Left-wing opponents of the Besancenot-Poutou line seem to believe that the crisis
experienced by the NPA is the consequence of a bad strategy by the partyleadership, which failed to manage the unexpected emergence, to the left of thePS, of the FdG then of LFI and would thus have been forced to favor with him asocial-democratic type alliance to the detriment of the implementation of a realpolicy of anti-capitalist rupture. This split gives us the opportunity to returnto the historical foundations of Trotskyism and its ambiguities with regard tothe USSR and the communist parties. Contrary to what this current claims, it isnot particularly far-sighted party leaders who make history but the level of theclass struggle. Consequently, it is necessary to find other explanations than thetreachery of each other to understand what happened between the widespreadpopular uprising that was the Russian Revolution and the establishment of abloody dictatorship in the antipodes absolute of any communist project of whichthe Soviet State has kept only the word.The positive image of Trotsky, the tragic hero of criticism of the Sovietbureaucracy, was built over time and beyond the strict movement dedicated to him,thanks to Stalin's relentlessness against him and his supporters. Dismissed,hunted down, banished and then assassinated, he became, victim and martyr, thesymbol of leftist opposition to the master of the Kremlin.Considered moreover as a man of great culture, open to new forms of artisticexpression such as surrealism, fluent in French, he seduced (without affiliatingthem for all that) many intellectuals of the interwar period ( 1), it is aprofile of the "old man", perfectly antithetical to that of the uneducated andhated brute that was Stalin, who was built within the movements of the extremeleft which tried, in France, to resist the control of the PCF subservient toMoscow on the labor movement.André Breton and TrotskyTrotsky, a very late critic of bureaucracyHowever, this vision of a Trotsky symbol of the denunciation of the Sovietbureaucracy proceeds from a somewhat revisited description of history whichobliges us to remember that the man took quite a long time to stick to it... andin the end lips.In August 1918, the anarchist newspaper Golos Truda, whose first issue appearedin August 1917 two months before the Bolshevik coup, was seized by the Cheka forhaving published a warning by Volin: "The Bolsheviks will develop politicalauthority and a state apparatus that will crush all opposition with an iron fist.Also as early as 1918, the Socialist Party of Great Britain considered that theUSSR was not a form, even a distorted one, of socialism but a capitalism in whichthe State directly owned the majority of the means of production. TheGerman-Dutch left (Pannekoek, Gorter), which made a similar observation, wasexcluded from the Third International in 1921.In the USSR, without going as far as the previous ones, going so far as to speakof state capitalism, the workers' opposition (Chliapnikov, Medvedev, andKollontai at first) was formed in 1919 to denounce the "bureaucratic machine"which "bridles grassroots initiatives. Its influence is such that it representsalmost half of the delegates to the Moscow conference of 1920 devoted to theimportant trade union question (we are then in full nationalization of Industry).While Lenin himself, considering that "the Soviet state is not entirelyworkers'... and presents a bureaucratic deformation", asserts that the tradeunions must still play a role, the future hero of the anti-bureaucratic struggledecides on to him against the right to strike... since the USSR is a workers'state: one cannot go on strike against oneself! (2).The following year the right to faction was abolished in the party and theworkers' opposition dissolved.During all these years our Commissar for War, a member of the Politburo, a warmsupporter of the creation of the Tcheka, of "revolutionary terror" and of themilitarization of labor transforming each striker into a deserter to be shot,will therefore not have distinguished himself by a virulent criticism of thebureaucracy! He launched repression against the Makhnovist insurgents whointended both to defeat the white armies of Wrangel and to establish libertariancommunism, until finally destroying them at the end of 1921. In March of thatsame year, supported by most of the leading tendencies of the Party (includingthe workers' opposition), he crushed in blood the insurgents of Kronstadt whodemanded the return of power to the Soviets and denounced the bureaucracy of theregime.But times are changing. Stalin gains more and more power as Lenin's healthdeclines. It was not until 1923 that Trotsky, joining the left opposition (3),denounced the bureaucracy's stranglehold on the party... but only internally, ina letter to the Politburo. According to him, the growth of the bureaucracy is dueto the weakness of the development of the productive forces (in other words tothe backwardness of the people) and to the difficulties encountered by the worldrevolution (which is correct). But there is no question of seeing in it the riseof a social class in the process of seizing the means of production which are andmust remain in the hands of the State.He was then fired from the government in 1924, from the party in 1927, exiled tothe province of Kazakhstan in 28, expelled from the country to Turkey in 1929.Stalin became the absolute master.Despite this, until 1933, Trotsky considered that it was from within (the partyand the Soviet state) that bureaucracy could be fought. It was only in 1938 that,noting the impossibility of his supporters who had remained in the Soviet Unionto escape the ferocious repression carried out by the GPU (4) against allopposition, that he resolved to act from outside in founding the FourthInternational. But always with a strategy of straightening out bureaucratizedapparatuses.Frida Kahlo and TroskiThe USSR, a degenerated workers state?Trotsky strongly opposes the assumption that Stalin's victory meant that a newsocial class seized power (as Thermidor endorsed the rise of the bourgeoisie in1795 France) and to characterize the USSR as state capitalism.And we understand why: to simply want to regenerate the revolutionary process andwith it the Communist Party is to affirm that the basis of the policy carried outsince 1918 has been the right one, that it has simply been "degenerated" and thatit has simply acts to take back the reins of the Party by removing the traitors.Conversely, if we noted that the bureaucracy had become a social class thatmanages a form of state capitalism according to its own interests, that wouldmean that a new revolution is needed to tear down the foundations of what hasbeen built since 1918. This would call into question the dogma according to whichthe concentration of the means of production in the hands of the State andcarried out by the Party in the name of the proletariat is the essential mark ofa revolution.Trotsky ends up recognizing all the same the seizure of power by the bureaucracy.But he still refuses to consider it as a social class and prefers to use the termBonapartism which designates the dictatorship of a man or a State, including theclass he is supposed to represent but which he would defend anyway. ultimatelyinterest. It takes a simple surgical operation: to remove the cancerous part (thebureaucratic character) while keeping the whole healthy (the working-classcharacter of the State and the Party). Do not destroy anything but transform byappealing to the "acquis of the Russian revolution" which remain in both.What should or what can be regenerated?And if there remain "revolutionary gains" in the USSR, there must be some in theinternational communist parties subservient to the Kremlin. These debates on thenature of the USSR were therefore reproduced identically, not only with regard tothe "brother parties" in the world which aligned themselves with the USSR butalso with regard to parties like the SFIO, admittedly reformist. from thebeginning, but still stemming from the common mold that was the labor movement.Were there still traces of an emancipatory project, of communism? Was theretherefore any reason to put them back on the right path by relying on the healthyelements that made it up?Such was the essence of the debates which animated the different fractions of theTrotskyist movements from the exile of the "old man" until today. And since itwas not a question of questioning the dogma of the necessity of a vanguard partytaking over a state that had become magically proletarian, the answer was mostoften yes. On the other hand, the tactical consequences varied considerablyaccording to the analyzes which were made of the international context andespecially of the rise of fascism (anti-fascism or revolution?) giving rise tothe various Trotskyist fractions and organizations.How to seal alliances with the tendencies considered to be the most revolutionarywithin the PCF or the SFIO? What criteria should be used to judge what isrevolutionary or not? Should we join the Popular Front or encourage MarceauPivert's left to split? Should we work for union reunification before and afterthe war? Is it better to enter the resistance through the FTP and the FFI or toform autonomous groups working to get German soldiers tossed in the air in thename of proletarian internationalism?So many legitimate questions that arose both among the libertarians and among theTrotskyists, but which the latter always approached in an elitist vision of thedirection to be taken (either openly, or more discreetly by the method ofentryism), never in sight. to promote the emergence of an autonomous movementfrom below.But to ask these questions, it is still necessary that there exist organizations(trade unions or political) still fleshy and healthy to bend or infiltrate, underpenalty of participating only in storms in glasses of half-empty water. And, overtime they have become more and more difficult to find.The time of disappointments From 1980, after a period of rise in the struggles of the proletariat, thebourgeoisie resumed the offensive worldwide (5): it was the Reagan decade in theUSA and Thatcher in the UK, Pinochet in Chile, but also the "turning point of therigor" of the socialist government in 1983, etc.Then, unexpectedly, 1990 sounded the death knell for the USSR after the fall ofthe Berlin Wall the previous year. Contrary to the hopes anchored in extreme leftand libertarian circles, this happy event was not the fruit of a popularexplosion against a dictatorship but of the implosion of a system incapable ofreproducing itself. Instead of favoring the rebirth of popular strugglesworldwide, it rather gave a positive signal to the bourgeoisies and to Capital tocontinue their assault against the conquered and the compromises obtained by theworkers for more than a century throughout the world.Capitalist restructurings prevailed despite the few last stand-offs such as theminers' strike in England in 84-85 or that of the steelworkers in France at theturn of the 1980s. elsewhere by decades of class collaboration and integrationinto state structures, are increasingly disconnected from social realities andare no longer able to represent the wage anger that will have to find other pathswhen it tries to catch one's breath.At the end of the 1980s, coordinations (nurses, teachers, students, railwayworkers) and the generalized practice of strike GAs then appeared in France...when there was a strike. Generally speaking, and not only with regard to wagedemands, the protest movements which affect other sectors of oppression arestructured more than before starting from the base and are becoming more and moresensitive to not to be dispossessed by devices coming from above.At the same time, it was during this same period that the decline in electoralparticipation in the legislative elections began. In 1986 abstention was only21.5%. In 1988 it climbed to 34%, stabilized more or less until 2002 (35%) andclimbed steeply thereafter: 40% in 2007, 43% in 2012, 51% in 2017, 53% in 2022. ,like the unions, are no longer what they used to be. The capitalists are in theprocess of finding other more "modern" relays linked to new technologies to"represent"/control so-called civil society, and other means more suited to thedevelopment of the productive forces to steer the State.One of the generally little-mentioned consequences of this disaffection is thatthe break between trade unionism and politics, conceived as a game between theparties in the parliamentary arena, is shrinking more and more in favor of a muchmore global vision of a policy that includes the everyday action of workers. Itis the world of representation that is undermined and which, consequently, putsin difficulty the groups that were consenting actors. But this disaffection,positive in our eyes, does not mean that a boulevard is open to libertarians!The NPA and the Fourth United International-Secretariat is certainly the currentof the Trotskyist family which has been the most attentive to the aforementioneddevelopments with its new forms of organization and its new fields of struggle.But without abandoning the electoral perspective allowing them to fit into thepolitical game in which, no doubt, they considered that there remained, theretoo, an "acquis" to preserve: bourgeois democracy. So much so that in passingfrom the LCR to the NPA it was the "revolutionary" of the Communist League whodiscreetly fell by the wayside, thus implying that it was necessary to wait forbetter days to think of a revolution and that, for the time being, favoring theconstruction of a new popular front (with or without the current socialists,All this being said, it would be falling ourselves into a form of Trotskyism (6)to explain the crisis of the NPA essentially by historical errors and theorientations of the organization in recent years. Obviously, this is the exercisethat each competing chapel engages in to better highlight the "accuracy" of itsown line and try to seduce a few dissidents. But this amounts to setting aside afundamental point: ALL political organizations are in crisis, large and small,whatever their ideology, quite simply because, as we said above, it is a form ofrepresentation that serves capitalist governance less and less and that they nolonger correspond,The so-called anti-capitalist organizations, including libertarians, are alsocaught in the teeth by the virtual disappearance of the idea of revolution, whichis the consequence of the difficulties that the employees themselves haveencountered in resisting the attacks of the employers for several decades. It isquite simply a question of the level of the class struggle which we think, forour part, depends only slightly on the orientation of this or that party or thatof any self-proclaimed avant-garde. It is rather a collective capacity to form aclass to resume the offensive against the operating system. And that abilitycan't be built from the top. In this sense the crisis of the NPA is also oursbecause it is a question for everyone of approaching with these data the questionof the role of the revolutionary groupings (7).JPDIn February 2015 (CA247) in a presentation of Olivier Besancenot and MichaelLöwy's book Revolutionary Affinities, Our Red and Black Stars, we wrote this:"Let the red stars stop having an eye on the institutional left (even of theleft) and accept the idea that politics is not party alliances or even theparties themselves, but autonomy struggles and ideas; that the black starsreconnect with their filiation and class analyzes by getting rid of post-moderndross. It is at this price that the rediscovery of affinities could have a slightimpact on the present social situation. Provided, of course, that we worktogether to unearth what are the forces which, in the existing of a capitalism infull development and in full mutation, could be carriers of levers for socialchange. It is certainly no longer the working class of the last century, at leastas it was constituted. But is it just any substitution group that varioustendencies periodically put forward? (We were entitled to the Third World, theunderclass, immigrants, the middle classes, technicians, women...). Certainlynot, but that's no small feat!Notes:(1) Let us quote among others the writers Maurice Nadeau, André Breton, BenjaminPéret, Simone Weil, André Malraux or Pierre Naville, the painters André Masson,Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and of course oppositional communist activists whohosted the review Proletarian revolution like Pierre Monatte, André Rosmer,Marcel Martinet, or libertarians like Daniel Guérin.(2) Lenin, The Trade Unions, the Current Situation and Trotsky's Errors, December30, 1920Lenin, Speech on the Trade Unions, March 14, 1921)(3) Not to be confused with the workers' opposition created in 1919 within theParty. The latter refuses to call on technicians from the old regime to run theeconomic machine and intends to grant a greater role to unions and workers byestablishing workers' control over production, without however calling intoquestion the centrality of the Bolshevik Party, which resulted in itsdissociation from the Kronstadt revolt. The Left Opposition (1923-1927) whichTrotsky joined, opposed the Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country anddenounced the bureaucratization of the party led by Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin.Most of its members will be physically eliminated over the years. On the otherhand, certain members of the working class opposition will be spared,(4) The GPU succeeded the Cheka in 1922, which became the NKVD in 1934, then theKGB in 1954 until 1991 and of which Putin was a brilliant officer.(5) This political sequence and concomitant doctrine is often calledneoliberalism. A rather ambiguous term because it suggests that it would besomething other than a moment in the logic of capitalism.(6) While some at the NPA say they no longer are.(7) See inserthttp://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3575_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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