Trotsky, goes on,
“They do not understand the difference between, let us say, a parliamentary agreement and an ever-so-modest agreement for struggle in a strike or in defence of workers’ print shops against fascist bands.
Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advantage of the Social Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party...
No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be concluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother, and even with Noske and Grezesinsky. On one condition, not to bind one’s hands. ”
And, of course, Trotsky is talking, here, about a fighting unity with social-democrats (most of whom still claimed some adherence to Marxism), whereas the opportunists, today, talk, not even about some negotiated parliamentary alliance with social-democracy, but simply voting for the bourgeois Harris! At least with Callaghan, in 1979, he was part of a Labour Party, in which the working-class, via its individual membership of the party, the collective membership via the trades unions and so on could exert their control over him.
The whole thrust of Trotsky's approach, here, as with that set out in The Action Programme For France, is as far away from parliamentary cretinism, and opportunist support for bourgeois parties on the basis of their “lesser-evil” character, as you can get! It is focused entirely on a critique of those bourgeois-parties, designed to draw the workers away from them, by demanding, not some kind of electoral pact, and certainly not just a passive vote, but rather a fighting unity in action, as and when required, to fight the fascists, much as Marx proposed, in relation to permanent revolution, in his Address to the Central Committee of The Communist League in 1850.
It is rather like people are taught in martial arts when confronted by two assailants. Don't give them time to attack you together. Rush one, preferably the biggest, and most threatening, separate them as far and as quickly as possible, put them down quickly, and then deal with the other, who, if you are lucky, will already have turned tail. It does not involve trying to negotiate the support of one against the other, but recognising that both are a threat. That is precisely what Trotsky says.
“When one of my enemies sets before me small daily portions of poison and the second, on the other hand, is about to shoot straight at me, then I will first knock the revolver out of the hand of my second enemy, for this gives me an opportunity to get rid of my first enemy. But that does not at all mean that the poison is a “lesser evil” in comparison with the revolver.”
Note that Trotsky does not suggest taking any of the poison, as a "lesser-evil". In fact, what the opportunists propose, today, is simply the position that Stalinism adopted before and after the short interlude of the Third Period. It involves subordinating the interests of workers to those of the bourgeoisie, in order to sustain a purely electoral alliance. It means aligning with the poisoner in the vain hope of securing their support against the assailant with the revolver, but the consequence of which is simply to drain my strength by the effects of the poison, so that I can fight neither, only to find that, having recognised my weakened condition, the poisoner, also, looks after their own skin by cutting a deal with the shooter!
Just as that had failed in China, in 1927, so too it failed in Spain, in the Spanish Revolution, in the 1930's. In order to fight Franco's fascists, the Stalinists proposed a popular front with the parties of the bourgeoisie. In fact, as Trotsky set out, this was also a delusion. When, Stalin had tried to assure imperialism, in China, that he was not seeking proletarian revolution, only bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, there was, in fact, no reason for imperialism to offer any kind of concession to him. After all, imperialism itself had an interest in continuing its own influence in China, and the bourgeois-nationalist government of Chiang Kai Shek, was the representative of a Chinese bourgeoisie that was itself highly interconnected with imperialist capital in China. As with Ukraine, today, the workers in China were presented only with a choice of one imperialism as against another, Japanese or British.
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