Trotsky Stresses Need to Study

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LYNN GREGORY considers the current relevance of Leon Trotsky's small book 'Lessons of October' in this, the centenary year of Trotsky's birth. 'Lessons of October' is available in the collection published by Pathfinder Press entitled "The Challenge of the Left Opposition' or on its own in an edition published by New Park Publications. Trotsky (centre) with the Petrograd Soviet The political richness of Lessons of October for revolutionaries today is inestimable.

The book raises a multitude of questions about strategy and tactics in a revolutionary crisis: the dangers of conservatism; and the sway of petty bourgeois forces pulling the revolutionary party towards social democracy.

The 'Lessons' that Trotsky was trying to impart were of a far broader nature than just a study of the course of the October Disastrous Written in October 1924, after a disastrous attempt by the German Communist Party to take powet in Saxony it was a warning to the international Communist movement that ignorance of its own history could mean a failure to grasp revolutionary opportunities.

A massive economic crisis occurred in 1921 in Germany with the occupation of the Ruhr by French troops, in order to force reparation payments.

Prices shot up in Germany and so too did support for the Communist Vast numbers of workers were grouped around factory committees under Communist leadership. The CP vote even after their 1923 defeat, reached 3.7 million.

Despite these favourable opportunities for revolutionaries the Communists persisted in their alliance with the 'left' social democratic government of Saxony.

Underestimated Placing the entire situation, and the fate of the working class, in the hands of the parliamentarians, they underestimated the insurrectionary situation.

Brandler, the leader of inii vex Russian workers demonstral the Communists, belatedly tried to bring about an uprising after the situation had matured and the working class had passed onto the defensive.

As a result the German army intervened, ejected the 'Red" Saxony government and proscribed the Communists.

By 1924 the government was able to stabilise itself with American aid.

For Trotsky this situation illustrated only too well how the Lessons of October' had been ignored.

He compared the situation to a commander in chief who in preparation for new wars failed to study the strategic and technical experience of the last imperialist war.

Such a commander . would inevitably be doomed to defeat. He went on to for All Power to the Soviets warn:

"The party which does not keep step with the historical tasks of its own class becomes, or runs the risk of becoming the indirect tool of other classes. 99 Brandler's policy in 1923 had been confined to the party's relationship with the government rather than with the working class and therefore had completely subordinated the class independence of the proletariat to. the parliamentary system.

Sneering

The appearance of the book in 1924 brought forth sneering comments from the party leadership now being consolidated under Stalin's control.

The debate was referred to as the literary discussion' and the events of 1923 as in 1917 only an struggle of for power.

episode' in the the working class Pessimism This glossing over of the German events revealed the pessimism of certain sections of the party about the chances of the working class overthrowing the armed might of the state (except in alliance with petty bourgeois forces).

Such pessimism had been expressed in 1917 in the initial support given by Stalin and Kamenev to the bourgeois Provisional Government, set up after the , February revolution under the now clearly misleading slogan of "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry"

Indeed whole sections of the Bolshevik party, unable to believe in the ability of an underdeveloped country to take the road of socialist revolution, had shown themselves to be tied to the notion that the working class could only help in building the bourgeois democratic state.

Only when the working class had done this, they argued, would there be possibilities of revolution.

Impossible In contrast to this Trotsky argued that because the bourgeoisie was weak a stable democratic regime was impossible.

The working class, to defend its interests, would be forced to seize power and adopt socialist measures.

This was the theory of Permanent which drew out the dynamics of the revolution and placed it in the context of a world socialist. revolution.

This was the lesson of 1917 drawn publicly by Lenin in the struggle for the April Theses of that year, and then shown in practice by the events of October.

The same basic mistake was now being repeated by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1923.

October

The book analyses crucial moments in the course of the October revolution: the decision not to send the troops to the front which sparked off the insurrection, and Lenin's arrival in Russia to turn the whole course of the revolution towards an extra-parliamentary struggle for power and against an alliance with the Mensheviks.

The right wing of the Bolshevik Party, which included Kamenev and Zinoviev, was steeped in pessimism about the prospects for revolution.

As in 1923 in Germany they emphasised the reluctance and unpreparedness of the masses to fight.

They came out in complete opposition to the motion for armed insurrection put by Lenin.

Instead, they adopted a policy of steering the Soviets towards an alliance with the Constituent Assembly these ideas of the right were exactly the same as conceptions held by the Mensheviks.

Conservative

They failed to analyse the movements in the class, lagging behind the historical tasks and becoming a conservative force.

Trotsky's keen understanding of revolutionary strategy and tactics shines throughout the book.

In the July preceding the October revolution the question arose of participating in the Pre-Parliament.

Some sections of the party were in favour of participation at a time when the masses were already on the streets and the actual struggle for power was posed.

Trotsky analyses the danger of seeking the revolution through the parliamentary road.

He wrote: "It is not true that many years must elapse between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions.

'It is not true that the school •of parliamentarianism is the one and only or the main, or the compulsory training school for the conquest of power.

"It is not true that the road to power runs necesTrotsky sarily through bourgeois democracy.

«These are all naked abstractions, doctrinaire patterns, and they play only one polițical role, namely, to bind the proletarian vanguard hand and foot, and by means of the democratic' state machinery turn it into an oppositionist political shadow of the bourgeoisie bearing the name of social democracy.

"The policy of the proletariat must not be guided by schoolboy patterns but in accordance with the real flux of the class struggle.

"Our task is not to go to the pre-parliament but to organise the insurrection and seize power."

Kamener (top) and Zinoviev Trotsky was trying to how in his book the recessity of learning the essons of previous victories and defeats of the Communist movement and in particular the rich experience of 1917.

These lessons have to be absorbed and applied in a living way to the concrete problems and opportunities of our own time.

As the book concludes: ... Bolshevism is not a doctrine (i.e. not merely a doctrine) but a system of revolutionary training for the proletarian upheaval.

"What is the Bolshevisation of Communist Parties?

It is giving them such a training and effecting such a selection of the leading staff as would prevent them from 'drifting' when the hour of their October strikes.

"That is the whole Hegel, and the wisdom books and the meaning all philosophy

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TME Wednesday October 3, 1979 HUDU [DEMOCR ARE REMOVAL