Mandel Rewrites Trotsky

Scan page 7

What in fact happened was the opposite: the blades of the scissors moved further apart as industrial prices rose and agricultural prices fell.

By October 1923 a sack of grain exchanged for about half the amount of manufactured goods it had exchanged for one year earlier. This was largely because agricultural output recovered from the civil war much faster than industrial output. By 1923 agriculture was producing at 75% of the pre-war level, industry at only 25%, though heavy industry rather than consumer goods was most sluggish. This fact however, was yet another problem produced by NEP.

The "scissors" crisis was overcome partly through state intervention but was in continuous danger of reappearing. And the reduction of industrial prices transferred the difficulties of food supply problems into another problem -unemployment.

UNEMPLOYMENT

The necessity for even state industry to operate profitably when cost were still very high meant that lower prices led to unprofitability and the growth of unemployment, which was around 1 million throughout the rest of the 1920s.

• This was a concrete fulfiiment of Lenin's frank admission that NEP in many respects. was a tactical retreat. 'Freedom of trade' *, he said, "means 'in a certain measure a development of capitalism'. But he added that this capitalism will be vision ohe co state, under the superNEP always remained, in the eyes of Lenin and Trotsky, a necessary tactical solution to basic economic and political contradictions whose real solution could only be found in the international proletarian revolution.

In introducing NEP, Lenin had said that 'only an agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia until the revolution has occured in other countries' But that did not mean that even under NEP Soviet economic policy could make no progressive advances. Lenin said that NEP had been introduced 'seriously and for a long time' but, Trotsky added, 'not for ever'.

PLANNING

Hence in 1922 Trotsky increasingly became an advocate of national economic planning in the context of NEP.

This would have been a step towards the social accounting and control which was so important to the material defence and advance of the revolution. Despite some initial doubts, Lenin became convinced that Trotsky was right - that even at that stage a major adyance towards national economic planning was possible.

In December 1922 he dictated a memorandum from his sick bed in support of Trotsky's proposals.

Partly through the influence of Stalin, who in 1923 had become general secretary of the pety. Trotsky's proposals iot ecosocis planning were rejected more. Trotsk: wa fordie: :: the Politburo to publish Lenin's memorandum. This was one sign among many of an ominous new approach to economic and all other problems in the Soviet Union.

DISCIPLINE

Lenin had looked to a time when "with the beginning of the socialist revolution, discipline must be built on entirely new principles; it must be a discipline of faith in the organising power of the workers and poor peasants, a discipline of comradeship, a discipline of the utmost respect, a discipline of independence and initiative in the In post-revolutionary Russia the material basis necessary for such discipline scarcely existed. It was frequently necessary to use instead the pre-socialist disciplines of compulsion and of money. But on the whole in the early years of the revolution virtues were not made of these necessities.

While it remained under the guidance of Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolshevik Party consistently held up the socialist and internationalist objectives in contrast to the necessities of survival.

This attitude is shown up in what has become probably Lenin's most famous remark on economic questions. Writing in travda on the fourth anniversary of the revolution he said that:

"When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities in the world.... Meanwhile, we must save the gold in the Soviet Union, sell it at the highest price, buy goods with it at the lowest price. When you live among wolves, you must howl like a wolf"

Stalin The introduction of the NEP was the last major change in Soviet economic policy in which the dis. tinction was made between inter. nationalist objectives and immed. iate necessities.

By the time of the next major change in 1929, Stalin had explicitly abandoned the conception that Russia's problems could only be solved through the international He had begun the systematic sabotage of that revolution. He had devalued "socialism' to mean the brutal policies with which he tried to solve problems that his own policy of socialism in one country The very opening words and the focal point of Trotsky's Transitional Programme - the declaration that "the world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis in the leadership of the proletariat" - has been rewritten by Ernest Mandel, leader of the so-called "United Secretariat of the Fourth International"

In an article in the June 10th edition of Inprecor (fortnightly journal of the USFI), Mandel puts forward what he terms the "Fourth International's analysis of the important changes that have occurred in the world situation during the past eight years"

IDEALIST But his method. soon makes itself plain. Mandel approaches the world workers movement not as a Marxist analysing a material process of movement, but as a crass idealist, attempting trom outside to judge the level of "class consciousness" Mandel In this Mandel echoes the approach of the IMG's Tariq Ali who in his book The Coming British Revolution made the notorious statement that consciousness determines history"

Ali of course (just like Mandel today) omitted to tell baffled readers the material origins of such "consciousness"

The reason for this omission is simple. For the Pabloites of the USFI the fight for revolutionary leadership is reduced to generalised propaganda aimed at counterposing their "correct" ideas to the "incorrect" ideas of the mass of the working class, while at the same time they cast around for a ready-made group - a "mass vanguard" -of people with a high level of "class consciousness" who are supposediy more open to revolutionary ideas.

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS Mandel's article informs us that "a rising level of class consciousness on the part of the entire class" is a necessity for building soviet power, soviet democracy and for the construction of socialism.

But the article's approach is one of contemplation of events not one of leadership. When Mandel talks of "rise" in consciousness, he is talking of a spontaneous rise and not one produced by the intervention of revolutionary To lend a bogus prestige to this position Mandel feels obliged to usurp the authority of the Transitional paraphrasing Irotsky while inserting his own personal poside= - and purting the #hole 5: to quotator at c me: sound plausible:

"The crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership (and of class consciousness) of the proletariat." [emph. added] The words in brackets have been added by Mandel. Trotsky never referred to class consciousness in this way, 101 very clear reason. slain fana errores ananasart Trotsky, like Lenin, saw the political backwardness of certain sections of workers as the product of their corrupt and reactionary reformist union and labour leadership which made deals with the employers and the state.

Lenin and Trotsky never ceased to pin the blame for nationalism and chauvinism in the workers movement on the bureaucratic "labour lieutenants of capitalism" who were then as now the main prop of imperialism - the capitalist's means of controlling the working class, There was never any doubt that given a revoluționary _leadership built in struggle on a firm base of support in the workers movement putting forward a programme of principled demands in line with the method of the Transitional Programme, that the struggles led by such naterial a leadershid would be the the class consciousness of the worl ing class.

In place of this workers today confront a blatantly dictatorial bureaucracy prepared to go to any lengths to preserve their cosy relationship with the employers and hold back the development of class consciousness. The crisis is crucially upside down. By simply confusing together the comparatively low level of political consciousness of sections of workers at present, with the crisis of leadership, he opens up the possible argument that the reactionary leaders simply reflect the "backwardness" of the working class.

This then opens the door to blaming the working class for its own defeats, and for the conscious betrayals carried out by the PRACTICE And it fails to recognise that if workers are mobilised around transitional demands they can be brought in practice into conflict with their own reformist and Stalinist leaders learning the political lessons necessary before taking the road towards soviet power.

Eded Mande! nowhere = De: programme or Iamention by WE=::=22:7022:253 NO Sloping the consciousness class.

Yet to Trotsky this was crucial. In several discussions on the Transitional Programme with leading members of the American Socialist Workers Party in 1938 he stressed the importance of the demands in heightening the militancy and mobilising even the comparatively politically backward American working class:

«These demands are transitory because they lead from the capitalist society to the proletarian revolution, a consequence insofar as they become the demands of the masses as the • proletarian government. We can't stop only with the day to day demands of the proletariat. We must give to the most backward workers some concrete slogan that corresponds to their needs and that leads dialectically to the conquest of power". (The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution p 119.), "The programme must express the objective tasks of the working class rather than the backwardness of the workers. It must reflect society as it is and not the backwardness of the working class. It is an instrument to overcome and vanquish the backwardness" . (p 125. emphasis added).

NOT FIXED The level of consciousness of the working class at any particular point is thus never seen by Trotsky as something fixed - but as something which continually changes and must be changed by the material intervention of Marxists.

Mandel however simply specul ates on the growth of class consciousness in the working class -asserting that there is a:

...growing [spontaneous understanding by broad vanguard layers of the proletariat of the fundamental bankruptcy of "classical" Social Democracy and Stalinism"

He is tactfully vague as to where these "broad vanguard layers" are to be found - and what should be done to mobilise the masses through such a vanguard.

He goes on to tell the reader that the whole problem of revolutionary strategy revolves around how to generalise and centralise:

..soviet-type bodies of self. organisation of the toiling masses". Hold on Mandel! First we have to discuss how we fight to mobilist the working class to the point of building soviets as such!

If there were some clear method of action laid down to get this far, then we could get interested in what to do with the new-formed soviets.

But the central problem for Marxists in Europe and on a world scale today is not that there is lack of clarity on what to do in soviets -but that there are no soviets!

-There are no soviets because the fight for revolutionary leadership is at a fairly elementary stage in the mass movement.

PRINCIPLED

It can only pass beyond that elementary stage by the principled intervention of Trotskyists in the daily struggles of the working class along the lines of the Transitional Until Mandel is prepared to direct the forces of the USFI along such a path, his concluding talk of the demand for a "Socialist United States of the World" and a "world planned economy" remain pointless abstractions. fit only for the daydreams of. wooly-headed idealists.

Terry