sciousness and the proletariat.
leading proletariat to the emergence in turn creates into mass parties, gles makes possible.
the on the party building useful for
Intercoral and the other view of
"incapability' of be basically of mass revolu-
This which only the focus for of
'traditional and oppressed the without
"Trotskyism' sectarian 'point of honour, but in relation to revolutionary vol
Marxism, in relation to Leninism as such. Since gar the beginning of the imperialist epoch
- if not even before atio then - for ress more than a century, Marxists have known and have proclaimed and demonstrated dozens of times, that tru the existence of an international organisation with a binding discipline
If re with respect to action on the an big ani international questions is the in-
Its dispensable complement to proletarian egre internationalist polities, the which inis certainly from dispensable precondition for a conand on a sistent internationalist practice in the class struggle. (21)
struggle not
Rejecting this organisation and its binding framework, in our epoch of wars, international law revolutions and also counter-revolutions, can only mean:
•Workers of the World, unite in times of peace but cut your mutual throats in times of war'
- to repeat the cruel but highly realistic phrase of
Rosa Luxembourg.
It is utopian to assume that the toiling masses worldwide are spondefence taneously internationalist.
On the contrary both the influence of sectoral war and corporatist interests and the pressure of everyday life pulls them spontaneously to a nationalism that is contrary to their long term interests.
It is utopian to presuppose that even communist activists are spontaneousto ly internationalist on all the key of the revolutionary class questions
The national limitations struggle.
of their daily activity and thus their tion.
socialist if ideological experience, not the of the
'campist' variety, confusion will impose narrow limits on their understanding of what is happening to of elsewhere in the world (the lack of of understanding by the Cuban communists, not to mention the Vietnamese will communists, of the Czech and Polish events is only yet another example of this for the nth time in history). It a is especially utopian to assume that the communists (even more so, bureaucrats of communist origin) who alvain applies ready hold state power will be spontaneously internationalist. Subject to the constraints of defending their status, they run the terrible risk of justifying military or diplomatic manoeuvres of self-defence with nationalist
Lenin arguments.
and chauvinist understood that better than anyone
Look again at the last part of his
21. In his opening speech to the Second
Congress of the
Communist Internatioal testament concerning the dangers of
Zinovieu stated:
Great Russian chauvinism inside the
•We have introduced into the statutes of the
Communist
International a phrase
CPSU - a warning that was unforfrom the statutes of the First International, more than confirmed by tunately if whose leaders were
Marx and
Engels:
working class has the struggle of the not history. (22)
until with heon crowned
Any basic application of Marxism the fact that this is notably also due to the workers have lacked international to our own practice must therefore agreement (coming together), rigorous teach us that an indispensable condiinternational organisation eutal support tion for avoiding a relapse into 'natinternational translation)
ional-communism' is real internationa-
See this codicil in Vol. 33 of the
22.
list practice and experience, unachiev-
"Collected Works.
25
international not by a practice that the International is their only father/motherland? national is a real step backwards for and in theory. like 'exchanges of views and experare the classic formulations of reformists and centrists who substitute 'everyone master in their own for the necessary struggle for political action common to the workers of all countries, at least on the big international questions. is the sort of argument used by Stalin justify the dissolution Third International. Lenin and Trotsky denounced on countless occasions the reactionary retreat from principled internationaldiplomacy absolution.
In practice the Australian SWP is now operating all alone, isolated from revolutionary forces throughout the world. The only real excuse it offers for this retreat is that the forces it had been trying up organisation are still very weak. That is true. But it is better to build somethan to purely and simply abandon the task of building such an organisation. That is what the Australian SWP does on a national level where, although it is not any stronger than the Fourth International is on the international level, it continues obstinately to build its own organisation. This it has stopped doing now on an international without a corresponding international activity when the constraints are the same is certainly the expression of a 'national-communist retreat. The historical stakes involved
Percy and Lorimer try historically to justify this step backwards to "national communism' by presenting the following schema for the emergence of mass revolutionary parties and of a mass revolutionary International throughout the world including in the imperialist countries:
'Real Marxist parties are not developed through debates around abstract programmatic questions nor by agreement on a "precise program. strategy and tactics." It is the big, living revolutionary developments that act as a beacon for important sections of the working-class political van26 guard, and that enables this vanguard to be crystallised into genuine Marxist parties by enabling abstract programmatic differences to be settled by learning from living experience, those who have made revolutions.
"The recomposition of the revoluin the imperialist tionary vanguard countries, as was the case in the early about through an identification with, and orientation to, the big revolutionary events in the world, to the living revolutions, Those who fail or refuse to follow this course, even if they carry out revolutionary countries, and even if they have some international organisation, will become irrelevant to the process, just as the IWW in the US and Australia became irrelevant in the early 1920s because of their failure to orient to the Russian Revolution.' (The SWP and the Fourth International, p 53).
This conception is a good expresone of the reasons for their split, even if all its dimensions are not revealed. It is profoundly voluntarist and Besides this, contradicts to quite an extent the rest of the Australian SWP's arguas well as its starting point. Just ask this question: with revolutionary development did the the Cuban revolutionaries have to identify advance in order to be able to build an adequate revolutionary leadership revolution in their countries to victory? And it is even the same in the case of Nicaragua;
which existed - was not the principal cause of Sandinista success. Their revolutook on its own specificities, which had little in comthe way in which the July 26 Movement conquered power
'Genuine Marxist parties' are parties trat succeed in leading significant fractions of their class - which in the imperialist, semi-industrialised pendent countries and the bureaucratised workers' indeed the big majority working population - to the revolutionary seizure of power. To do grouped behind them important sectors (albeit a minority) of the working class. In other words revolutionaries have to have acquired a real political authority on the basis of their practice in the current class struggle, on the basis of their ability to root themselves deeply in the working class, to respond correctly to workers' aspirations, to provide adequate answers to such goals and to propose forms and objectives of struggle producing success. That is genuine revolutionary Marxist parties were built, are being built and will be built in the future.
The recomposition of the organimovement is an indissed workers' pensable precondition for the buildgenuine Marxist parties all places where Marxists are only a small minority and where powerful organisations exist alongside them. It has and will only place under the combined effect of two factors:
the differentiation, radicalisa-
-tion inside and trade union mass organisations, on from the experience of explosive mass struggles;
correct intervention and sufficient organisational strengthening of the initial nucleus of the revolutionary party or parties in that country.
The recomposition Lorimer is talking about is not this recomposition of the organised workers' movement. His schema does not involve the mass movement. It only concerns little groups. Paradoxically, after having elevated the 'seizure of power', that is, the emergence of mass parties elsewhere, he downgrades it to an absolutely second-
This is certainly proof that whạt underlines the whole evolution of the Australian SWP is scepticism towards the possibility of revolution in the big majority of countries in the world and therefore scepticism about the revolutionary proletariat.
If we examine the actual development of revolutionary organisations in the 1920s, we see how far the Percy/Lorimer analysis is partial and thereby false, and how ours corresponds better to the real historical
The Russian Revolution unquestionably triggered off enthusiasm among revolutionaries the world over. Everywhere it advanced the emergence of the first communist nuclei based on reactions against the imperialist war. But in most cases these remained at the level of small groups despite the Revolution and the Communist International, which was incidentally to that of the Cuban or these groups for years, if not for of the present principal sections of the Fourth International. Authentic mass communist parties appeared in the 1920s in less than ten countries. And without exception, in each country these parties only emerged under the impact of pre-revolutionary or revolutionary events produced by the aftermath of war and the crisis of capitalism and, as such, lived International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
PERMAnENT
Trotsky, who were not responsible at all) they
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986 through by large masses of workers
Revolution did not
The Russian because it was a 'beacon' that more or less automatically attracted the vanguard workers.
and their comrades were able to movement above the establishment of the
REVOLUTION