; approximately one machine gun to fifty men; and one pistol or revolver to about thirty men. These weapons so necessary in trench warfare were not issued by the government and could be bought only illegally and with the greatest difficulty...
A government which sends boys of fifteen to the front with rifles forty years old, and keeps its biggest men and newest weapons in the rear, is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the fascists.”
(George Orwell, Controversy, August 1937)
The same is true, in Ukraine, despite the fantasies peddled by Western social-imperialists, about the war being fought by “ordinary Ukrainians”, whatever that means, as against the reality of a war fought between two capitalist (imperialist) states, and their armies, backed by huge imperialist alliances.
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