Trotsky in Cuba, 2019

By Paul Le Blanc

May 12, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — More than one
friend has expressed the hope that I would write a report on my experience in attending
an international conference on Leon Trotsky held in Havana, May 6-8, 2019 – so I have
felt even more compulsion to craft such a report than I would have otherwise. Since I
have come down here earlier than the dates of the conference, I find that I have time to
begin shaping such an account as I am living through what I describe. My take on all of
this is influenced, naturally, by my understanding of the Cuban Revolution – which can
be found in “Origins and Trajectory of the Cuban Revolution,” in my
collection Revolutionary Studies (Chicago: Haymarket 2017), first published in the
journal Against the Current, January/February 2007 (which can be found
online https://solidarity-us.org/atc/126/p319). My experience now seems to me
consistent with what I wrote then.

With my excitement somewhat subdued (after all, I have turned 72 years old on the very
day of this journey), I made my way to the fabled land of my radical youth – where I have
never been before, this land of revolutionary mystique and alluring rhythms, José Martí’s
green and crimson verses of “Guantanamera” and the wondrous sounds of The Buena
Vista Social Club, a land embraced by foreigners like Ernest Hemingway and Che
Guevara, a central element in my own political formation and in my evolving intellectual
landscape. It seemed unreal that I would be making this journey. But now I was finally
making it – with a persistent anxiety that somehow, at one point or another, I would be
prevented from reaching this wondrous, contradictory land where I now find myself.

An additional magical quality involves the circumstances of this first visit to Cuba – the
fact that I have been invited to make a presentation at an international conference on the
life, ideas, and influence of Leon Trotsky. This is a first, running counter to significant
elements of anti-Trotskyism that have been prevalent in sectors of the Cuban
Communist Party since the 1960s. Yet there have been counter-tendencies – for
example, efforts by the late Celia Hart (daughter of two historic leaders of the Cuban
Revolution, Armando Hart and Haydée Santamaría) to popularize the ideas of Trotsky in
her homeland.

More recently, there has been the incredible contribution to twenty-first century literature,
Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs, referring to three men – Leon Trotsky,
his Stalinist assassin Ramón Mercader, and a fictional down-and-out Cuban
writer/veterinarian who becomes acquainted with the aging Mercader who lived in Cuba
years after the killing. This magnificently written novel wrestles with the meaning of
Communism – with Trotsky representing the luminous hopes and Mercader representing
the horror and betrayal. Most significantly, this truly subversive work is not a piece of
émigré literature, but a prize-winning contribution by a well-known writer still living in
Cuba. I had nursed the hope that Padura might make an appearance at the conference,
but was told that he is currently in Japan.

So here I am in Cuba, experiencing contradictory realities in this amazing land. After

giving a taste of those, I will focus on at least some of which happened at the Trotsky
conference.

Experiencing Cuban realities

Even with the limitation of being only in Havana, it is clear that this is an amazingly
beautiful country, a tropical island embraced by the Caribbean Sea, with such sunny
(sometimes all-too-hot) days kissed by cooling breezes in the evenings. Modern and air-
conditioned buildings in Havana co-exist with picturesque older buildings, some nicely
renovated, some badly in need of renovation, still others seemingly beyond renovation.
The ongoing hostility of Cuba’s powerful Northern neighbor – whose military threats
blend with persistent and brutal efforts at economic strangulation – has combined with
the severance of a life-line from the now collapsed Communist Bloc, to ensure a
plummeting of the Cuban people’s quality of life.

The quality of life may be undermined, but it is hardly obliterated. One is struck, in this
urban landscape, by the bright colors (some faded in the non-tourist areas), as well as
by the fact that things have been run-down but persistently and creatively refurbished.
Very early morning, the water was off, another time the electricity interrupted, but not for
long. In this self-defined socialist society – with health care, education, housing, food
and jobs seemingly guaranteed to all, by a government dominated by the Cuban
Communist Party – one can see the prevalence, nonetheless, of a vibrant network, in
fact a seeming prevalence, of small private enterprises. At the same time, there are
maddening restrictions especially for those who have become addicted to the internet.
The complex dialectic of governmental policies – historically aggressive ones from the
US state, and defensive ones (some understandable, some not so much) from the
Cuban state result in restricted access to the internet. It is not impossible to get online,
but it is not easy. Early on I simply decided simply to avoid the frustrations and reconnect
to the world-wide web when I get back to the United States.
The centrality of tourism to the Cuban economy today – though assuming less
exploitative and extravagant forms than what existed before the Revolution – naturally
impacts culture and human relations. There is a pronounced friendliness to the many
foreigners walking around in Havana, sometimes tinged by an overly-friendly hustle: a
wonderful place to dine right around the corner, a chance to get black market cigars, an
opportunity to get candy for one’s grandchildren, and sometimes more. And there is, of
course, the double currency system – a certain form of Cuban peso for tourists (peso
convertible), equivalent in value to a US dollar, worth much more than the regular Cuban
peso (peso cubano). Meals at restaurants, trinkets, books, etc. are very reasonably
priced for a typical US consumer, but they are beyond the reach of the average Cuban
who must subsist on the peso cubanoof much lesser value. Yet the average Cuban can
secure fruits, vegetables, meats, at primitive markets, bread at bakeries, and medicines
in pharmacies for inexpensive peso cubano rates. The fact remains that a more or less
middle-income person from the blue-collar/white-collar US working class becomes
privileged, although the tourist dollars one spends are vital to the health of the Cuban
economy.

The several highways, the many crisscrossed avenues and streets, alleyways and
plazas of Havana are animated with the traffic of cars (with many cacharros, ingeniously
overhauled and brilliantly painted US vehicles from the pre-revolutionary 1950s), taxis
and buses, bicycle-powered cabs, semi-silent motor scooters, and masses of
pedestrians in this vibrant city of 2.1 million people. The populace seems, overall,
relaxed and generous, and the overall pace of life seems free and easy. This is not a
terrible city to get lost in – there are many helpful people, and finding one’s way often
leads to encounters with fascinating and pleasant sights. It feels safe, even when one is
walking at night on fairly dark and narrow streets. There are plenty of pot-holes, and
sometimes smells emanating from dumpsters and piles of garbage bags (huge garbage
trucks come around regularly), but such things are not overwhelming and are partially
offset by lovely parks and playgrounds. There are economic (and political) limitations,
certainly relative scarcity, relative poverty – but without the levels of hunger, illness,
illiteracy, despair that have been evident to me elsewhere. This is the triumph and legacy
of the Cuban Revolution.

I am struck by the multiracial, interracial, bi-racial blendings, reflected not simply through
the genetic make-up of the multitudes of individuals all around me, but especially in the
dynamism of blended cultures, with often truly beautiful young men and women making
wonderful music (jazz, Afro-Cuban, salsa, more) in the many cafés and on the streets,
with people of all ages sometimes breaking into dance. The pulsating national culture is
punctuated, no less in Havana than elsewhere, by street graffiti art, but also flows in
abundance in the richly layered collections – reflecting multiple styles and sensibilities –
of the Museo Nacionale de Belle Artes. Here, and not surprisingly in the
neighboring Museo de la Revolución, but also throughout Havana, pride in and
identification with the Cuban Revolution seem to be essential elements in the culture –
certainly fostered by the government, but also freely, consistently, and sometimes
enthusiastically embraced by many, many people. The prevalence of revolutionary
symbols seems to have little in common with the bureaucratic inundation of such stuff in
the restrictive societies that Eastern Europeans had to endure under Communist Party
dictatorships. Here things seem to be open, vibrant, animated by an incredible energy
and creativity, by nourishing humor, and by stubborn life-force.
Some of us are staying in lodgings that are part of a network – again – of private
enterprises known as casas particulares, in ways similar to bed-and-breakfasts. The
people who conscientiously oversee the apartments some of us live in are very down-to-
earth working people in very casual dress – two sisters and a brother. Aleida (age 74),
who seems to be in charge, speaks some English, and makes breakfasts (plenty of fruit,
an egg, toast, coffee) for Flo, or Florivaldo Menezes Filho – a Brazilian musician and
independent Trotskyist, a delightful comrade, a youthful 57-year-old – and myself; her
very outgoing sister Juana (72) makes casual conversation with us in Spanish (though
one morning she had to go out early for choir practice), and her older brother Eduardo
(76) invariably walks to and fro, for the most part silently, tending to some task or
another. Their father was an electrician, their mother a homemaker, and the family
supported the triumph of Fidel’s July 26th Movement. Almost sixty years ago, at the time
of the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, Eduardo was only 16, but was part of the
force that defeated the invaders at Playa Girón. When Aleida tells us this, Eduardo
pauses, his face suddenly animated with pride, his eyes flashing as he affirms that this is
so, adding a detail or two. Aleida also explained to me that the very appealing original art
works on the walls are from a longtime artist friend, Carlos Guzmán, and that the many
photos in her living room are of her three grandchildren (two living in Spain, one in
Havana) and her handsome son now living in Chile. Juana speaks with pride about her
own son, a doctor, and her now twenty-something grandson.

Of special interest to me, naturally, are Havana’s younger people, of whom I certainly
see many. I am staying across the way from a school, and especially in the morning I
hear animated sounds of many children. Sometimes I see students, in well-kept school
uniforms, which initially misled me when a Canadian labor historian, a good friend (and
now temporary neighbor) Bryan Palmer and I were visiting the Museo Nacionale de
Belle Artes. A contingent of well-behaved and very engaged young people entered,
wearing uniforms that included red kerchiefs, and I thought I was perhaps seeing a
Communist-connected youth group. I asked several of them the name of their group,
and some of them held up five fingers – saying “Five” and “Cinco.” Just that. It seemed a
very odd name for an organization, until I realized these were fifth graders on a field trip
to the art museum.

It is precisely the enthusiasm of younger people that brought me down to Cuba so much
earlier than I otherwise would have – traveling on my April 30 birthday in order to
participate in Havana’s massive May Day parade. This was at the urgent, almost
insistent, invitation of the young militant who has organized the Trotsky conference,
Frank García Hernández. He is 31 years old, but to me he still qualifies as one the
Havana’s “younger people.” He definitely has the energy and buoyancy of youth. Frank
is an earnest and very knowledgeable researcher at the Cuban Institute of Cultural
Research Juan Marinello. He insists that he is not a Trotskyist. Rather, he believes what
Trotsky offers must be integrated into the enriched and renewed body of Cuban Marxist
thought, animated by a revolutionary internationalism. He sees such a process as
essential for the future of Cuba.

Frank’s generous and soaring visions often seem to outpace the material realities and
practical possibilities. I am worried, based on several experiences, that the organization
of this specific conference may suffer from such tendencies, and from the possibility that
Frank is trying to do too much by himself, with insufficient back-up from friends and
comrades. We will see – the conference is still two days in the future as of this writing.
At the same time, some of Frank’s inclinations go very much in the right direction, such
as his insistence that it would be best if I came to participate with many thousands of
buoyant Cubans in the massive May Day march. Here indeed was a magnificent
outpouring of youth, as well as non-youth, and the mood seemed a blend of immense
national pride and exuberant support for the revolutionary ideals that had animated the
coming to power of the compañeros of the July 26th Movement in 1959 and the radical
course charted by Fidel and others in the years afterward. Surging waves of marchers –
cheering, singing, shouting rhythmic slogans – carried a multiplicity of signs and
banners, as well as Cuban flags and red flags as well. An especially vociferous and large
contingent of medical students, with other student contingents as well from various
schools, contingents from workplaces and unions, working people of various ages – but
especially the youth – from the neighborhoods, and bringing up the rear a very large and
powerful contingent of soldiers.

Frank held aloft a large red flag with hammer and sickle – signifying the alliance and
power of workers and peasants – as he led our little contingent of early conference
arrivals, along with a small cluster of Cuban friends and comrades, including his very
smart and outspoken young wife Lisbeth (a journalism student) who wore a big cast on
her broken leg and was being pushed in a wheelchair, holding a patchwork banner
containing the flags of many nations. What for me was an incredibly remarkable
development was the fact that we found ourselves in the midst of a gay liberation
contingent – its members (gays and their allies) exultingly waving large and little rainbow
flags signifying gay rights. Frank enthusiastically combined a large rainbow flag on the
same pole as the red flag, and all of us accepted the smaller flags being handed out to
us and joined with the hundreds of others, mostly young women and men, many
seeming to be students, who were waving them as they sang and chanted and danced.

Despite the enthusiasm, not all in this May Day celebration were supportive. Some
onlookers cheered our rainbow contingent, but others definitely did not. In the military
contingent a young woman took one of the little rainbow flags, handing it to a somewhat
older comrade or family member in an officer’s uniform, and he looked at her askance as
she giggled at her little joke. The fact remains that such an open and substantial gay
rights manifestation within the May Day march is hugely significant in a country where
persecution of homosexuality had been all-too-prevalent in past decades.

Of course, one cannot live by demonstrations and political struggle alone. Last night
Bryan and I went to a large club where the drinks were good but not too expensive, and
the big band sound created by very professional musicians really got the place jumping.
Especially impressive were two wonderful dancers, a relatively young man and woman,
each gorgeous, smart, and sexy – performers with a delicious sense of humor who got
many of the customers (except for cowards such as me) on the dance floor. It was great
fun.

On the following day it was time, at long last, to engage with the Caribbean. Flo and I
took a forty-minute bus ride to the beach. The water was clear turquoise, no waves, not
too cold, but luxuriously refreshing. It costs only a single peso cubano to go each way on
the bus, and the bus was packed. The trip out there wasn’t too bad, but the return trip
was even better after the revitalizing experience.

By the day before the conference, it seemed clear to me that the conference is likely to
be a success. We had a space (fortunately one that would be air-conditioned), and there
was now a dramatic influx into Havana of the many and diverse scheduled speakers
bristling with knowledge, ideas, interpretations, analyses, and dynamic personalities, and
having things to say. It was a given that there would not be enough time for them to say
everything they would want to (and at least many of them were sufficiently experienced
to know that would be so), but I still felt some worry that more might be packed into the
conference than could be contained in its three days.

Cuba’s first international academic meeting on Trotsky

The day before the May 6-9 conference was to begin, preparations were made in a fine
large room housed within the beautiful, Mexican oriented Museo de Beníto Juarez for
the next day’s sessions. Conference organizer Frank García Hernández and a team
from the Museo Casa de León Trotsky(headed by its energetic new director, Gabriela
Pérez Noriega) were busily putting up beautiful banners and an excellent photo exhibit.
Chairs were set up, there was a relatively good sound-system being put in place. It
seemed to me that things were looking good.

Omens seemed encouraging. The sun was shining reassuringly, and Frank’s wife
Lisbeth, recently been afflicted with a broken leg, was out of her cast, able to walk and
preparing to participate fully in the conference. As it turned out, the first day of the
conference had both its triumphant and problematical aspects.

Simply the fact that such a conference on Leon Trotsky was taking place in Havana
constituted an amazing achievement, guaranteed to have an intellectual ripple-effect and
contribute to the further development of a critical-minded Marxism, within Cuba and
beyond Cuba. One of the best qualities of this conference, as with many others that I
have enjoyed attending, was the opportunity for informal and very meaningful
interactions among activist scholars. Because of space restrictions, attendance was on
an invitation-only basis, with the number of applications far exceeding the 100 or so who
were in attendance. (I believe about 190 applications could not be granted.) There were
about 40 Cubans, and then substantial numbers of Latin Americans (many – a vibrant
contingent – from Brazil, also from Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Puerto Rico), a few from the
United States and Canada, a handful of Europeans. Some were seasoned veterans,
many were young.

On the other hand, there were a number of complications, some certainly related to the
relative inexperience of conference organizers, but many simply being unavoidable
given the limitation of resources – due especially to Cuba’s impoverished conditions, and
perhaps also to the disinterest, in some cases maybe even hostility, of certain entities
having resources. And yet there was enough support within Cuba’s institutions that,
combined with the very hard work especially of Frank but also of others, ensured the
conference’s success.

One of the problematical aspects was the fact that initially there was a single very
capable and hard-working translator who was able to do only serial translations from
English to Spanish and Spanish to English. Fortunately, a couple of conference
participants were able to pitch in to help with the translation efforts. Still, the absence of
simultaneous translation forced many speakers (already restricted to 20-minute time
limits) – on the spur of the moment and as best we could – to cut our talks by a third or
half, with some inevitably running over time. This, in turn, ran roughshod over the
schedule, which was consequently being revised as the conference unfolded.

In what follows, I will offer, more or less in order, a detailed summary – as best I can – of
the presentations at the conference (excluding special events: greetings read aloud from
Trotsky’s grandson, video greetings from Alan Wood, special presentations related to
just-published books by or about Trotsky, etc.).

Day 1

After greetings from the very supportive director of Museo de Beníto Juarez and also
from Frank, the first session began (only 30 minutes late), chaired by Frank. Entitled
“Trotsky: The Revolution Against the Bureaucracy,” it included: Eric Toussaint, Robert
Brenner, Suzi Weissman and I.

Toussaint (associated with the Fourth International) began with a sweeping overview of
the Lenin/Trotsky collaboration in the Russian Revolution and in efforts to push back
against the growing bureaucratic dictatorship, and then of the opposition that Trotsky
continued to lead in the struggle of what was beginning to crystallize as Stalinism – all of
which represented part of the revolutionary-democratic legacy within Marxism that has
also been rightly associated with Rosa Luxemburg.

I noted Trotsky’s assertion that Stalin represented a more serious assault on the socialist
and communist workers’ movements than Hitler – the Nazi leader’s assaults were from
the outside, whereas Stalin’s were from within, with practices that would pollute,
disorient and discredit the struggle for socialism. He went on to discuss the resistance in
Soviet Russia of Left Oppositionists associated with Trotsky, especially their heroic
struggles in the face of certain destruction in 1937-38, inside the Stalinist gulag.
Referring to Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy and related theory of
permanent revolution, and to the program of the Left Opposition – explications of these
were dropped from the talk for time reasons – he emphasized their relevance for today.
[Le Blanc’s presentation is appended at the conclusion of this article.]

Brenner apologized in advance for what was about to happen – knowing that he had
insufficient time to do what he had intended. He proceeded to use up most of his 20
minutes by offering a capable presentation of Trotsky’s theory of permanent. This drew a
round of applause, but it turned out to be only preliminary remarks for his main
argument. Acknowledging that he was out of time, he went on to provide a quick
summary of the argument that he had intended to make – which took another twenty
minutes, particularly because of some translation difficulties. He suggested that Trotsky’s
theory of permanent revolution had proved more than adequate up to 1917, but not so
much afterward. He suggested that the major contradiction within the new Soviet
Republic after 1917 was between workers’ power and peasant power (although what this
meant was, for many, not made clear). He asserted that the basic analysis of the
peasantry among the various Bolshevik current missed the fundamentally non-capitalist
nature of the peasantry as such, and that – among other things – this had created an
obstacle to the ability of Trotsky and Bukharin to join together in opposing Stalin – with
Trotsky wrongly believing that Bukharin’s soft policy toward the peasants would tilt in the
direction of empowering the rich peasants, who would constitute the base for a capitalist
restoration. For that matter, Stalin and others among the Bolsheviks were also inclined to
view the peasants with suspicion, as potentially a class enemy – with murderous
consequences when there was a shift to the forced collectivization of the land in 1929-
1930.

Weissman offered a penetrating examination of the vibrancy and breakdown of the

relationship between Leon Trotsky and Victor Serge. Trotsky was largely to blame, in
part due to an isolation from strong co-thinkers and from involvement in mass struggles
(a point buttressed by a quote from Serge’s recently published notebooks), resulting in
impaired judgment. Serge, she seems to feel, was in the right about pretty much
everything. Another factor was the infiltration of Trotskyist ranks by the Stalinist secret
service, and the disruptive dirty tricks such agents employed to turn Trotskyists against
each other. She also acknowledged the development of actual political disagreements
between the Serge and Trotsky as a factor in their fracturing relations – although time
prevented her from elaborating on these. She emphasized the importance of the two
men’s contributions to the revolutionary cause, and that the cause was weakened by
their split. (In the all-too-brief discussion, Bryan Palmer took the floor to suggest Serge’s
and Weissman’s contention regarding Trotsky’s isolation is overstated, citing as an
example the extensive and ongoing discussion and collaboration with leading militants of
the US Socialist Workers Party as being essential in Trotsky’s development of
documents for the founding conference of the Fourth International.)

The first panel – all of which was quite interesting to me (perhaps because I was a
panelist) – set a pattern that at least one conference participant with whom I spoke was
quite critical of. Following that pattern, most of the conference sessions went significantly
over time, involving what became for some an overwhelming number of presentations
(many of them short or even truncated, some stretching out to be rather long) with all too
little time for discussion – and sometimes there was no discussion time at all. The critical
participant argued that it would have been better to have a pre-determined and more
planned-out selection of significantly fewer and more substantial presentations, with
more time allocated for critical discussion.

I must confess that it was difficult for me to give the second session’s presentations
adequate attention and fair evaluation, perhaps because of a sudden energy drain
caused by my no longer having to be concerned about my own presentation. The panel
was a reorganized merger of portions of two different panels, with a very heavy
concentration of people who seemed to me to have a relationship to one or another
relatively small but pure-minded Trotskyist group. For me it had a droning quality – some
assured me that was caused by the acoustics in the room – punctuated by a little
liveliness here and there, but with very frequent intoning of factional references, and
seemingly innumerable repetition of words like “the Pabloites” and “Posadas” and I’m not
sure what else. (Pablo was a major figure in the Fourth International during a fierce
factional conflict in the 1950s, and Posadas led a somewhat divisive Latin American
current influential in the late 1950s and early 1960s.) A veteran Trotskyist from the post-
World War II period that we were being lectured about, old enough to be most of the
panelists’ grandmother, leaned over to me, shaking her head with disgust: “I lived
through that – they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

A third panel was postponed to the following day.

Day 2

The initial panel of the day contained presentations that attempted to cover far more
than could be accommodated in the amount of time allotted.

Presentations by two young Brazilian comrades (friends who were collaborating in their
efforts), both on fascinating topics, would have required a half a day for adequate
presentation and discussion. Clara de Freitas Figueiredo utilized slides to give a sense
of the Soviet artistic avant-garde – Mayakovsky, Rodschenko, Eisenstein and others,
combined in a radical artistic grouping, the Left Front of the Arts, referred to as LEF. LEF
defined artistic realism as dealing with the materiality of the construction of a work, not
as any attempt of an artistic work to create the illusion of reality. She asserted, without
time to make her case, that concerns of LEF’s concerns coincided with cultural issues
that Trotsky dealt with in his essays of the early 1920s, Problems of Everyday Life. She
also argued that the quasi-religious cult of Lenin, that developed after his death (despite
the opposition of Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, as well as Trotsky and some others) had a
profound and “liturgical” cultural impact that – if I understood her correctly – was a thorny
issue with which the avant-garde had to deal, but there was insufficient time for this idea
to be developed clearly.

No less frustrating was the inability (given the time constraints) of the next speaker,
Marcela Fleury, to develop her fascinating thesis on the correspondence between
Eisenstein’s first major film, “Strike” (1925), with Trotsky’s theorizations of uneven and
combined development and permanent revolution. She also utilized slides but would
have been better served by showing clips from the film – for which, of course, there
would not have been time. She appropriately emphasized the actual historical context of
the film – which included worker dissatisfaction with the capitalistic impacts of the New
Economic Policy, and also debates in the Communist International on the possibility of
bourgeois-democratic revolution in China (positing two separate and distinct
“democratic” and “socialist” stages of revolution – in contrast to Trotsky’s theory). She
argued that Eisenstein’s film – contrasting the collectivism and solidarity associated with
the working class and both the individualism and selfishness associated with the
capitalist class, and the incompatibility of the two – connected with the contemporary
sentiments and debates in Soviet Russia, tilting in Trotsky’s direction.

The others on the panel were more successful in dealing with the time constraints.

Armagan Tulunay gave a very capable presentation on Trotsky’s extremely productive

years in his Turkish exile after being expelled from the Soviet Union – maintaining
contacts in the USSR, launching the Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition,
extending the global reach of the Left Opposition to a proliferating number of countries,
developing ongoing analyses and commentary on world events, and writing the classic
works My Life, History of the Russian Revolution, and Permanent Revolution. She then
focused on the development of Trotskyist influence within the Turkish left – with an
especially intriguing discussion of what appeared to be impacts on the thought and work
of the great Turkish Communist and poet Nazim Hikmet, whose positions and poetry
veered away from Stalinist perspectives, more consistent with those of Trotsky at various
points. She noted that Hikmet expressed anti-Stalinist views well before the Khrushchev
revelations of 1956, and that – after years of exile in the USSR – visiting Cuba in the
early 1960s was a revitalizing experience for him.
Helmut Dahmer’s low-key presentation suggested an “aesthetic relationship” between
Trotsky and the great culture critic Walter Benjamin (who influenced many in German
intellectual circles, including those around the Frankfurt School, various other Marxist
intellectuals, and particularly the great playwright Bertolt Brecht). He traced the life of
Benjamin while noting striking similarities (despite the obvious and dramatic differences)
between Benjamin and Trotsky, insisting that there were affinities between the two. Both
felt the need to draw on historical materials to find a way out of the labyrinth of the
present. While Trotsky was probably unaware of Benjamin’s work, Dahmer offered
interesting points on the influence on Benjamin of Trotsky’s History of the Russian
Revolution and writings on Britain.

Cultural motifs – and also the unfortunate patterns in the conference indicated earlier –
were abundantly present in the next panel.

Flo Menezes offered remarks on Trotsky and art, literature and culture. He began with a
focus on the 1930 suicide of the revolutionary poet Mayakovsky, and Trotsky’s
comments that linked this act to negative pressures in the increasingly bureaucratic-
authoritarian atmosphere of Soviet Russia. This led to an assault on that analysis by
Anatoly Lunacharsky, a highly cultured Bolshevik of some prominence who was adapting
to (and thereby distorting himself) the now-dominant Stalinism. Discussing Marxist
conceptualizations of ideology and knowledge, Menezes emphasized that art and
politics cannot be understood in the same way. Basing himself on the work of Marx,
Trotsky was able to advance theorizations Marx had never had an opportunity to
develop. Terming the Stalinist-backed artistic development of “Socialist Realism” anti-
Marxist, Trotsky – while not uncritical of surrealism – allied himself with surrealists in
efforts to push back Stalinism’s deadening cultural incursions. Menezes was about to
enter into discussion about the Brazilian Marxist theorist and Left Oppositionist Marío
Pedrosa – at which he ran out of time and concluded his presentation. Fortunately, the
next speaker – Edson Luiz de Oliviera – dealt with Pedrosa, with a focus on the Brazilian
Trotskyist’s appreciation for the work of the great German artist Käthe Kollwitz. Yunier
Mena engaged, in his presentation on The Revolution Betrayed, with cultural
developments in the early Soviet Republic up to the mid-1930s. The one presentation on
this mostly cultural panel that was not like the others came from Dan La Botz, who
offered an energetic and lengthy biography of Boris Souvarine, a short-term Left
Oppositionist coming out of the French Communist Party who first supported, then
clashed with, then broke from Trotsky in the course of the 1920s. La Botz’s contention
was that Souvarine was superior to Trotsky in regard to his analysis of the Russian
peasantry, his analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy, and his positions on democracy in the
Soviet Union and the Communist movement.

The next panel on Trotsky’s theoretical impact was as uneven as many others – some
well-developed and clearly presented presentations, others seeming more like a work-in-
progress. What the session did not amount to, however, was a systematic overview of
Trotsky’s theoretical work; instead, consistent with the organization of the conference as
a whole, there were a number of different presentations reflecting the particular
inclinations of the presenter – although many were certainly of interest (at least to me).

Two speakers explored Trotsky’s impact on and interconnection with Italian

revolutionaries. Antonella Marazzi explained that her presentation was part of a bigger
project in which she is engaged. Noting that Lenin and Trotsky became famous
throughout Italy with the Russian Revolution of 1917, she referenced the massive
working-class upsurge that rocked Italy in 1919-1920 and noted that splits in the
country’s large Socialist Party resulted in the formation of a substantial Italian
Communist Party. Prominent figures in this included Amadeo Bordiga (a very influential,
but somewhat ultra-left figure), Giuseppe Serrati (a left-wing leader of the Socialist Party,
drawn to the new Communists, but not fitting easily among them), and ultimately the
important personage of Antonio Gramsci. The rise and onslaught of Benito Mussolini’s
fascist movement naturally constituted a destructive context for subsequent
developments. This occurred in the period when both Trotsky and Bordiga were being
marginalized in the Communist movement (the speaker felt that Bordiga’s
marginalization was partly self-inflicted). Unity explorations between the two came to
nothing, as Trotsky’s overtures ran into the wall of Bordiga’s sectarianism. Gramsci, on
the other hand, developed some positions similar to Trotsky’s, but he never chose to
connect with the Trotskyist movement. The speaker went on to discuss the leading
Italian Trotskyist, Pietro Tresso, and then her time was up. The question of Trotsky and
Gramsci was revisited by the next speaker, Robert Marazzi, who emphasized that
Gramsci was far from being the abstract theorist presented in various academic studies.
Rather, his militant theorizations were inseparable from his role as an activist leader in
the Communist movement. In the complex swirl of the 1920s, Gramsci momentarily
approached Trotsky’s position, then pulled back. But he never became a Stalinist, and
from prison he absolutely rejected the disastrously sectarian “third period” orientation of
Stalinism.

The other speakers on the panel were more Trotsky-focused. Alex Steiner offered the
most thorough and elaborated presentation, providing an informative and detailed
discussion of Trotsky’s philosophical and theoretical notebooks, and how these
connected to a wide range of subjects – from Hegelian dialectics and evolutionary
theory, aspects of the natural and physical sciences, and more contemporary political
issues of the revolutionary movement. Niloofar Moazzami and Morgana Romao focused,
respectively, on Trotsky’s political theorizations regarding the dynamics of revolution and
the development of the Soviet bureaucracy. Moazzami’s attention was drawn to Trotsky’s
classic History of the Russian Revolution, which showed the overthrow of the Tsarist
autocracy resulted in the unstable alliance and growing conflict between two power-
blocs, one dominated by bourgeois forces, the other consisting of a worker-peasant
combination. She then suggested the value of comparing Trotsky’s analysis with works
of other scholarship on revolution, such as Barrington Moore’s classic of historical
sociology, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Of course, the worker-peasant
triumph, with the October Revolution culminating in the creation of the Soviet Republic,
soon led to crisis. Trotsky saw the early Soviet Republic, according to Romao, as a
society in transition to socialism – but the problems facing it (economic
underdevelopment, devastating impacts of world war and civil war, the relative isolation
in a hostile capitalist world, etc.) caused it to develop into what became known as
Stalinism, with its extreme bureaucratic-authoritarian distortions.

Day 3

The first session of the final day opened with two discussions on the evolution of
Trotsky’s thought in the years of his Mexican exile. Daniel Perseguim, commenting that
Trotsky’s ongoing contributions to a variety of journals over the years (in a sense, his
work as “a journalist”) reveal an evolution of thinking and sensibilities, from the first issue
of Iskra in 1900 to the last issue of the Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition. This
has framed Perseguim’s own research project of tracing Trotsky’s writings in his final
period of exile, in Mexico, within which the final issues of the Bulletin of the
Opposition (from number 54-55 in 1937 to number 87 in 1941) were published. Trotsky’s
emigration to Mexico provided a relative freedom that, according to Perseguim, changed
the relationship of forces on the Left to the detriment of the Kremlin. One source of
enrichment in the thought of Trotsky and his co-thinkers was the influence of the
indigenous cultures of the Americas – an important assertion for which there was an
unfortunate lack of time to develop. A clear example of evolution in Trotsky’s thinking on
the relationship of art and revolutionary politics was provided by comparing a formulation
in his 1924 work Literature and Revolution and the 1938 manifesto he drafted for the
International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI), the latter emphasizing
the absolute necessity for autonomous artistic creativity missing from his writings of
fourteen years earlier. Perseguim argued that further systematic research into Trotsky’s
writings during his final exile might change our understanding of this revolutionary
theorist.

Anti-imperialism and the struggle for political independence of the working class was the
dual focus of the presentation by José Alberto Fonseca Ornelas. The approach
developed in the mid-1930s by the Communist International under Stalin’s domination,
the popular front (or people’s front), was – according to Fonseca (basing himself on
Trotsky’s critical analysis) not a tactic for struggle against fascism, as presented by
Stalinists at the time, but rather a crime leading to working-class defeat. It replaced the
goal of working-class victory over capitalism with subordination by the labor movement
to “progressive” capitalists, who would advance positive reforms in exchange for
working-class political support. One example of how this worked out in practice was the
backing by the Cuban Communist Party in the 1940s for the regime of Fulgencio Batista,
aligned as it was, during World War II, in the anti-Hitler coalition. Of course, Batista – tied
in with US imperialism – ultimately headed up the corrupt and murderous dictatorship
that was overthrown by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Another example was support in
the 1930s and 1940s given by the Mexican Communist Party to the ruling nationalist PRI
(Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and its predecessors. Fonseca noted that Trotsky
supported the radical-nationalist Lázaro Cardenas regime in its opposition to imperialism
and its progressive national reforms – but did not favor electoral support to the party of
Cárdenas. He championed, instead, the creation of an independent party of the working
class. The Mexican Communist policy eventually resulted in a debilitating subordination
of the powerful trade union movement to Mexico’s capitalist state, dramatically eroding
the working-class power as the PRI came to be dominated by more corrupt elements
than Cárdenas.

What may have been an excellent exposition by Kaveh Bovieri on the historiography of
Trotsky was actually – I am sorry to say – impossible for me to hear (others noted the
same difficulty) due to problems with acoustics.

Héctor Puenta Sierra began by making the important point that Trotsky represented a
continuity with classical Marxism. He then repeated the earlier assertion by Suzi
Weissman regarding a judgment-impairing isolation that, he argued, resulted in a
complex and problematical legacy, particularly in regard to Trotsky’s development of the
conceptualization of the USSR under the Stalin. Puenta argued that it was a problem to
identify this as a bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state in the face of the
thoroughgoing political expropriation of the working class, and the complete absence of
workers’ democracy. The reality was resolved in a more satisfactory manner, he
suggested, through the development by Tony Cliff of the analysis of the USSR as a
variant of capitalism – state capitalism. Cliff’s analysis was superior to Trotsky’s, he
contended, in preventing one from seeing the collapse of the USSR as the collapse of
socialism.

The session’s final presentation was from Gabriela Pérez Noriega, Director of the Museo
Casa de León Trotsky, who hailed the conference as an historic event. Before continuing
with her presentation, she showed a specially-made video in which Trotsky’s grandson,
Esteban Volkow (in part responding to questions from Alan Wood), greeted the
conference, referred very positively to Padura’s novel about Trotsky and his
assassin, The Man Who Loved Dogs, and commented on the importance of his
grandfather’s ideas. After the short video, Pérez (citing the Russian’s historian Dmitri
Volkoganov findings of materials in the Stalin archives) emphasized that the dictator was
animated by great fear of Trotsky, which is why he sent an agent with an ice-axe to
destroy one of the greatest brains of revolutionary Marxism. She observed that such
enemies continued to slander Trotsky viciously down to the present day, pointing to the
recent anti-Trotsky film series produced by right-wing filmmakers in Russia and
distributed globally through Netflix. Those at the conference and others, with their own
serious work, were pushing back against such assaults. Pérez then discussed the
development of the Museo Casa de León Trotsky, noting that it had in recent years
added to its mission an emphasis on defending the right to asylum for the oppressed
and the persecuted – which had been central to the last chapter of Trotsky’s struggle.
Revitalizing the Museo, this commitment was reflected in its investigations of and
support for the recent migration movement that had surged through Mexico. Inviting
everyone to visit the Museo Casa de León Trotsky, she concluded with a quote from
Trotsky’s final testament: “Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil,
oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.”

In the truncated discussion period, there were brief and bitter interchanges (of which
there had been some rumblings on Day 2). In one of the milder interventions, responding
to the presentation on Tony Cliff, I insisted that regardless of what one thought of the
theory of state capitalism – and he expressed his own rejection of it – one must
recognize that no Trotskyist, and certainly none at that conference, saw the collapse of
the USSR as the collapse of socialism, or identified Stalinism as a variant of socialism:
Stalinism is the opposite of socialism. Utilizing her prerogative as the chair of this panel,
Caridad Massón (of the Cuban Institute of Cultural Research Juan Marinello) concluded
the session with an impassioned admonition. Noting the existence of contradictory
perspectives among a number of the presenters, she emphasized that contradictions in
fact generate development. It is a mistake to see Marxism as representing something
that is singular, and it is ill-served by taking a stance of dogmatic leftism – there are
diverse currents of thought and Marxism can take in all. She insisted that conference
participants should listen to each other and discuss with respect, working together to
study reality and working together in the struggle for a better world.

Day 3 continued: Building revolutionary struggles in the Americas

The next very substantial set of presentations had a richness to which I cannot possibly
do justice in this already lengthy report.

Reviewing the context and specifics of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, veteran
Canadian Trotskyist Ernest Tate emphasized the internationalism that has been decisive
in the efforts of Trotskyist mainstream, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist action most of all
– focusing not on explication of and disputes over revolutionary texts, but rather on
mobilizing practical action to defend and advance actual revolutions. He offered three
examples of this in his own experience: (1) defense of the 1959 Cuban Revolution,
through the development of Fair Play for Cuba Committees and multiple other efforts in
the early 1960s; (2) defense of the Vietnamese Revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s,
through recurrent mass anti-war mobilizations in North America and globally, which
helped to limit the power of US war makers; (3) defense of the Algerian Revolution in the
1950s and 1960s, including not only anti-imperialist mobilizations but also helping to get
weapons and supplies to the revolutionaries.

Simón Rodríguez’s discussion of permanent revolution in Latin America emphasized the

necessity of building, throughout the continent, revolutionary organizations based on a
revolutionary program, engaged in struggles of today, recognizing that that no elements
of the bourgeoisie of the various countries can play a consistently progressive or
democratic role, invariably functioning instead as the tail of imperialism.

Drawing on experience from his native Puerto Rico, Rafael Bernabé noted – consistent
with the previous presentation – that the rise and development of US imperialism has
been central to all that has unfolded in modern Latin American history. It is essential to
analyze the particularity of US imperialism, which, as a latecomer in the competition of
capitalist economic expansionism, has presented itself as a democratic force, in contrast
to the older colonial empires. It functions differently, dominating through economic rather
than political structures, and always claiming to be dedicated to “liberating” someone. In
Puerto Rico, this facilitated the seduction of various reformers – often very militant in
popular mobilizations against various forms of oppression, but also inclined to build faith
in the United States as a progressive ally. The Puerto Rican Communist Party – the
central force in building Puerto Rico’s powerful labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s
– was committed to building an alliance with the “progressive” and “democratic”
imperialism of the United States, particularly in the struggle against fascism during World
War II. To facilitate this, the Puerto Rican Communist Party liquidated itself, which
consequently facilitated the collapse of the labor movement. An economic boom
combined with Cold War anti-Communism resulted in substantial political disorientation.
Bernabé recalled that Trotsky had emphasized the need, in the Americas, for an
“Americanized” Bolshevism to confront and defeat American imperialism. Instead, a
bureaucratized Bolshevism (in the form of Stalinism) ended up confronting American
imperialism – and had proved incapable of bringing victory. The struggle must continue,
based on lessons learned from the past.

Bryan Palmer, drawing on new research for the upcoming second volume of his James
P. Cannon biography, discussed the relationship of Cannon and another founder of US
Trotskyism, Max Shachtman, with each other and with Trotsky, from 1928 through the
1930s. Cannon has had an misleading reputation of being provincial, weak on
internationalism, and “innocent of theory,” while his former young protégé Shachtman
has often been seen as cosmopolitan and theoretically sophisticated. Trotsky’s
assessment in the early 1930s was that Shachtman was overly inclined to place
“chumminess” above principle and too often unreliable on political matters; eventually he
placed greater trust in Cannon. In the early 1930s a generational divide had opened up
among US Trotskyists, with a younger group headed by Shachtman impatient and
hostile toward the older Cannon – bringing to mind a Freudian sons-slay-the-father
dynamic. Shachtman was soon reconciled with Cannon, a close and fruitful cooperation
being generated by several major developments: the New York hotel workers strike; the
Minneapolis teamsters strikes; the struggles against fascism and Stalinism; merger with
another left-wing group headed by A.J. Muste; a battle against internal sectarian
tendencies; and a decision to merge the US Trotskyists into the Socialist Party. Yet
differences between the two reemerged: Shachtman was inclined to focus on
negotiations and maneuvers with an organized tendency of militants in the Socialist
Party (with hopes of perhaps taking over the Socialist Party), while Cannon (anticipating
a split) preferred to build Socialist Party branches outside the control of the Socialist
Party leadership, and helping advance labor struggles in California and Minnesota.
When Trotskyists were – as Cannon anticipated – ejected from the Socialist Party, they
took many labor militants and youth with them to form the Socialist Workers Party, that
was able to play a leading role in helping to found the Fourth International in 1938.

A detailed, critical-minded, finely nuanced analytical account of an almost-revolution in

Bolivia in the early 1950s was provided by S. Sándor John, with useful focus on both
contributions from and mistakes of Bolivian Trotskyists. (Rather than trying to
summarize, I will share the comrade’s contact information, since he promised to send to
anyone interested the full, detailed paper on which his presentation was
based: s_an@msn.com.)

A need to connect with Lindy Laub, the comrade who is working on the full-length
documentary on Leon Trotsky – “The Most Dangerous Man in the World” (45 minutes of
which had earlier been shown to enthusiastic conference participants) – caused me to
miss the conference’s fascinating final panel. This was focused on Cuba, and I am told it
was excellent. According to the program, this is what I missed: Ricardo Márquez on Julio
Antonio Mella (1903-1929), founding leader of the Cuban Communist Party, martyred in
1929, who sympathized with the Left Opposition; Caridas Massón on a founding leader
of Cuban Trotskyism – black working-class militant Sandalio Junco (1894-1942); Rafael
Acosta on the Last Days of Cuban Trotskyism after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution;
Burak Sayim on Trotsky, Che Guevara and Permanent Revolution.

Unplanned was an enthusiastic, more or less harmoniously multi-lingual singing of the

“Internationale.” I noticed a wonderful young comrade who did not sing, looking askance
at the weirdness of it all, while the older singers around her were, in contrast, especially
loving it.

Concluding reflections

With the upcoming eightieth anniversary year of Trotsky’s death in 2020, there are
discussions taking place about the possibility of organizing conferences and other
observances in various cities around the world. This year’s Havana conference gives a
vibrant sense of what can be done. It is worth learning from the experience. Worth
considering, for example, is my friend’s suggestion – noted earlier – that a different
organization of such a conference might be considered: a pre-determined and more
planned-out selection of significantly fewer and more substantial presentations, with
more time allocated for critical discussion. On the other hand, there is something to be
said for providing opportunities for younger presenters to present their ideas and their
scholarship – going more in the direction of what happened at the Havana conference.

As I have been completing this report, I have been struck – despite limitations I have
alluded to – by the breadth and richness of the content that I have been describing. Such
a gathering would have had value anywhere. The fact that it was held in Havana has
great significance. Many participants seemed to feel a profound affinity between all that
is vibrant and healthy in the Cuban Revolution (and in Cuban society today) and the
revolutionary democracy and internationalism that are central to the Marxist
theorizations developed by Trotsky. A gathering of such a diverse number of activist-
scholars is impressive. For the conference organizers in Cuba – operating with quite
modest resources – the achievement is even more impressive.

Even had I not been there, I would have been excited and grateful that such an event
could take place. To have been able to actually be there and participate feels like an
immense privilege. But beyond such individual reactions, there is the obvious question
about what is the meaning of what happened in Havana. From a political standpoint it
seems obvious that amid the deepening crises of our various societies throughout the
world, growing numbers of people are searching for answers to the multiple and complex
questions with which we are confronted. Much of what Trotsky and his various co-
thinkers have had to offer in the past seem, for such people today, to provide insights
and possible starting-points. This makes it likely that such gatherings and discussions
will multiply and be fruitful.

The darker the night, the brighter the star: Trotsky and the struggle against
Stalinism

The following is Paul Le Blanc’s presentation to international conference on Leon

Trotsky, Havana, Cuba.

“The darker the night, the brighter the star,” the title of the final volume of Tony Cliff’s
biography of Leon Trotsky, was taken from another book – The Darker the Night, the
Brighter the Stars by Friedrich Schlotterbeck, a young working-class Communist in
Germany when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. His 1947 memoir on resistance to Nazi
tyranny recounts the heroism and horrific destruction of comrades, friends, and family
members who remained committed to socialist and communist ideals.

But Trotsky has told us: “No one, not excluding Hitler, has dealt socialism such deadly
blows as Stalin. This is hardly astonishing since Hitler has attacked the working-class
organizations from without, while Stalin does it from within. Hitler assaults Marxism.
Stalin not only assaults but prostitutes it. Not a single principle has remained unpolluted,
not a single idea unsullied. The very names of socialism and communism have been
cruelly compromised … Socialism signifies a pure and limpid social system which is
accommodated to the self-government of the toilers. Stalin’s regime is based on a
conspiracy of the rulers against the ruled. Socialism implies an uninterrupted growth of
universal equality. Stalin has erected a system of revolting privileges. Socialism has as
its goal the all-sided flowering of individual personality. When and where has man’s
personality been so degraded as in the U.S.S.R.? Socialism would have no value apart
from the unselfish, honest and humane relations between human beings. The Stalin
regime has permeated social and personal relationships with lies, careerism and
treachery.” So wrote Trotsky in 1937. And those animated by such beliefs in Soviet
Russia were repressed no less ruthlessly than the German Communists had been.

The Left Oppositionists that Trotsky led persisted in their struggle after his expulsion
from the Soviet Union, and they were rounded up and sent to Siberian prison camps.
“When you can no longer serve the cause to which you have dedicated your life – you
should give it your death.” These were the words of Adolf Joffe, one of Trotsky’s close
comrades who had committed suicide as a protest against Stalinism in 1927. His young
wife Maria was arrested in 1929. As the situation of the condemned Oppositionists
worsened by degrees, she held out, and when it became the horrific “one long night” that
she describes in her memoir, she was one of the few who somehow survived to tell what
happened. She was sustained by the core belief: “It is possible to sacrifice your life, but
the honor of a person, of a revolutionary – never.”

Pressures to give in were intense, when capitulation could mean freedom, while
remaining in Opposition meant never-ending jail and exile. By 1934, Trotsky’s close
comrade Christian Rakovsky himself was ready to capitulate, his views later recounted
by Maria’s step-daughter, Nadezhda Joffe, in whom he confided and whom he won over:
“His basic thoughts were that we had to return to the party in any way possible. He felt
that there was undoubtedly a layer in the party which shared our views at heart, but had
not decided to voice their agreement. And we could become a kind of common sense
core and be able to accomplish something. Left in isolation, he said, they would strangle
us like chickens.”

Some imprisoned male Oppositionists who rejected this logic made three toasts on New
Year's Day: “The first toast was to our courageous and long-suffering wives and women
comrades, who were sharing our fate. We drank our second toast to the world
proletarian revolution. Our third was to our people's freedom and our own liberation from
prison.”

Instead, they would soon be transferred to the deadly Siberian labor camps into which
hundreds of thousands of victims of the 1935-39 purges were sent as Stalinist
repression tightened throughout the country. Arrested while in Moscow in 1936,
Secretary of the Palestinian Communist Party Joseph Berger later remembered the Left
Oppositionists he met during his own ordeal: “While the great majority had ‘capitulated,’
there remained a hard core of uncompromising Trotskyists, most of them in prisons and
camps. They and their families had all been rounded up in the preceding months and
concentrated in three large camps -- Kolyma, Vorkuta, and Norilsk.... The majority were
experienced revolutionaries who had … joined the Opposition in the early twenties....
Purists, they feared contamination of their doctrine above all else in the world.... When I
accused the Trotskyists of sectarianism, they said what mattered was ‘to keep the
banner unsullied.’”

Another survivor's account recalls “the Orthodox Trotskyists” of the Vorkuta labor camp
who “were determined to remain faithful to their platform and their leaders. … Even
though they were in prison, they continued to consider themselves Communists; as for
Stalin and his supporters, ‘the apparatus men,’ they were characterized as renegades
from communism.” Along with their supporters and sympathizers, they numbered in the
thousands in this area. As word spread of Stalin's show trials designed to frame and
execute the Old Bolshevik leaders, and as conditions at the camp deteriorated, “the
entire group of ‘Orthodox’ Trotskyists” came together. The eyewitness remembers the
speech of Socrates Gevorkian: “It is now evident that the group of Stalinist adventurers
have completed their counter-revolutionary coup d'etat in our country. All the progressive
conquests of our revolution are in mortal danger. Not twilight shadows but those of the
deep black night envelop our country. . . . No compromise is possible with the Stalinist
traitors and hangmen of the revolution. But before destroying us, Stalin will try to
humiliate us as much as he can. . . . We are left with only one means of struggle in this
unequal battle: the hunger strike. . . .’ The great majority of prisoners, regardless of
political orientation, followed this lead.”

Lasting from October 1936 to March 1937, the 132-day hunger strike was powerfully
effective and forced the camp officials to give in to the strikers’ demands. But then, Maria
Joffe was told by an Oppositionist who had survived, “everything suddenly came to an
end.” In 1938 the Trotskyists of Vorkuta were marched out in batches – men, women,
children over the age of twelve – into the surrounding arctic wasteland. “Their names
were checked against a list and then, group by group, they were called out and machine-
gunned,” writes Joseph Berger. “Some struggled, shouted slogans and fought the
guards to the last.” According to a witness, as one group of about a hundred was led out
of the camp to be shot, “the condemned sang the ‘Internationale’ joined by the voices of
hundreds of prisoners remaining in camp.”

This expanded into what Maria Joffe calls “the complete destruction of the October and
Civil War generation, ‘infected by Trotskyist heresy …’” The so-called “Trotskyist heresy”
analyzed how a profoundly democratic workers and peasants revolution, inspired by the
deepest socialist idealism, could turn into one of the worst tyrannies in human history.
Trotsky’s analysis clearly emerges from the fundamental analysis of Karl Marx eighty
years earlier. It is also inseparable from the basics of Trotsky’s own theory of permanent
revolution.

[In the presentation I was going to give, I intended to discuss Trotsky’s analysis of the
USSR, his theory of permanent revolution, and the program of the Left Opposition. But
this has already been discussed in the presentation by Eric Toussaint and can be found
in the longer version of this talk that I’ve already handed out to you. In the interest of
saving time, given the extra time it is taking to translate, I will cut that out of these
remarks. I want to conclude with a comment about the meaning of it all – the so-called
“heresy” and the program for which these wonderful comrades struggled and gave their
lives.]

The relevance of this for today brings us back to this talk’s title. When we look up at
night, the blackness of the universe is vividly punctuated by the stars, whose glow has
traveled light-years for us to see. Even though some of those stars no longer exist, we
see them shining from where we are. And their wondrous illumination may help us find
our way in the dark terrain of our own times.

Clara Zetkin’s defense of the united front

Clara Zetkin in the 1920s

By John Riddell

May 7, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's
Marxist Essays and Commentary Blog — An internationally respected revolutionary leader since
the 1880s and a close collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) became part of
the newly formed Communist International (Comintern) in 1919. In 1921, she joined with
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky in helping to win the Comintern to an effort to unify
working people and their organizations in joint struggle against the evils of capitalism. This policy
was termed the “united front.” (See “Clara Zetkin’s Struggle for the United Front”.)

Two years later, the German Communist leader applied this policy to the challenge of unity
against fascism in a report adopted by the Comintern. (See Zetkin, “The Struggle Against
Fascism” and “Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and Win“.)

Yet in 1924 the visionary policy championed by Zetkin was overturned. Zetkin spent the last
decade of her life as an honoured but effectively silenced dissident as the Comintern decayed
into Stalinist degeneration.
Zetkin’s efforts to uphold united-front policy during these years is outlined below. The text that
follows first appeared in Clara Zetkin, Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, ed.
Mike Taber and John Riddell, Haymarket Books, 2017.[1] See also “Part 2: Years of Stubborn
Resistance, 1928-1933“.

Zetkin’s defeat at the Fifth World Congress

Twelve months after the Comintern’s adoption of Clara Zetkin’s report and resolution on fascism,
this position was overturned by its Fifth World Congress, held in June-July 1924.

During the next few years, as the International came increasingly under the domination of a
bureaucratic apparatus headed by Joseph Stalin, its view on fascism and the united front shifted
several times, without ever returning fully to its 1923 position. Then in 1928 the Comintern
embraced a sectarian stance, opposed in principle to antifascist unity of any kind with Social
Democratic and other non-Communist currents in the workers’ movement, whom it labeled
“social fascists.” This refusal, combined with a corresponding rejection of united action by
leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), opened the door to Hitler’s assumption of power in
Germany in January 1933.

Although increasingly burdened by illness and loss of vision, Zetkin remained an active member
of the Comintern during these years. The International’s officials blocked her from openly
expressing her views on fascism and the united front. Nonetheless, she found ways to indicate
her disagreement on these questions. In August 1932 she managed to express the essence of
her 1923 report on fascism in a speech to the German Reichstag (parliament). When Zetkin died
a year later at the age of 75, she was one of the few leading figures within the Communist
International who was still attempting to stand on the ground of the Comintern under Lenin.

About-face on workers’ unity

In his opening report to the Fifth Comintern Congress in 1924, its president, Gregory Zinoviev,
abandoned Zetkin’s analysis of the nature and dynamics of fascism by claiming that Social
Democracy was itself closely linked to this antiworker movement. “The Social Democratic Party
has become a wing of fascism,” he declared. “The fascists are the right hand and the Social
Democrats the left hand of the bourgeoisie."[2] This ultraleft position excluded the possibility of
united action involving both Communist and Social Democratic workers—the very error that had
crippled resistance to Italian fascism during its rise to power in 1921–22.
Zinoviev also criticized attempts to promote the cause of workers’ unity in action by challenging
and, when appropriate, discussing with Social Democrats on a leadership level—an approach
endorsed by the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922 as a necessary component of united-front
policy. He also redefined the Comintern’s call for a workers’ and peasants’ government in such a
way as to rule out any possibility of a governmental coalition with Social Democrats.

Despite opposition by Zetkin and Karl Radek, another central Comintern leader, Zinoviev’s views
were adopted by the 1924 congress.

Rise of Stalinism

The underlying cause of the turnabout in Comintern policy was the rise of a privileged and self-
serving bureaucratic layer within the Russian Communist Party and a resulting factional division
in its leadership. In 1923, a Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky and supported by Radek renewed
the antibureaucratic struggle launched by Lenin in 1922.[3] Lenin’s political activity had been cut
short by a stroke in March 1923; he died in January 1924. While Lenin was incapacitated,
Zinoviev was part of a bloc with Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin to take over the Communist
Party’s leadership and to oppose Trotsky. By the end of 1923, Trotsky and Radek had been thrust
aside from their central leadership role in the Comintern.[4]

Zinoviev, who had initially held doubts about the united-front policy,[5] threw his authority in
1924 behind an ultraleft shift, particularly with regard to Germany. With Lenin gone and Trotsky
and Radek sidelined, Zetkin was left as the only leading proponent of united-front policy in the
broader Comintern leadership.

The debate at the Communist International’s Fifth Congress focused on drawing a balance sheet
of the KPD’s participation in the massive workers’ upsurge in Germany in 1923, which the
Comintern central leadership believed could have led to a successful proletarian revolution. After
months of intense struggle in Germany, capitalist rule was restabilized by year-end, with the
Communist Party in inglorious retreat.

Debate over the causes of this defeat spread to the Russian party. Trotsky and the Left
Opposition accused the Comintern Executive (ECCI) of failing to see the revolutionary potential
of the situation until it was too late. Zinoviev sought to pin responsibility on the German party’s
main leaders, Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, who like Zetkin were strong advocates
of broad united action against fascism.
In 1924 the ECCI under Zinoviev threw its support behind the ultraleft current in Germany led by
Ruth Fischer and endorsed its retreat from united-front initiatives. Meanwhile, the Comintern
Executive forced all its parties into alignment with the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin “troika” in the
Russian party. Zetkin kept silent on the Russian dispute, refusing to endorse the “troika,” but she
did speak up on the united-front debate in Germany.

Zetkin at the Fifth Congress

Both Zetkin and Radek took the floor at the Fifth Congress to strongly oppose Zinoviev’s
proposals to reverse Comintern positions on the united front and other questions. Most of
Zetkin’s two-hour speech was devoted to the defeat in Germany. While making forceful criticisms
of the German party’s leadership, she also pointed to the ECCI’s responsibility and argued that
the German working class had not been ready in the autumn of 1923 for a showdown struggle
for power.

The last half-hour of Zetkin’s speech dealt with the united front, the underlying issue behind the
disagreement on fascism. The basic precondition for united-front efforts, she explained, was the
Communist Party’s unity, independence, and close ties to the masses. In that framework,
negotiations with Social Democratic leaders were sometimes appropriate—provided that we
meet with them “not to do them honor” but to “increase the pressure on them toward action”
and win “an even broader range of their supporters to our banner.”

Delegates should not reject such leadership meetings on principle, she said. They should hold
firm to the decisions of the Fourth Congress (1922) on this point and not be misled by latter-day
reinterpretations of them.[6] Despite Zetkin’s appeal, the Fifth Congress endorsed Zinoviev’s
proposals.

Although sharply criticized at the congress, Zetkin was still publicly honored by the Comintern in
the years that followed as a symbol of revolutionary intransigence. She often penned greetings
or appeals of a ceremonial nature, but was not allowed to speak or write publicly on
controversial topics. The Communist Women’s Movement and its journal Die Kommunistische
Fraueninternationale (The Communist Women’s International), in which she was the driving
force, were shut down in 1925 and 1926 respectively.

Zetkin was severely afflicted by illness during the last decade of her life. Her lengthy periods of
treatment outside Moscow sometimes served, according to her biographer Tânia Puschnerat, as
a form of quarantine to keep her away from important political occasions.[7]
Defending unity in struggle

Zinoviev broke with Stalin in 1925 and went into opposition, joining the next year with Trotsky,
Kamenev, and Radek in the United Opposition, which challenged the tightening grip of Stalin’s
bureaucratic control in the Soviet Union and his rejection of an internationalist perspective
under the guise of building “socialism in one country.”

The Ruth Fischer leadership in the German party (KPD), aligned with Zinoviev, was overturned at
the end of 1926. During the interval that followed, Zetkin regained limited freedom of action
within the Comintern leadership. In 1927 she became once more a member of the KPD Central
Committee; she was removed two years later.

In October 1927, Zetkin sent the KPD Central Committee a powerful defense of the united-front
policies she had helped develop in 1921–23. She called on the party to propose conditional
support to a Social Democratic government in the German federal state of Hamburg, where the
KPD and SPD together held a parliamentary majority, on the basis of an agreed program of
measures in workers’ interests.

Zetkin’s letter also defended the KPD’s entry in 1923 into a short-lived SPD-KPD government in
the German state of Saxony, which had been sharply attacked within the KPD and the
International.

“We can be sure that the broad masses have a quite incorrect view of what such a government
could achieve,” she wrote, “but this is all the more reason to call for it.” Otherwise, she believed,
the SPD leaders will find it all the easier to reject governing with KPD support and to form a
coalition instead with the openly bourgeois parties—its standard procedure during the years of
Germany’s 1919–33 Weimar Republic.[8]

At this time, Zetkin was aligned with Nikolai Bukharin, then the Comintern’s president. Zetkin
supported Bukharin and Stalin’s harsh reprisals against the United Opposition, going so far as to
endorse Trotsky’s expulsion from the Communist Party in November 1927. She did not protest
the mass arrests of oppositionists and their banishment to Siberia. She thereby gave
encouragement to bureaucratic forces that were soon to turn against Bukharin and solidify
Stalin’s absolute rule.[9]
Ultraleft turn

Only one month after Zetkin’s appeal on the united front, a convention of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union initiated a major ultraleft turn in policy. Known as the “Third Period” line, it
was based on a schema according to which the first period was the revolutionary upsurge that
followed World War I; the second period was the subsequent stabilization of capitalism that
followed; the third period supposedly was to be marked by capitalist collapse and revolution.

It served to solidify Stalin’s control by undercutting support for Bukharin as well as to win over
and silence individuals sympathetic to Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The new line began the
march toward forced collectivization of agriculture, breakneck industrialization, and ever-
tightening control by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

In Germany, this line meant reviving and intensifying the disastrous policies of the Ruth Fischer
period, including rejection of united-front initiatives with the Social Democrats. Stalin made a
rare appearance at an ECCI meeting in February 1928 to castigate the “right wing” of the KPD—
that is, the forces led by Brandler and associated with Zetkin—as the main danger to the party.

The meeting marked the effective end of united-front policy in the Comintern, blocking the road
to a fighting antifascist alliance. A subsequent meeting of delegates from Germany and the
Soviet Union to the ECCI, from which Zetkin was excluded, spelled out the transfer of power in
the KPD to forces adhering to Stalin’s new line.

Zetkin expressed her anguish in a letter to her son Costia in March 1928: “I ask myself, what to
do…. This situation afflicts and torments me.” She wrote German party leader Wilhelm Pieck of
her opposition to having such vital questions of party policy “settled by agreements among
different parties,” alluding to the Soviet party’s interference in the KPD’s internal life.[10]

When the resolution on Germany came up in the ECCI for ratification the next month, Zetkin
alone voted to reject it. She wrote a confidential letter to the KPD leadership explaining her
views, which was inexplicably leaked and published the following year in a German non-
Communist newspaper.[11]

In the months that followed, a behind-the-scenes factional struggle opened up in the leadership
of the Russian party, known since 1925 as the “All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).” Stalin’s
faction, committed to an ultraleft line both internationally and in the Soviet Union, confronted
“right oppositionist” forces led by Bukharin.
On July 3, 1929, the Moscow daily Pravda published an article by Zetkin that presented some
central themes of her 1923 report on fascism. She submitted the article as a criticism of the draft
program prepared for the Comintern congress the following month, whose main author was
Bukharin.

Criticizing the draft’s schematic presentation of a “class against class” perspective, Zetkin
stressed that the Comintern must unite “all working people and all oppressed classes and
peoples.” She regretted the draft program’s inadequate attention to middle layers between the
proletariat and bourgeoisie, especially the more educated layers (“intellectuals”).

Also neglected, Zetkin indicated, was the impact of capitalist “rationalization” –increasing
mechanization and the displacement of small-scale producers and traders – which was throwing
all subordinate social layers into crisis. Demands benefiting women were absent, she pointed
out, while the significance of women for the class struggle was acknowledged only for those who
were workers or peasants. A German text of Zetkin’s article circulated to Comintern activists
internationally.[12]

The Comintern’s Sixth Congress, held in July-August 1928, was the first one attended by Zetkin
where she did not speak. In its corridors, Stalin’s supporters campaigned against Bukharin and
his international supporters, including Zetkin.

The conflict in the KPD culminated in a historic session of the ECCI on December 19, 1928, where
Zetkin confronted Stalin directly. Stalin’s forces demanded expulsion of the KPD “right wing”;
Zetkin called for postponement of any disciplinary action until the KPD held a democratic
discussion and congress. During this session, Béla Kun, an architect of the ultraleft “March
Action” disaster in Germany in 1921, charged Zetkin with “rightism” for opposing his course at
that time. In response, Zetkin pointed out that she had joined with Lenin in rallying the world
congress against Kun’s ultraleft views. To no avail: the plenum decisions were in step with Kun’s
position. Expulsion of the KPD “right” was decided, against the votes of Zetkin, Jules Humbert-
Droz, and Angelo Tasca; 6,000 dissidents were forced out of the German party.[13]

Following Stalin’s expulsion of Zetkin’s co-thinkers in the German Communist Party (KPD) in
1928, the internal dispute in the Russian Communist leadership escalated toward Joseph Stalin’s
open break with Nikolai Bukharin several months later. Bukharin’s faction was crushed; Bukharin
and other leading “right oppositionists” capitulated, admitting their supposed errors. Expelled
supporters of Bukharin in Germany organized a new movement, which took the name
Communist Party of Germany (Opposition), or KPD(O).
Privately, Zetkin wrote bitterly of the Comintern’s transformation into a mechanism that “sucks
in Russian-language directives on one side and shoots them out, translated into various
languages, on the other.”[14] Yet she still believed that Communists must work to reform the
International, as did her friends in the KPD(O) and also the now-exiled Leon Trotsky and his
comrades in the International Left Opposition.

For Zetkin, loyalty to this perspective and to the Soviet Union demanded that she remain in the
International, even at the cost of keeping silent on crucial issues. Stalin, for his part, although
threatened by Zetkin’s continued defiance, evidently considered the risks flowing from her
membership less than those that might follow if she were expelled.

Between October 1929 and March 1930, Zetkin composed a comprehensive memorandum on
the crisis in the KPD addressed to the ECCI.[15] Assessing the German party’s erroneous political
line, she diagnosed it as a symptom of a more general crisis of the Comintern as a whole. As in
the December 1928 ECCI plenum, she compared the party’s ultraleft stance with the notorious
“theory of the offensive” that some central ECCI leaders had briefly and disastrously embraced in
1921.[16] Breaking the grip of that error had been the great achievement of the Comintern’s
Third Congress (1921). Won through the efforts of Lenin, Trotsky, and Zetkin herself, this victory
opened the door to the united-front policy adopted by the Comintern later that year.

Zetkin’s memorandum condemned the destructive role of the Soviet party, which no longer
“leads” but merely “dictates” to the International. And for the first and only time, she challenged
the Stalin leadership’s policies within the Soviet Union by demanding “extensive documentary
material” on developments in the Soviet party and state. Comintern member parties, she said,
had the “duty and right to consult on the problems of the Soviet Union in fraternal solidarity
with the Russian party.”

Expressions of dissent

Zetkin complained to her son Maxim of the severe censorship and frequent suppression suffered
by her writings. Even her name could no longer be mentioned, she said. And yet, by one means
or another, her ideas managed to reach a wider audience.

In 1929, after many delays, her Reminiscences of Lenin was published in German. This pamphlet
contained a detailed account of her collaboration with Lenin in the Third Congress over issues
fundamental to united-front policy.[17]
Zetkin received visits from leaders of the KPD(O) such as Paul Frölich, with whom she agreed on
the united front, trade-union unity, the need for internal party democracy, and the need to
reform the Comintern. The KPD(O) published four of Zetkin’s private oppositional statements,
without eliciting any protest from her.[18] She corresponded with old friends now hostile to the
KPD, such as Georg Ledebour. She wrote an obituary of Margarete Wengels, a comrade from
wartime revolutionary struggles who later returned to the SPD, which was published in a non-
KPD workers’ paper.[19]

While praising the Soviet Union’s achievements, Zetkin did not join in the customary adulation of
the Soviet dictator.[20] She expressed her contempt for the Soviet ruler in a private note
intended for Bukharin in Moscow, advising him not to let himself be pushed around by Stalin,
whom she referred to, using the gendered language of that era, as a “mentally deranged woman
who wears men’s pants.”[21]

In 1929, the Russian émigré and SPD press published rumors regarding Zetkin’s supposed
persecution by Communist authorities in Moscow. The KPD’s central newspaper, Die Rote
Fahne, twice broke its silence regarding Zetkin by publishing her denials of these reports. Her
second statement ended in a fashion surely disconcerting to her editors: “As is generally known,
my outlook on both tactics and fundamentals stands opposed to the opinion of the ECCI’s
majority.”[22]

Although aware of the Comintern’s degeneration, Zetkin maneuvered cautiously and skillfully to
maintain her status as a tolerated dissident. In her 1929–30 memorandum, she pledged, “I will
break party discipline three times, four times, if it serves the interests of revolution.” But when,
in 1931, Stalin assailed the memory of Rosa Luxemburg, for example, Zetkin’s protests of this
insult to her longtime friend and comrade circulated only in private letters.[23]

“My greatest affliction,” she told a friend at the time, “is to answer the question: Where does the
truth lie? What are my responsibilities to the proletarian revolution? Should I speak out or
remain silent?” She paid the price of maintaining her Communist Party membership, which was
to speak only a fraction of what she believed.[24]

Seizing an opportunity

Zetkin continued to present aspects of her 1923 analysis of fascism publicly when possible—in a
criticism of KPD policy sent to party leader Wilhelm Pieck in March 1932, for example, and in
published greetings to an antifascist conference in June.[25] In greeting the KPD’s 1931 campaign
for freedom of choice on abortion, she made a public appeal for unity with women in the SPD.
[26]

In August 1932, Zetkin seized a chance to speak publicly to a national audience on the need for
united action against fascism. To do so she had leave some things unsaid, such as spelling out the
need to approach the SPD on the need for a united struggle against fascism. Passages from her
text stressing the magnitude of the task the party faced in rousing the masses were deleted from
her final text. Nonetheless, confident that she could express the essence of her thinking, she
eagerly grasped the opportunity.

The circumstances of the speech were dramatic.

The global depression that broke out in 1929 had hit Germany hard. With its workers’ parties
consumed by fratricidal struggle, Hitler’s National Socialists—in eclipse since 1923—quickly grew
to be Germany’s largest party. The Nazi vote rose from 2.6% (1928) to 18.3% (1930) and 37.4%
(1932). In the July 1932 vote, Zetkin was re-elected to the Reichstag, having been a member
since 1920. Seventy-four years old, she was the oldest member of Germany’s parliament and as
such had the right to formally open its first session.

The Nazi press bristled with vile threats against her as a “Communist Jew,” a “slut” (Goebbels),
and a “traitor.” The KPD received a Nazi threat to assault her on the floor of the Reichstag. But
when her party’s Central Committee asked whether she could open the Reichstag session, she
responded with characteristic defiance, “I’ll get there, dead or alive.” Driven incognito into
Berlin, she slipped into a safe house. Her biographer Gilbert Badia describes the ensuing drama
at the Reichstag as follows:

“Clara Zetkin was very weak, subject to fainting fits, and almost blind. On August 30, before a
Reichstag crammed with Nazi deputies in SA and SS uniforms, two Communist deputies helped
the old woman to mount the speakers’ platform. She spoke at first with a barely audible voice,
but little by little her voice strengthened and grew passionate."[27]

The final part of her talk reasserted the essence of her long-suppressed opinion on the urgency
to forge unity against fascism.

Zetkin’s August 30, 1932, speech in the German Reichstag (excerpt)

Zetkin’s courageous call for antifascist action, made in Germany’s parliament less than a year
before her death, stands as a fitting tribute to her lifetime of revolutionary struggle and to her
legacy as a beacon for future generations.—JR

Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back
fascism. All the differences that divide and shackle us—whether founded on political, trade-
union, religious, or ideological outlooks—must give way before this imperious historical
necessity.

All those who are menaced, all those who suffer, all those who desire freedom must join the
united front against fascism and its representatives in government. Working people must assert
themselves against fascism. That is the urgent and indispensable precondition for a united front
against economic crisis, imperialist war and its causes, and the capitalist mode of production.
The revolt of millions of laboring men and women in Germany against hunger, deprivation,
fascist murder, and imperialist war expresses the imperishable destiny of producers the world
over.

This destiny, shared among us around the world, must find expression through forging an iron-
like community of struggle of all working people in every sphere ruled by capitalism. It must also
unite them with their vanguard, the liberated brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union. Strikes
and uprisings in various countries abroad are blazing fires showing those in struggle in Germany
that they are not alone.

Everywhere the disinherited and the defeated are beginning to advance toward taking power.
Millions of women in Germany are still subjected to the chains of sexual slavery and thereby also
to the most oppressive form of class slavery. They must not be absent from the united front of
working people now taking shape in Germany.

The youth who want to blossom and mature must fight in the very front ranks. Today they face
only the prospect of corpse-like military obedience and exploitation in the ranks of obligatory
labor service. All those who produce through intellectual labor, whose skill and will augment
social well-being and culture but can find no expression in the existing bourgeois order—they
too belong in the united front.

The united front must embrace all those who are dependent on wages or salaries or otherwise
must pay tribute to capitalism, for it is they who both sustain capitalism and are its victims.
I am opening this session of the Reichstag in fulfillment of my duty as honorary chair and in the
hope that despite my present infirmities I may yet have the good fortune to open, as honorary
chair, the first congress of workers’ councils of a Soviet Germany.[28]

Notes

[1]. Copyright (c) 2017 Mike Taber and John Riddell. The text in Fighting Fascism has been
slightly modified to adapt it to blog format.

[2]. Protokoll Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale (Hamburg: Carl Hoym Nachf.,
1924), pp. 66–67.

[3]. From late 1922 on, Lenin had initiated a broad fight within the Soviet leadership around a
number of issues, including the national question, defense of the monopoly of foreign trade, and
the alliance with the peasantry. At the root of many of these questions was the growing
bureaucratization of the Communist Party, whose general secretary was Stalin. To wage this
fight, Lenin had formed a bloc with Trotsky, urging him to champion their common positions on
these questions within the party leadership, and he had called for Stalin to be removed as
general secretary.

[4]. For Trotsky’s view of these controversies, see Leon Trotsky, The Third International after
Lenin (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1996), part 2, section 4, pp. 107–15.

[5]. In his report to the June 1923 ECCI meeting, Zinoviev admitted, “At the time, to be sure, I did
have reservations” about the united-front policy. In Mike Taber, ed., The Communist
International at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International Executive Committee,
1922–1923 (Historical Materialism Book Series, 2017).

[6]. Protokoll Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale, pp. 335–39. For the record
of the Fourth Congress, see Toward the United Front, Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the
Communist International.

[7]. Tânia Puschnerat, Clara Zetkin: Bürgerlichkeit und Marxismus (Essen: Klartext, 2003), p. 296.

[8]. For the text of Zetkin’s letter,

see https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/zetkin/1927/10/zkkpd.html

[9]. Puschnerat, pp. 305–6.

[10]. Gilbert Badia, Clara Zetkin, féministe sans frontières (Paris: Les Éditions ouvrières, 1993),
pp. 276–78.

[11]. Badia. p. 278. For the text of Zetkin’s letter, see Beiträge zur Geschichte der
Arbeiterbewegung, 6 (1991), pp. 787–88.
[12]. Zetkin’s 3,500-word text was published in Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz, vol. 8, no.
64, pp. 1172–73 and no. 65, pp. 1189–90. For a quite different criticism of the draft program, see
Leon Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin.

[13]. Puschnerat, pp. 364-66. The entire proceedings of this ECCI meeting are found in Tânia
Ünlüdag, “Die Tragödie einer Kämpferin für die Arbeiterbewegung,” IWK 33 (1997), pp. 337–
47. For the controversy involving Kun and Zetkin in 1921, see To the Masses: Proceedings of the
Third Congress of the Communist International.

[14]. Tânia Puschnerat, Clara Zetkin: Bürgerlichkeit und Marxismus (Essen: Klartext, 2003), p.
370.

[15]. Puschnerat, pp. 370–72, 377, 380.

[16]. The “theory of the offensive” was advanced by majority leaders in the KPD following the
adventurist “March Action” of 1921 to justify their policies in launching that action and to
propose that such policies continue. The theory called on Communists to radicalize their slogans
and initiate minority actions that could sweep the hesitant workers into action.

[17]. Zetkin’s record of her discussions with Lenin on the Third Congress is included in To the
Masses, pp. 1137–48. The entire text of Zetkin’s Reminiscences of Lenin can be found on
Marxists Internet Archive.

[18]. Puschnerat, p. 381.

[19]. Puschnerat, p. 378.

[20]. One exception has been noted. In 1932 Zetkin assented to her editor’s insertion into a
message of greetings she had written of a reference to Stalin as an “outstanding and brilliant
leader.” See Puschnerat, p. 384.

[21]. Gilbert Badia, Clara Zetkin, féministe sans frontières (Paris: Les Éditions ouvrières, 1993), p.
288–89, Puschnerat p. 374.

[22]. Puschnerat, p. 376.

[23]. Zetkin had defended Luxemburg at the March 1926 ECCI plenum against similar attacks
made in the German party. Her speech was published in the record of the plenum.

[24]. Puschnerat, p. 377; Badia, pp. 282, 290.

[25]. Badia, pp. 300–301.

[26]. Badia, p. 264.

[27]. Badia, pp. 302–3.

[28]. Translated
from https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/zetkin/1932/08/alterspraes.html. For the entire
text of Zetkin’s Reichstag speech, see Mike Jones and Ben Lewis, ed., Clara Zetkin: Letters and
Writings (London: Merlin Press, 2015), pp. 169–73, or Philip S. Foner, ed., Clara Zetkin: Selected
Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1984), pp. 170–75.
Michael Harrington and his afterlives

By Doug Enaa Greene

May 5, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted

from Cosmonaut — Michael Harrington (1928-1989) was the most important advocate for
democratic socialism in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century. He is widely,
and deservedly, recognized for writing The Other America, a seminal exposé of poverty in the
United States. However, Michael Harrington was not simply a public intellectual but a political
activist who developed a vision to make democratic socialism into a major force in American life.
His strategy was to realign the Democratic Party by driving out the business interests and
transform it into a social democratic party. This new party of the people would then not only
represent the interests of the vast majority and pass genuine reforms, but begin the transition to
democratic socialism. Michael Harrington’s politics and vision have outlived him and they remain
the “common sense” of much of the American left, shaping debates in the organization he
founded, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Life of Michael Harrington

Despite later being hailed as the “Man Who Discovered Poverty,” Michael Harrington’s
beginnings were anything but impoverished. He was born into a well-off Irish-American and
Catholic family in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 28, 1928. When he was growing up, the terms
Catholic, Irish, and Democrat were practically synonymous. His immediate and extended family
were just as devoted Democrats as they were faithful Catholics and culturally Irish. Despite a
brief lapse into revolutionary radicalism in the mid-1950s, Michael himself would maintain his
allegiance to the Democratic Party for most of his life.
However, it was the Catholic Church far more than his Irish heritage that shaped Michael
Harrington’s early worldview. For both religious and financial reasons, Michael’s family wanted
him to receive a rigorous Jesuit education. He attended local Jesuit schools and later attended
Holy Cross College in the 1940s, where he distinguished himself as a brilliant student. Michael
absorbed the Jesuits’ lessons that “ideas have consequences, that philosophy is the record of an
ongoing debate over the most important issues before mankind.”[1] Even after Michael left the
Church, a Jesuit spirit remained in his later Marxist writings. In his youth, his social and economic
ideas were in line with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which condemned
unbridled capitalism and displayed concern for the condition of the working class.

After graduating second in his class at Holy Cross in 1948, Michael went to Yale Law School. His
father hoped that he would pursue a career in law, but Michael had dreams of becoming a poet.
After less than a year at Yale, he was accepted into the University of Chicago’s program for
English literature. During his time in Chicago, Michael was drawn to the city’s Bohemian culture
where “everyone… had a poem or play or novel in the works.”[2] Amongst these free spirits, he
read voraciously in order to grasp ideas and their implications. He also experienced his first crisis
of faith and no longer accepted that people could be condemned to hell no matter the offense.
This caused the edifice of his Jesuit worldview to collapse. When Michael graduated with a
Master’s degree in 1949, he not only lacked his religious belief but was now completely unsure
about his future. So he returned home to Saint Louis, where he worked as a social worker in
impoverished sections of the city. It was during this time of seeing poverty that he had a
revelation:

One rainy day I went into an old, decaying building. The cooking smells and the stench from the
broken, stopped-up toilets and the murmurous cranky sound of the people were a revelation. It
was my moment on the road to Damascus. Suddenly the abstract and statistical and aesthetic
outrages I had reacted to at Yale and Chicago became real and personal and insistent. A few
hours later, riding the Grand Avenue streetcar, I realized that somehow I must spend the rest of
my life trying to obliterate that kind of house and to work with the people who lived there.[3]

He was now determined to do something to fight poverty. However, he did not yet know what.
In December 1949, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City; Bohemia still beckoned
him. While in Greenwich Village, he was exposed to left-wing politics. At one of the many jobs he
worked, he recalled that “bosses and the workers discussed the Russian Revolution at lunch
break.”[4] He still took little interest in those debates, but was starting to pay attention.

When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, he experienced another crisis of faith and became
a conscientious objector and rejoined the Catholic Church. His reconversion occurred after
reading Pascal and Kierkegaard: “I no longer felt that I could prove my faith, but now I was willing
to make a wager, a doubting and even desperate wager, on it: Credo quia absurdum. I believe
because it is absurd.”[5] He decided to put his faith into action. From 1951 to 1953, Michael was
a part of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement, which was one of the most vibrant
expressions of left-wing Catholicism in the United States. As Michael later observed: “it was as
far Left as you could go within the Church.”[6] The Catholic Worker Movement acted to improve
the lives of the poor, preached absolute pacifism, and urged its adherents to “live in accordance
with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ.”[7]
Harrington’s start as a labor organizer was in the Catholic Worker Movement

Michael Harrington not only worked in the soup kitchens and lived his faith, but wrote and
edited for the Catholic Worker on labor struggles and poverty in America. He started making
public speeches and developed connections to the literary world and the anti-communist left.
Then, in 1952, he met Bogdan Denitch, a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL),
who saw Michael as a promising recruit. Denitch’s instincts were correct: Michael joined the
YPSL and left both the Catholic Worker and the Church itself. This time his break with organized
religion was permanent.

Almost from the moment that he joined the YPSL, Michael was fighting the Socialist Party
leadership. Due to the Cold War, the Socialist Party and its leader, Norman Thomas, accepted
prevailing anticommunist consensus and supported the Korean War. Michael Harrington and the
YPSL opposed Thomas and began working with Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League
(ISL), which opposed the Korean War. Michael and the YPSL severed ties with the parent body
and fused with the ISL in February 1954 to create the Young Socialist League (YSL).

Michael proved to be a major asset for Max Shachtman and the ISL. He wrote and edited for a
number of socialist papers on a vast range of topics. In his capacity as an organizer, he traveled
widely across the United States to different college campuses to speak and establish
contacts. Max Shachtman himself—a former communist and Trotskyist—ended up becoming
Michael’s most important political mentor. This influence was something that Harrington
acknowledged after he had broken with Shachtman in later years. In the dedication to the 1970
work Socialism,he wrote: “Even though I have some serious disagreements with him on issues of
socialist strategy, I am permanently and deeply indebted to Max Shachtman, who first
introduced me to the vision of democratic Marxism and whose theory of bureaucratic
collectivism is so important to my analysis.”[8] Harrington took from Shachtman a deep-rooted
anticommunism grounded in the belief that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic collectivist evil
empire. He also adopted Shachtman’s politics in other respects: an adaptation to social
democracy, alliances with the labor bureaucracy, and support for “realignment” in the
Democratic Party. This is not to say that his politics were completely identical to those of Max
Shachtman: he was able to expand and develop Shachtman’s ideas and diverged with him on
secondary issues when necessary.

During the Red Scare era, life on the socialist left was largely confined to small groups on the
margins of politics. Michael Harrington wanted to change that. He became open to collaboration
with liberals in pursuit of progressive causes. However, Michael believed that this common work
would only be effective if socialists had an organization of their own. An opportunity came to
regroup the American left in 1956 after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the near total collapse
of the Communist Party USA. Suddenly a new political space on the left opened up, and both the
ISL and the Socialist Party hoped to take advantage of it. Realizing their mutual goals, the ISL and
Socialist Party fused in 1958. Considering that the Socialist Party was practically moribund, ISL
members such as Max Shachtman and Michael Harrington quickly assumed positions of
prominence in the organization. The merger left Michael Harrington hopeful that the left finally
had its own organization and would soon place its mark on American politics.

As part of a new strategy for socialists, Michael Harrington was no longer concerned with the
revolutionary seizure of power, but with pragmatic and “realistic” questions about using the
existing institutions to effect change. To that end, he argued that the left needed to support
progressives in the Democratic Party to achieve reforms. He also argued that left-leaning
members of the labor bureaucracy such as Walter Reuther were not obstacles to the
development of class consciousness, but were allies of the left. According to Michael Harrington,
the “Reutherites were the genuine, and utterly sincere and militant, Left-wing of American
society.”[9]

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Michael Harrington also played an active role in the Civil
Rights Movement, where he worked closely with important figures like Bayard Rustin. Rustin was
a major organizer for the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s March on
Washington. Harrington and Rustin shared Shachtman’s vision of allying the Civil Rights
Movement with organized labor and the Democrats to create a new majority. As part of this
work, Michael wanted to keep the Civil Rights Movement on a moderate course and worked to
exclude communists from organizations such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC).

It was in 1962 that Michael Harrington first rose to national fame with the publication of The
Other America. Even though he wrote dozens of articles and published fourteen books on a
diverse array of subjects, his name is synonymous with just this one. The Other America was a
groundbreaking and moving exposé of poverty in the United States of America. It established
Michael’s reputation as a respected intellectual and advocate for the poor. The Other
America stirred the conscience of people from all walks of life by revealing the grinding poverty
that existed in the richest country in the world. As Martin Luther King Jr once jokingly said to
him: “You know, we didn’t know we were poor until we read your book.”[10] The Other
America’s impact extended beyond the circles of idealistic students into the corridors of power
when it caught the attention of President Kennedy who planned to launch a “War on Poverty.”
After Kennedy’s death, President Johnson carried on his legacy by expanding the welfare state
with his vision of the Great Society. Michael Harrington himself served as an adviser to President
Johnson in developing the Great Society programs.
Harrington’s The Other America was influential on “war on poverty” programs in the 1960s

While Michael supported the Great Society, he believed that welfare state could not overcome
the contradictions of capitalism: “Capitalism ‘socializes’ private priorities and is institutionally
opposed to any redistribution of the relative shares of wealth. This is related to its propensity for
crisis and, ultimately, its self-destruction. In this context, the welfare state is seen as an
ambiguous and transitional phenomenon, the temporary salvation of the system, but also the
portent of its end.”[11] As we shall discuss later, Michael Harrington believed that it was
necessary to go past the welfare state.

As student radicalism emerged, Michael Harrington was hopeful about its prospects to revitalize
the American left, provided that it received proper guidance from him. To that end, he served as
a mentor to the young radicals of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in developing the Port
Huron Statement. The Port Huron Statement was one of the defining documents of sixties
radicalism. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, it not only provided coherence to a new generation of
students, but “it gave to those dissatisfied with their nation an analysis by which to dissect it, to
those pressing instinctively for change a vision of what to work for, to those feeling within
themselves the need to act a strategy by which to become effective. No ideology can do
more.”[12] Michael Harrington’s ideas are quite visible throughout the Port Huron Statement in
stressing the necessity of the student movement allying with the civil rights movement and labor
unions, realigning the Democratic Party and supporting liberals, and rejecting communism.

However, the Port Huron Statement also condemned American imperialism for instigating the
Cold War and rejected visceral anti-communism. Michael Harrington found this abhorrent and
was enraged. He had the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), SDS’s parent organization, cut
off funding to the youth affiliate and changed the SDS office door locks to keep the radicals out.
Later, Michael Harrington and the LID board interrogated the SDS radicals in a mini-show trial for
being soft on communism. Eventually cooler heads prevailed and a break between LID and SDS
was avoided.

For the rest of his life, Michael Harrington regretted what happened and believed that the clash
was due to a misunderstanding between two different generations. While Michael
acknowledged his lack of diplomacy in handling SDS, he did not believe he was wrong on the
larger political issues at stake: “But if I am quite ready to acknowledge my personal failings in this
unhappy history, I am not at all prepared to concede political error on all points in the
dispute.”[13] Michael admitted that even if he had been more tactful with SDS, it would not have
made a difference in the long run: “the conflict was, I think inevitable, and had I acted on the
basis of better information, more maturity, and a greater understanding of the differences at
stake, that I would only have postponed the day of reckoning.”[14] Ultimately, Michael
Harrington’s problem with SDS and the New Left was not just that they were “soft on
communism,” but that they rejected the moderation and liberalism that were central to his
politics. Eventually, the conflict between him and the radicals came to a head with the Vietnam
War.

When the Johnson Administration escalated American involvement in Vietnam, SDS played an
active role in opposing it. Like SDS, Michael Harrington opposed the war, but the main dividing
line between them was over how to oppose it. Michael wanted to keep his lines of
communication open with the White House and liberal Democrats because he believed they
were vital allies when it came to domestic reform. To Michael, Democratic support for the war
was a tragic error and not the symptom of anything deeper. He refused to target the Democrats
as complicit in the war because that could only alienate them. To that end, Michael argued that
the antiwar movement needed to be kept within proper limits and stay respectable. He
therefore opposed militant action, the participation of communists, breaking the law, or
anything that would actually end the war. Only when the Democrats were not the ones
conducting the war after 1968 and large swaths of the public and the establishment saw it as
unwinnable did Michael come out against it, while his allies like Max Shachtman backed the war
to the bitter end.

Over the course of the 1960s, Michael Harrington’s relations with Max Shachtman became
strained due to a number of issues, leading to a split. Aside from differences over Vietnam,
Michael remained steadfast in supporting the original vision of Realignment by supporting
progressives in the Democratic Party and labor bureaucracy, and he was committed to winning
over moderates in the New Left. By contrast, Shachtman uncritically supported the AFL-CIO
leadership, opposed the New Left tout court and backed the most right-wing Democrats because
they were reliably anticommunist. The factional fight between Shachtman and Harrington tore
the Socialist Party apart. In 1973, Michael Harrington finally resigned from the party.

After leaving the Socialist Party, Michael founded a new socialist organization – the Democratic
Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). DSOC had a solid base of support among progressives in
the labor bureaucracy. Its strategy was to support realignment in the Democratic Party to push it
to the left. To that end, Michael Harrington and DSOC supported the Democratic Agenda, a New
Deal-style program that was supported by Jimmy Carter in 1976. When Carter was elected,
Michael Harrington believed that the Democrats would carry out sweeping reforms similar to
FDR or LBJ. Instead, he felt betrayed when the Carter Administration enacted austerity measures
and ignored the program of the Democratic Agenda.

Over the course of the 1970s, DSOC grew and began working with like-minded socialist groups
such as the New American Movement (NAM). Eventually, NAM and DSOC merged and created
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982 with Michael Harrington as its preeminent
leader. The Reagan years saw crushing defeats on organized labor, attacks on the legacy of the
New Deal, and an escalation of the Cold War. To oust Reagan, Michael Harrington and his allies in
the labor bureaucracy eschewed any form of independent socialist politics or militancy from
below, and instead placed their faith in the Democratic Party. This meant that the DSA stayed
aloof from Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, which was probably the most serious Realignment
effort in decades, by backing the conservative Walter Mondale. When Reagan secured a
smashing victory in 1984, the lesser-evil strategy of “Anybody but Reagan” was shown to be a
dismal failure. In a postmortem of the democratic socialist 1984 electoral strategy, Alexander
Cockburn concluded:

They must now be footsoldiers in a campaign whose captains are implacably antagonistic to the
principles of their constituencies…So in control are the Democratic ‘pragmatists’ as the pollsters
and pundits call them, the ones who argue for party unity at the expense of movement and who
propose that the way to beat Reaganism is to denounce its excesses while accepting its
premises. The pathos of their opportunism lies in its shortsightedness. As every tactician can
attest, the key to defeating Reagan is turnout. But turnout has political content and context.
People will not simply vote for Anybody But Reagan; they want somebody who speaks to their
interests, who promises them more than they’ve got and who offers them hope.[15]

It was mere days after Reagan’s reelection that Michael Harrington discovered a bump in his
throat, which was later determined to be cancer. After a series of operations and surgeries, it
appeared that his cancer was gone. By 1987, Michael’s doctors told him that he had an
inoperable tumor, and he was was given two years to live. During those last years, he continued
his political and intellectual work. He finished his second memoir, The Long-Distance Runner, and
a testament, Socialism: Past and Future. Still, his condition deteriorated and he quietly passed
away on July 31, 1989.
Harrington would support conservative Democrat Walter Mondale in the 1984 election.

The limits of Democratic Socialism

From the 1960s until the end of his life, Michael Harrington developed a sophisticated theory of
“Democratic Marxism” that he hoped that it would serve as both the ideology and political
strategy for democratic socialists and the American labor bureaucracy. Michael believed that the
tenets of “Democratic Marxism” would enable socialism to break out of its political isolation,
create a new political majority and lead to the creation of democratic socialism. “Democratic
Marxism” was all-encompassing, touching on areas ranging from philosophy to imperialism, but
here we will discuss merely two of its aspects: Realignment and the Transition to Socialism.

A. Realignment

While Michael Harrington did not originate the idea of Realignment, he did develop it into a full-
blown strategy for not only transforming American politics, but as a necessary part of a socialist
transition. According to Harrington, realignment was “the only place where a beginning can be
made” and he fervently believed that without it, all socialist efforts would ultimately fail.[16] He
claimed that the Realignment strategy was based on a Marxist analysis of the changing class
nature of American society. He believed that after World War II the social weight of the
organized working class had declined. If there was going to be a majority for socialism in
America, then the working class couldn’t rely only on themselves; it needed allies. As he argued:
“There is no single, ‘natural’ majority in the United States which can be mobilized behind a series
of defined policies and programs. Rather, there are several potential majorities at any given time
and which one will actually emerge depends on a whole range of factors.”[17]

Michael Harrington argued that the most important ally of the working class was located in the
“new class” of scientists, technicians, teachers, and professionals in the public sector of society.
[18] The emergence of the new class was a sign that the capitalist economy was “inexorably
moving toward collective forms of social life.”[19] In the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe, this
collectivist trend took the shape of the new tyranny of “bureaucratic collectivism.” On the other
hand, in the United States and Western Europe, collectivism took the form of the welfare state
where “markets give way to political decisions… [and] bureaucrats, both private and public,
become much more important than entrepreneurs or stockholders.”[20] Harrington concluded
that society faced the choice of two possible futures: “these extensions of Shachtman’s theories
have led me to a basic proposition: that the future is not going to be a choice between
capitalism, Communism, and socialism, but between bureaucratic collectivism, advantageous to
both executives and commissars, and democratic collectivism, i.e. socialism.”[21] This was
Michael Harrington’s updated version of Rosa Luxemburg’s warning of “socialism or barbarism.”

For Michael Harrington, the issue was not about reversing these collective trends, which he
accepted as a given, but whether the future would be democratic or totalitarian. For Michael,
the key factor determining the future lay in the contradictory nature of the new class. In the new
class, there was the potential for anti-democratic forces prevailing: “With so much economic,
political and, social power concentrating in computerized industry, the question arises, who will
do the programming? Who will control the machines that establish human destiny in this
century? And there is clearly the possibility that a technological elite, perhaps even a benevolent
elite, could take on this function.”[22] On the other hand, the new class “by education and work
experience…is predisposed toward planning. It could be an ally of the poor and the organized
workers—or their sophisticated enemy. In other words, an unprecedented social and political
variable seems to be taking shape in America.”[23] For example, the expansion of education was
necessary to teach the “new class” of planners and bureaucrats to create new opportunities for
social advancement and prestige as part of the established order. However, Harrington argued
that students were not destined to “act bureaucratically and use sophisticated means to keep
the black and poor in their proper place.”[24] As the 1960s student movements demonstrated,
“a school is a dangerous place, for it exposes people to ideas…Increasing education, all the data
indicates, means greater political involvement.”[25] This all meant the future political allegiance
of the new class was open.

Therefore, the possibility existed of the working class allying with the new class, along with
blacks and the poor (Harrington would later include groups such as feminists, peace activists,
and environmentalists in this coalition) to build a new majority or the “conscience
constituency.”[26] Harrington believed it was only this new majority that could bring real
democratic socialist change to America. Eventually, he believed that the components of the new
majority would seek political expression. Rather than creating a new third party, Harrington
believed it was necessary to realign the Democrats. He argued that the Democrats were a site of
struggle for socialists since they not only contained segregationists and capitalists, but also held
the allegiance of labor unions, blacks, and progressive sections of the new class. In other words,
he claimed there was a contradiction within the Democratic Party between its social base and its
racist and capitalist leadership. According to the Socialist Party Platform of 1968: “That the most
progressive elements in American life thus belong in the same Party as the most reactionary is
one of the most outrageous contradictions in the society. But it is not enough simply to
denounce the scandal. We must abolish it.”[27] Michael Harrington was emphatic that socialist
work within the Democratic Party “does not constitute a commitment either to its program or
leadership…So the democratic Left does not work in the Democratic Party in order to maintain
that institution but to transform it.”[28] In 1973, he succinctly described the realignment
strategy as “the left wing of realism” because it was only there that the “mass forces for social
change are assembled; it is there that the possibility exists for creating a new first party in
America.”[29]

Despite the rise of the new class, Michael Harrington believed that the AFL-CIO remained the
leading force of Realignment and the new majority. While American labor unions had avoided
independent political action in the shape of a labor or socialist party like their European
counterparts, he argued that they had actually created one in all but name. In fact, Michael
Harrington asserted that the socialism of the American labor movement was actually unknown
to most: “there is a social democracy in the United States, but most scholars have not noticed it.
It is our invisible mass movement.”[30] Therefore, he concluded that labor unions were not just
another interest group in the Democratic Party, but they “had clearly made an on-going, class-
based political commitment and constituted a tendency—a labor party of sorts—within the
Democratic Party.”[31]

Michael Harrington argued that the first step of Realignment “will not be revolution or even a
sudden dramatic lurch to the socialist left. It will be the emergence of a revived liberalism—
taking that term to mean the reform of the system within the system—which will of necessity, be
much more socialistic even though it will not, in all probability, be socialist.”[32] With a new,
robust liberalism as the short-term goal for Realignment, this naturally meant socialists should
look to liberals as natural allies. Therefore, the Realignment strategy required patience and
playing a long game, but the promised result was the creation of a left-liberal, if not social
democratic, party that would take over the Democratic Party and lay the foundations for
democratic socialism.
For all its theoretical sophistication, Michael Harrington’s Realignment strategy rested on a
number of faulty assumptions. Firstly, his contention that the Democratic Party was open to
being “captured” by socialist forces was misguided. This position assumed that the Democrats
were a loose coalition of diverse interest groups such as labor and capital who were more or less
equally balanced. In fact, the Democrats are a capitalist-controlled party representing the
interests of more liberal elements among the ruling class. While Michael Harrington is certainly
correct that the Democrats do traditionally command the support of a progressive and working-
class constituency, this does not make the Democrats the “party of the people.”[33] In fact, labor
unions and other progressive groups hold no power in the Democratic Party due to
overwhelming capitalist control. Capitalist hegemony in the Democrats allows them to thwart
any internal challenge or to co-opt them as the need arises. This is a reality that Michael
Harrington never understood.

Secondly, the liberal-labor alliance needed for Realignment was an illusion of Harrington’s own
imagination. As Kim Moody observed: “Post-World War II liberalism, although embraced by
much of the union leadership, was mostly a middle-class phenomenon…As a political current, it
never challenged the corporate or private form of property in the means of production, while it
rapidly abandoned such New Deal-expanding programs as a national health care system by the
early 1950s.”[34] In other words, liberals were not reliable allies of socialists, but were their
enemies. To win the support of liberals, Harrington argued that socialists needed to practice
moderation and play according to the rules set by the Democratic Party. Since the Realignment
strategy saw the Democratic Party as the only political arena for socialists, this led socialists to
accept the logic of lesser-evilism and supporting any Democrat, no matter how right-wing, which
ultimately thwarted the goals of the entire strategy.

Lastly, the Realignment strategy was doomed because it refused to develop an independent
socialist organization. On paper, the Socialist Party viewed themselves as playing a unique role in
Realignment as “an independent organization, free of any compromising ties with the old party
machines. It can and it will play the role of the most courageous and intransigent force for
realignment.”[35] In practice, however, this was never something carried out. As Christopher
Lasch argued,

[Harrington] is correct in saying that there are no new social forces automatically evolving
toward socialism (which is what “democratic planning” comes down to). Presumably this means
that radical change can only take place if a new political organization, explicitly committed to
radical change, wills it to take place. But Harrington backs off from this conclusion. Instead he
seems to predicate his strategy on the wistful hope that socialism will somehow take over the
Democratic party without anyone realizing what is happening. He admits that “there is obvious
danger when those committed to a new morality thus maneuver on the basis of the old
hypocrisies.” But there is no choice, because radicals cannot create a new movement “by fiat.” It
is tempting, Harrington says, to think that the best strategy for the Left might be to “start a party
of its own.” But this course would not work unless there were already an “actual disaffection of
great masses of people from the Democratic Party.[36]

In the end, Michael Harrington forgot the cardinal lesson of Lenin that “in its struggle for power
the proletariat has no other weapon but organization.”[37] Without political independence,
there was no room for socialists to develop strategies and actions to advance the interests of the
working class. Instead, Realignment forced socialists to maintain good relations with liberals in
the hopes of reform at the expense of revolutionary militancy from below. The natural end of
Realignment and Harrington’s democratic socialism was the transformation of leftists into the
most loyal servants of the Democratic Party.
Harrington debates Trotskyist Peter Camejo on Jimmy Carter at Queens College, 1976

B. Popular Front without Stalinism

Instead of through a violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, Michael
Harrington believed that socialism could be achieved peacefully through an electoral majority. In
formulating a democratic strategy, he drew upon the work of the Italian Communist Antonio
Gramsci, whom he called “one of the most fascinating thinkers in the history of Marxism.”[38]
Michael Harrington argued that socialists needed to create a counter-hegemonic bloc that
comprised a majority of the population, who would have a vested interest in a new order. This
counter-hegemonic bloc would win support by promoting a “practical program in a language of
sincere and genuine idealism. A politics without poetry will simply not be able to bring together
all the different and sometimes antagonistic forces essential to a new majority for a new
program.”[39] Harrington argued that the Gramscian “intellectual and moral reform” that
socialists needed to undertake involved building upon American traditions, particular
Jeffersonian republicanism with its ideals of moral virtue and citizenship: “But I do not think that
the Left can afford to leave the civic emotions to the Right. In a profound sense, that is our
heritage more than theirs.”[40] The promotion of a new republican ethic would not only
Americanize socialism but enlighten people and mobilize them for social change.

For a democratic transition to socialism to be possible, socialists must be able to capture the
existing state apparatus from the bourgeoisie. Building on the work of the Marxist theorist Nicos
Poulantzas, Harrington argued that the capitalist state was “relatively autonomous” and not the
instrument of any single class.[41] He claimed that the classical Marxist position on the state—
that it is a machinery of repression in the hands of the dominant class, designed to preserve
capitalist rule and existing property relations—was false since it was “tied to the base-
superstructure model of society and is flawed for that reason. It metaphorically imagines the
government as an inert thing that has no life of its own and is wielded by the ‘real’ powers
residing in the economic base.”[42] Furthermore, he argued that in capitalist society there was
no ruling class, merely competing blocs of classes. Due to the great wealth of the bourgeoisie,
they naturally exercised greater power in the state than the working class.[43] If socialists could
mobilize their counter-hegemonic bloc, then they could win concessions from the state and
gradually tilt the state to favor working class interests.

As part of his strategy, Michael Harrington said socialists must utilize the state bureaucracy and
undertake a transitional program of structural reforms. He argued that socialists could not
dispense with existing bureaucracy since it was essential to the functioning of a modern
economy. The problem lay not with bureaucracy per se, but with bad bureaucrats. To serve as a
check against bad bureaucrats, he envisioned some form of grassroots control alongside more
responsible bureaucrats: “bureaucracy is itself a weapon to be used against
bureaucracy.”[44] The structural reforms that he advocated were the socialization of investment;
the progressive socialization of corporate property; later, the socialization of private property
itself; and finally using taxes as an instrument of socialist change. He believed that this
transitional program could be undertaken without any cataclysmic changes since he did not
expect violent resistance from the bourgeoisie. Looking to the example of social democratic
Sweden, Michael Harrington argued that “it is now possible to have a relatively painless
transition to socialization if socialists will only learn how to encourage the ‘euthanasia of the
rentiers.’”[45] In looking to a positive model for this strategy, Michael Harrington defended the
Communist Party’s popular front. As he said in a 1976 debate with Peter Camejo:
My policy is very much like the Communist policy in the 1930s. You bet your life it is. I’m an
opponent of communist dictatorship and totalitarianism. But while the Socialist Party and the
Socialist Workers Party were getting absolutely nowhere because they counterposed themselves
to the workers who wanted to vote for Roosevelt, the Communist party of the 1930s was
building the biggest, largest movement calling itself socialist in the United States since the days
of Gene Debs, and winning leadership in a third of the unions of the CIO.[46]

In other words, he believed in a popular front without Stalinism.[47] However, Michael

Harrington’s idealization of the popular front is based on a profound misreading of history.
During the 1930s, the CPUSA did have a visible presence in unions, black freedom struggles, and
anti-fascist coalitions, but this did not come about due to the popular front strategy, but in spite
of it. The major successes of the CPUSA in organizing workers occurred before the popular front
was implemented when the party experimented with militant united front tactics and still
maintained its revolutionary identity. After adopting the popular front strategy, the CPUSA
retreated from all that and, in the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, the Communists ceased all
their criticism of the labor bureaucracy, the Roosevelt administration, and liberal organizations.
Over the course of the 1930s, the class character of the CPUSA changed as its members took up
positions within the labor bureaucracy and clamped down on working class militancy. According
to Charlie Post:

Popular Frontism transformed the CP from the main current promoting self-organization,
militant action and political independence among workers, African Americans and other
oppressed groups into the emerging CIO’s bureaucracy’s ‘point men’ in their drive to ‘tame’
worker and popular militancy and to cement their partnership with the Roosevelt
administration.[48]

As a result of the popular front, the CPUSA retreated from its advocacy of communist revolution
and ended up as the “left-wing” of the Democrats and the New Deal. The “hidden secret” of why
the anticommunist Michael Harrington idealized the popular front was not because it was proof
that socialism had mass influence or spoke the language of ordinary people. Rather, he liked the
popular front because it was when the communists ceased to be revolutionary and gave up on
militant action, self-organization of the working class, and “sectarian” political independence in
order to become loyal allies of the labor bureaucracy and liberals. In other words, it was when
communists acted like Michael Harrington’s ideal of a democratic socialist.

Furthermore, Michael Harrington’s popular frontist strategy depends on a fundamental

misunderstanding of the state. He is unable to recognize the realities of the state’s dependency
on both the existing bureaucracy and the needs of profitability. The ability of socialist
governments to deliver the type of structural reforms that Harrington advocates such as higher
wages and an expanded welfare state depends on higher taxes on capital, both of which
ultimately depend upon profitability. If a socialist government seriously pursued structural
reforms, then this would threaten the flow of profits and spark resistance from the existing
bureaucracy. This means that there are definite limits on the ability of the capitalist state—even
if its governing personnel are principled and dedicated socialists—to implement reforms.[49]

Harrington also forgets that a socialist majority in parliament does not equal state power. Rather,
the real power in the state resides in its unelected institutions—the military, state bureaucracy,
courts—all of which will resist structural reforms and a democratic road to socialism with
whatever means are at their disposal. This was shown both when Spain’s popular front
government and Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile were violently overthrown in
military coups wholeheartedly supported by the bourgeoisie. The reality that no ruling class
willingly surrenders its privileges and power was precisely why Marx and Engels said a violent
revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat was a necessary strategy for revolutionaries.
This is something that Michael Harrington refused to acknowledge. All he can offer is moral
appeals to the ruling class and faith that they will play fair with socialists, despite all evidence to
the contrary.
Legacy

Since the 2016 election and the campaign of Bernie Sanders, DSA has grown to 55,000 members
and become the largest nominally socialist organization in America in over 60 years. The
revitalized DSA has seen chapters spring up across the country and its members involved in
activities from labor strikes to fixing brake lights to election campaigns (notably the election of
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018). It stands to reason that Michael Harrington
would be pleased with DSA’s growth, but would he still recognize the organization? In some
symbolic ways, DSA has moved away from his legacy in a manner that would have horrified
Michael Harrington. There are now Marxist study groups who openly talk about Lenin and
Trotsky. At its 2017 convention, DSA severed its longstanding ties to the Socialist International
and endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement to end international support
for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.[50] Support at the convention for breaking with the
Democrats attracted a substantial minority inside DSA. Does all this mean that DSA is
abandoning the politics of Michael Harrington and embarking on a new course? In point of fact,
Michael Harrington’s strategy of Realignment and a democratic transition to socialism remain
hegemonic inside DSA.

DSA member Maurice Isserman, a biographer of Michael Harrington, has argued that DSA is
growing precisely by supporting Democratic candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
Cynthia Nixon: “The two of them did immeasurably more to popularize democratic socialism by
acting as the left wing of the possible than any number of purist third-party campaigns, or
electoral abstinence, could ever have accomplished.”[51] Isserman argues that those who
propose breaking with the Democratic Party are “left sectarians” who embrace “whatever policy
and doctrine seems to promise the greatest personal sense of moral purity.”[52]

Isserman himself is a member of the North Star Caucus, one of the many caucuses that have
sprouted up in the DSA. Many of the signatories of the North Star Caucus represent the
Harringtonite “Old Guard,” who were active in DSOC, NAM, and the labor bureaucracy. The
North Star Caucus believes the main goal of the DSA is to defeat the Republicans by supporting
the Democratic Party.[53] To accomplish this, the North Star Caucus believes that the Democratic
Party needs to be Realigned.[54] Supporters of the North Star Caucus such as George Fish
explicitly draw inspiration from Michael Harrington’s political vision and understanding of
socialism. According to Fish, “Harringtonism is the guiding ideology of democratic socialism in
the US” which is characterized by socialism that “fights for free, honest and open elections for
achieving socialism based on democratic self-determination and for transformative change for
the here and now” as opposed to totalitarian Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism.[55] Secondly,
Fish says Michael Harrington was “correct in seeing the locus for socialist struggle within the
Democratic Party, and constituting DSA as the left wing of the Democratic Party,” which he
believes was vindicated by the DSA’s growth after their involvement in the Bernie Sanders
campaign.[56]
While the North Star Caucus are champions of a Realignment strategy in almost identical terms
to Michael Harrington, others such as Seth Ackerman have attempted to update the strategy for
the twenty-first century. Like Harrington and the North Star, Ackerman acknowledges that the
Democratic Party is undemocratic, lacks a coherent program, and that the party leadership is
unaccountable to its membership. Instead of simply uncritically supporting all Democrats like the
North Star Caucus, Ackerman proposes that the DSA utilize the Democratic Party by running
their own candidates on its ballot line. For Ackerman, supporting the Democratic Party ballot line
is not a question of principle, but a “secondary issue” and should be utilized “on a case-by-case
basis and on pragmatic grounds.”[57] In order for a DSA member to run as a Democrat,
Ackerman claims they must adhere to a “democratic socialist” program and be accountable to
DSA. In effect, DSA Democrats would function as “a party within a party.” According to
Ackerman, his proposal would enable

the Left organize to the point that it can strategically and consciously exploit the gaps in the
coherence of the system in order to create the equivalent of a political party in the key respects:
a membership-run organization with its own name, its own logo, its own identity and therefore
its own platform, and its own ideology.[58]

For all its sophistication, Ackerman’s updated Realignment strategy comes up against the same
roadblocks as Harrington’s original strategy and offers no solution to overcome them.

Whatever their differences, all of the factions in DSA remain formally committed to a democratic
socialist road to power. For instance, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara and leading DSA member
Joseph Schwartz favor a strategy that Michael Harrington would have felt quite comfortable
with. Sunkara and Schwartz are in favor of an expanded welfare state on the Nordic model, but
recognize that “social democracy is good, but not good enough.”[59] Like Harrington, they argue
that capitalism undermines social democracy in the long run:

Even if we wanted to stop at socialism within capitalism, it’s not clear that we could.

Since the early 1970s, the height of Western social democracy, corporate elites have abandoned
the postwar “class compromise” and sought to radically restrict the scope of economic
regulation. What capitalists grudgingly accepted during an exceptional period of postwar growth
and rising profits, they would no longer.[60]
In line with Michael Harrington’s strategy, they advocate building a new majority where socialists
“must be both tribunes for socialism and [its] best organizers” along the model of the
Communist Party’s Popular Front:

Still, the Popular Front was the last time socialism had any mass presence in the United States —
in part because, in its own way, the Communists rooted their struggles for democracy within US
political culture while trying to build a truly multiracial working-class movement.[61]

According to Sunkara and Schwartz, a new popular front would have a broad base of support
necessary to implement “non-reformist reforms” that would weaken capitalism and increase
the power of the working class, ultimately leading to socialism. Similar to Michael Harrington,
the exact mechanisms of Sunkara and Schwartz’s socialist transition remain unclear.

A much more developed strategy of the “democratic road to socialism” has been developed by
the sociologist Vivek Chibber. Strangely, Chibber says that the left should look to the early years
of the Bolshevik Party as an example of “a mass cadre-based party with a centralized leadership
and internal coherence” that is rooted in working-class communities.[62] However, Chibber does
not advocate a revolutionary insurrection on the Bolshevik model since he claims it is no longer
viable due to the overwhelming armed power of the state. Like Sunkara and Schwartz, Chibber
argues that the left needs to pursue a strategy of “non-reformist reforms” that “should have the
dual effect of making future organizing easier, and also constraining the power of capital to
undermine them down the road.”[63] In the distant future, Chibber believes that socialism will
require a “final break” with capitalism, but what that means is left unspecified and vague. For
now, Chibber advocates the creation of a reformist Bolshevik Party, and a gradualist strategy.

While the name Michael Harrington is unknown to most of the DSA’s new members, his ideas
continue to shape the contours of the debates on Realignment, reforms, and democratic
socialism. Some such as the North Star Caucus remain unreconstructed Harringtonites, while
Ackerman, Sunkara, Schwartz, and Chibber have attempted to make those ideas relevant to the
present. Still, none of the Harringtonites have seriously confronted the limitations of Michael
Harrington’s strategy or how to overcome them. The growth of the DSA’s membership opens up
the possibility that the organization may decide on a different course than the one envisioned by
Michael Harrington. However, at the time of this writing, the future course of the DSA and
Michael Harrington’s essay remains open.
Harrington’s strategy of realignment lives on in the Democratic Socialists of America and their
promotion of Bernie Sanders.

Conclusion

Michael Harrington’s hope was to make democratic socialism a force to be reckoned with in the
United States. Whatever his socialist desires may have been, Michael Harrington ultimately
reconciled himself to acting as the “loyal opposition” to the powers that be. His realignment
strategy meant that he prized tactics of moderation and compromise for fear of alienating
potential allies. Realignment was based on a flawed characterization of the Democratic Party as
a coalition of equal interest blocs as opposed to a capitalist controlled party, which meant any
attempt to “capture” the party was doomed in advance. The requirements of Realignment
required kowtowing to liberal prejudices, prizing loyalty to American institutions, and an
unquestioning reformist vision. As his conduct proved during the Vietnam War, Michael
Harrington’s whole strategy acted as a brake and a roadblock to revolutionary action. Still,
Michael Harrington’s ideas shape debates in the DSA and the wider left. Ultimately, if the
American left is serious about fighting for socialism, then they will have to abandon Michael
Harrington’s politics for those of revolutionary communism.

To Shalon, you mean the world to me.

Doug is currently working on a book on the life of Michael Harrington. His writings can be
found here.

1. Michael Harrington, Fragments of the Century: A Social Autobiography (New York:

Saturday Review Press, 1973), 13.

2. Ibid, 35.
3. Ibid, 66.

4. Ibid, 41

5. Ibid. 17.

6. Ibid, 18.

7. The Catholic Worker Movement, “The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker.” The
Catholic Worker. http://www.catholicworker.org/cw-aims-and-means.html

8. Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Sunday Review Press, 1970), vii.

9. Harrington 1973, 179.

10. Ibid, 129.

11. Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976),
321.

12. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), 53-54.

13. Harrington 1973, 149.

14. Ibid.

15. Alexander Cockburn, Corruptions of Empire (New York: Verso, 1989), 370 and 373.

16. Quoted in Robert Gorman, Michael Harrington: Speaking American (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 142.

17. Michael Harrington, Decade of Decision: The Crisis of the American System (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1980), 291.

18. Michael Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left (New York: The MacMillan Company,
1968), 290. For a succinct summary of the new class see Harrington 1968, 282-291 and
Harrington 1970, 361.

19. Michael Harrington, “The New Class and the Left,” in B. Bruce-Biggs, ed., The New
Class? (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1979), 24.

20. Ibid.

21. Harrington 1973, 75-76.

22. Michael Harrington, The Accidental Century (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 40.

23. Harrington 1968, 290.

24. Ibid, 287-288.

25. Ibid, 289.

26. Harrington 1973, 132

27. Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, “To Build a Democratic Left, 1968 Platform:
Socialist Party,
USA,” Archive.org.https://archive.org/details/ToBuildADemocraticLeft1968PlatformSocia
listPartyU.s.a/page/n0

28. Harrington 1968, 294.

29. Michael Harrington, “Out Beyond Liberalism,” New York Times, March 3,
1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/03/archives/out-beyond-liberalism.html

30. Harrington 1970, 250.

31. Ibid, 267.

32. Harrington 1980, 321.

33. See Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008).

34. Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class
War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 111-112.

35. Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, “A way forward; political realignment in

America. political declaration of the 1960 national convention.” and see also Jack
Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Potomac Books, 2015), 476-477

36. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
1969), 198-199

37. V. I. Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” Marxists Internet
Archive.https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/r.htm

38. Michael Harrington, “Wrestling With the Famous Specter,” The Nation, February 28,
1972, 277

39. Michael Harrington, The Next Left: The History of the Future (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1986), 187.

40. Ibid, 191.

41. Harrington 1976, 311-312.

42. Ibid, 311.

43. Ibid, 313.

44. Harrington 1968, 146 and 150.

45. Ibid. 296-297.

46. Michael Harrington and Peter Camejo, “Should Socialists Have Voted for Carter? Part
III,” Militant, December 10, 1976, 25,
https://www.themilitant.com/1976/4047/MIL4047.pdf24.
47. Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Rebirth American Radicalism (New York: Routledge,
1996), 96 and Stanley Aronowitz, “The New American Movement and Why It
Failed,” Works and Days 55/56 Vol. 28, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 2010):
23, http://www.worksanddays.net/2010/File03.Aronowitz.pdf

48. I am drawing on the work of Charlie Post here. See Charlie Post, “The Popular Front:
Rethinking CPUSA History,” Against the Current. https://solidarity-us.org/atc/63/p2363/
and Charlie Post, “The New Deal and the Popular Front: Models for contemporary
socialists?” International Socialist Review. https://isreview.org/issue/108/new-deal-and-
popular-front ; Charlie Post, “The Popular Front Didn’t Work,” Jacobin Magazine,
October 17, 2017, https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/popular-front-communist-party-
democrats

49. See Charlie Post, “What Strategy for the US Left?” Jacobin Magazine, February 23, 2018,
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/socialist-organization-strategy-electoral-politics

50. Juan Cruz Ferre, “DSA Votes for BDS, Reparations, and Out of the Socialist
International,” Left Voice. http://www.leftvoice.org/DSA-Votes-for-BDS-Reparations-and-
Out-of-the-Socialist-International

51. Maurice Isserman, “Who Are You Calling a ‘Harringtonite’?” New York Times, Sept. 13,
2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/opinion/who-are-you-calling-a-
harringtonite.html

52. Ibid, 53.

53. DSA North Star: The Caucus for Socialism and Democracy, “Statement of Principles,” DSA
North Star. https://www.dsanorthstar.org/statement-of-principles.html ; Dan La Botz,
“DSA Two Years Later: Where Are We At? Where Are We Headed?” New Politics.
http://newpol.org/content/dsa-two-years-later-where-are-we-where-are-we-headed

54. Ibid.

55. George Fish, “Michael Harrington and Harringtonism: A Critical Assessment,” DSA North
Star. https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/michael-harrington-and-harringtonisma-
critical-appreciation

56. Ibid.

57. Seth Ackerman, “A Blueprint for a New Party,” Jacobin Magazine, November 8, 2016,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-
ackerman

58. Ibid.

59. Joseph M. Schwartz and Bhaskar Sunkara, “Social Democracy Is Good. But Not Good
Enough,” Jacobin Magazine, August 29, 2017,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/democratic-socialism-judis-new-republic-social-
democracy-capitalism
 60. Ibid.

61. Joseph M. Schwartz and Bhaskar Sunkara, “What Should Socialists Do?” Jacobin
Magazine, August 1, 2017, https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/socialist-left-democratic-
socialists-america-dsa

62. Vivek Chibber, “Our Road to Power,” Jacobin Magazine, December 5, 2017,
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/our-road-to-power

63. Ibid.

Trotsky y Trotsky and

Preobrazhensky
: La
problemática
unidad de la
Oposición de
Izquierda
Por Richard Day
Prólogo de Daniel Gaido
Introducción
Presentamos al lector de En
Defensa del Marxismo la primera
edición castellana de este estudio
fundamental sobre la relación entre of the Left Opposition to the Stalin
Trotsky y el principal economista
de la Oposición de Izquierda al
régimen de Stalin, Yevgeni
Preobrazhensky. El autor de este
trabajo, Richard B. Day, es un
profesor de la Universidad de
Toronto especializado en la historia series of works on the subject,
Preobrazhensky
: The
problematic
unity of the Left
Opposition
By Richard Day
Foreword by Daniel Gaido
Introduction
We present to the reader of In
Defense of Marxism the first
Castilian edition of this fundamental
study on the relationship between
Trotsky and the leading economist
regime, Yevgeni
Preobrazhensky. The author of this
work, Richard B. Day, is a
professor at the University of
Toronto specializing in the history
of Russian Marxism and author of a
del marxismo ruso y autor de una
serie de trabajos sobre el tema,
entre ellos Leon Trotsky and the
Politics of Economic Isolation
(Cambridge University Press,
1973), The Crisis and the Crash:
Soviet Studies of the West, 1917-
1939 (NLB, 1981), y Cold War
Capitalism: The View from
Moscow, 1945-1975 (M.E. Sharpe,
1995).
Richard B. Day es también co-
editor, junto con Daniel Gaido, de
Witnesses to Permanent
Revolution: The Documentary
Record (Brill 2009), Discovering
Imperialism: Social Democracy to
World War I (Brill 2012) y
Responses to Marx’s ‘Capital’:
From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak
Illich Rubin (Brill 2016), y traductor
de obras como Yevgeni
Preobrazhensky, The Decline of
Capitalism (M.E. Sharpe, 1985) y
Pavel V Maksakovsky, The
Capitalist Cycle (Brill 2004).
Actualmente Day está editando las
obras completas de
Preobrazhensky, de las cuales ya
ha aparecido el primer tomo: The
Preobrazhensky Papers: Archival
Documents and Materials. Volume
1:1886-1920 (Brill 2014).
Yevgueni Preobrazhensky (1886-
1937) nació el 15 de febrero 1886
(según el calendario juliano
entonces vigente en Rusia) en
Boljov, en la gubernia de Orel.1 Su priest, teacher of the Bible in the
padre, Aleksei Aleksandrovich
Preobrazhensky, era un sacerdote Alekseevich studied at his father's
ortodoxo, maestro de la Biblia en la private school and completed two
escuela parroquial de Boljov.
including Leon Trotsky and the
Politics of Economic Isolation
(Cambridge University Press,
1973), The Crisis and the Crash:
Soviet Studies of the West, 1917-
1939 (NLB, 1981), and Cold War
Capitalism: The View from Moscow,
1945-1975 (ME Sharpe, 1995).
Richard B. Day is also co-editor,
along with Daniel Gaido, from
Witnesses to Permanent
Revolution: The Documentary
Record (Brill 2009), Discovering
Imperialism: Social Democracy to
World War I (Brill 2012) and
Responses to Marx's 'Capital':
From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak
Illich Rubin (Brill 2016), and
translator of works like Yevgeni
Preobrazhensky, The Decline of
Capitalism (ME Sharpe, 1985) and
Pavel V Maksakovsky, The
Capitalist Cycle (Brill
2004). Currently Day is editing the
complete works of Preobrazhensky,
of which the first volume has
already appeared: The
Preobrazhensky Papers: Archival
Documents and Materials. Volume
1: 1886-1920 (Brill 2014).
Yevgueni Preobrazhensky (1886-
1937) was born on February 15,
1886 (according to the Julian
calendar then in force in Russia) in
Boljov, in the gubernia of Orel.1 His
father, Aleksei Aleksandrovich
Preobrazhensky, was an Orthodox
parish school of Boljov. Yevgueni
years at the school in the city of
Yevgueni Alekseevich estudió en la Boljov. He joined the Russian
escuela privada de su padre y Social Democratic Labor Party
completó dos años en la escuela (RSDLP) at the end of 1903 and
de la ciudad de Boljov. Se unió al was arrested during his first year of
Partido Obrero Socialdemócrata de membership when he was a
Rusia (POSDR) a finales de 1903 y student at the Law School of the
fue detenido durante su primer año Moscow University. He moved to
de militancia, cuando era various positions and towns, and in
estudiante en la Facultad de December 1905 he took part in the
Derecho de la Universidad de uprising in Presnia.
Moscú. Se trasladó a varias
posiciones y pueblos, y en After the repression of that
diciembre de 1905 tomó parte en el uprising, Preobrazhensky was sent
levantamiento en Presnia. by the party to the Urals at the
suggestion of Aleksei I.
Tras la represión de aquella Ríkov. There he met M. Iakov
sublevación, Preobrazhensky fue Sverdlov and his wife, Klavdiia T.
enviado por el partido a los Urales Novgorodtseva. He was involved in
por sugerencia de Aleksei I. Ríkov. party work in Ekaterinburg,
Allí se encontró con M. Iakov Chelyabinsk, Perm, and especially
Sverdlov y su esposa, Klavdiia T. in the southern Urals: Ufa and
Novgoro- dtseva. Estuvo Zlatoust. Preobrazhensky was a
involucrado en el trabajo del member of the Bureau of the Ural
partido en Ekaterinbur- go, Oblast in the RSDLP, and in the
Cheliabinsk, Perm, y summer of 1907 he was elected to
especialmente en el sur de los represent the Urals at the Pan-
Urales: Ufa y Zlatoust. Russian party conference held in
Preobrazhensky fue miembro del Finland, where he met with Lenin.
Buró del Oblast de los Urales en el
POSDR, y en el verano de 1907 Preobrazhensky was arrested
fue elegido para representar a losseveral times. He was sentenced
Urales en la conferencia panrusa on May 5-7, 1909 in Chelyabinsk
del partido que se celebró en by the Chamber of the Court of
Finlandia, donde se reunió con Saratov and on September 14,
Lenin. 1909 in Perm by the Chamber of
the Court of Kazan, and was
Preobrazhensky fue detenido en sentenced to internal exile. He
varias ocasiones. Fue condenado fulfilled the sentence in Siberia, in
los días 5-7 de mayo de 1909 en the Irkutsk gubernia, with Artem
Cheliabinsk por la Cámara de la Sergeev and others. In exile, he
Corte de Saratov y el 14 de corresponded with Lenin, Grigorii
septiembre de 1909 en Perm por la Zinoviev and Nadezhda K.
Cámara de la Corte de Kazan, y Krupskaya. In the spring of 1916 he
fue condenado al exilio interno. moved to Chita (in eastern Siberia)
Cumplió la sentencia en Siberia, en and remained there until the
la gubernia de Irkutsk, con Artem revolution of February 1917.
Sergeev y otros. En el exilio,
mantuvo correspondencia con In Chita, Preobrazhensky took an
Lenin, Grigorii Zinoviev y active part in the revolution of
Nadezhda K. Krupskaya. En la February 1917, but traveled to
primavera de 1916 se trasladó a Petrograd in April to serve as a
Chita (en Siberia oriental) y delegate to the First All-Russian
permaneció allí hasta la revolución Congress of Soviets of Workers
de febrero de 1917. 'and Soldiers' Deputies (June 3-24,
1917). After the Congress he
En Chita, Preobrazhensky tomó returned to the Urals and was
parte activa en la revolución de elected to the Urals Oblast Party
febrero de 1917, pero viajó a Committee. The organization of
Petrogrado en abril para servir Zlatoust of the RSDLP (b) elected
como delegado al Primer Congreso him delegate to the VI Congress of
Panruso de los Soviets de the Party (July 26-August 8), where
diputados obreros y soldados (3-24 he was elected a member of the
de junio de 1917). Después del Mandate Commission and
Congreso regresó a los Urales y candidate for a member of the
fue elegido para el Comité del Central Committee.
partido del Oblast de los Urales. La After the congress,
organización de Zlatoust del Preobrazhensky returned to the
POSDR (b) lo eligió delegado al VI Urals and stayed there during the
Congreso del Partido (26 de julio-8 October Revolution. There he
de agosto), donde fue elegido wrote in 1918 his first important
miembro de la Comisión de work, Anarchism and Communism.
Mandato y candidato a miembro
del Comité Central. During the Brest peace
Después del congreso, negotiations, Preobrazhensky
Preobrazhensky regresó a los joined the "left communists" and
Urales y se quedó allí durante la approached Nicolás Bujarin. Both
Revolución de Octubre. Allí were in the Program Commission
escribió en 1918 su primera obra created by the VIII Party Congress
importante, Anarquismo y to edit and prepare the final version
comunismo. of the program approved by
Congress; Together they wrote the
Durante las negociaciones de paz famous ABC of Communism.
de Brest, Preobrazhensky adhirió a
los “comunistas de izquierda” y se The party organization in Ufa chose
acercó a Nicolás Bujarin. Ambos Preobrazhensky as delegate to the
estaban en la Comisión del IX Party Congress, which elected
Programa creada por el VIII
Congreso del Partido para editar y
preparar la versión final del
programa aprobado por el
Congreso; juntos escribieron el
famoso El ABC del comunismo.
La organización del partido en Ufa
eligió a Preobrazhensky delegado
al IX Congreso del Partido, que lo
eligió para el Comité Central y lo
convirtió en uno de sus tres
secretarios (junto con N. N.
Krestinskii y L. P Serebriakov). En
marzo de 1920 Preobrazhensky y
su familia se trasladaron a Moscú.
Además de su designación en el
aparato del Comité Central,
Preobrazhensky también fue
designado para integrar tres
departamentos: agitación y
propaganda, trabajo entre las
mujeres y trabajo en las zonas
rurales. Preparó las tesis de la
circular del Comité Central
relativas a la lucha contra la
desigualdad material y la
burocracia dentro del partido y
también se convirtió en miembro
de la Comisión Central de Control
(TsKK) luego de su creación.
En el debate sindical,
Preobrazhensky apoyó la
plataforma de Bujarin, mientras
que en el X Congreso del Partido
(marzo de 1921) apoyó el proyecto suggested that he be held
de resolución propuesto por
Bujarin y Trotsky. Al parecer, este the Central Committee and the
apoyo le costó la elección al
Comité Central. En el congreso, sin implementing financial
embargo, Lenin apoyó la opinión
de Preobrazhensky relativa a la
him to the Central Committee and
made him one of its three
secretaries (together with NN
Krestinskii and L. P
Serebriakov). In March 1920
Preobrazhensky and his family
moved to Moscow. In addition to
his designation in the Central
Committee apparatus,
Preobrazhensky was also
appointed to integrate three
departments: agitation and
propaganda, work among women
and work in rural areas. Prepared
the thesis of the Central Committee
circular concerning the struggle
against material inequality and
bureaucracy within the party and
also became a member of the
Central Control Commission (TsKK)
after its creation.
In the trade union debate,
Preobrazhensky supported
Bukharin's platform, while at the X
Party Congress (March 1921) he
supported the draft resolution
proposed by Bukharin and
Trotsky. Apparently, this support
cost the election to the Central
Committee. At the congress,
however, Lenin supported
Preobrazhensky's opinion
regarding the need to revise the
financial policy to be in line with the
new economic policy (NEP), and
responsible for the commission of
Sovnarkom charged with
reforms. Lenin considered
Preobrazhensky an important
necesidad de revisar la política authority in finance, especially after
financiera para que estuviera en the publication in 1920 of his paper
línea con la nueva política Paper Money in the Epoch of
económica (NEP), y sugirió que se Proletarian Dictatorship (available
le hiciera responsable de la in English in Day, 2014: 732-738).
comisión del Comité Central y el
Sovnarkom encargada de For the Eleventh Party Congress
implementar las reformas (March 1922), Preobrazhensky
financieras. Lenin consideraba a tried to delineate the objectives of
Preobrazhensky una autoridad the party with respect to the various
importante en las finanzas, sobre strata of peasants under the NEP.
todo después de la publicación en He argued that non-economic
1920 de su trabajo Paper Money in coercion was unacceptable and
the Epoch of Proletarian that the State should use more
Dictatorship (disponible en inglés taxes to limit the tendencies
en Day, 2014: 732-738). exploiters of the kulaks (rich
peasants). Lenin supported
Para el XI Congreso del Partido Preobrazhensky's view that it
(marzo de 1922), Preobrazhensky would be wrong to support this
trató de delinear los objetivos del class at the expense of others in
partido respecto de los diversos order to develop agriculture as
estratos de campesinos bajo la quickly as possible.
NEP Sostuvo que la coerción no
económica era inaceptable y que el In the spring of 1922 Lenin and
Estado debía usar más impuestos Preobrazhensky disagreed about
para limitar las tendencias the nature of the country's
explotadoras de los kulaks economic system. At the Eleventh
(campesinos ricos). Lenin apoyó la Party Congress, Lenin argued that
opinión de Preobrazhensky de que Russia's economic system was
sería un error apoyar esta clase a state capitalism, a necessary stage
expensas de las demás con el fin in the country's advance towards
de desarrollar la agricultura lo más
socialism. He thus warned the
rápido posible. party against overestimating the
socialist maturity of the transition
En la primavera de 1922 Lenin y economy and underestimating the
Preobrazhensky estuvieron en role of market relations. In Lenin's
desacuerdo sobre la naturaleza del view, the concept of the "socialist
sistema económico del país. En el market" nature of the Soviet
XI Congreso partidario, Lenin Russia's economic system that
argumentó que el sistema Preobrazhensky advocated
económico de Rusia era el underestimated the role of the
capitalismo de Estado, una etapa market in the state sector.
necesaria en el avance del país
hacia el socialismo. Advertía así al
partido contra la sobrestimación de
la madurez socialista de la
economía de transición y la
subestimación del papel de las
relaciones de mercado. En opinión
de Lenin, el concepto de la
naturaleza “socialista de mercado”
del sistema económico de la Rusia
soviética que defendía
Preobrazhensky subestimaba el
papel del mercado en el sector
estatal.
Después de que los puntos de
vista de ambos se hubieron
acercado en el XI Congreso del
Partido, Preobrazhensky llegó a la
conclusión de que la NEP era
inevitable debido a la necesidad de
extraer toda la utilidad posible de
los antiguos métodos capitalistas
de contabilidad para el sector
estatal. Lenin apoyó Trotsky en su
lucha para ampliar las
prerrogativas del Gosplan (comité
para la planificación económica),
por una parte, y pidió más
democracia en el partido y en el
Estado, por la otra.
Inmediatamente después del
congreso, Preobrazhensky asistió
a la Conferencia de Génova.
En 1922, en su libro De la NEP al
socialismo, Preobrazhensky
esbozó las perspectivas para la
evolución del país durante la NEP
Su modelo para el futuro se
basaba en su interpretación de la
NEP como una economía
socialista de mercado en la que los
elementos de socialismo y
After the views of both had
approached in the XI Congress of
the Party, Preobrazhensky came to
the conclusion that the NEP was
inevitable due to the need to
extract all the possible utility of the
old capitalist methods of
accounting for the sector.
state. Lenin supported Trotsky in
his struggle to expand the
prerogatives of the Gosplan
(committee for economic planning),
on the one hand, and called for
more democracy in the party and in
the State, on the other. Immediately
after the congress, Preobrazhensky
attended the Genoa Conference.
In 1922, in his book From the NEP
to Socialism, Preobrazhensky
outlined perspectives for the
evolution of the country during the
NEP. His model for the future was
based on his interpretation of the
NEP as a socialist market economy
in which the elements of socialism
and capitalism were in a
confrontational
relationship. Preobrazhensky
predicted that this struggle would
lead Soviet society to an economic
deadlock towards the end of the
1920s, and that the European
proletariat, after its victory in a
European revolution in the late
1920s or early '30, could come to
the aid of the Soviet Union.
In the spring of 1923, Lenin
withdrew from politics due to
successive brain hemorrhages, and
the country's economic problems
worsened during the summer and
capitalismo estaban en una
relación de confrontación.
Preobrazhensky predijo que esta
lucha llevaría a la sociedad
soviética a un punto muerto
económico hacia finales de la
década de los ‘20, y que el
proletariado europeo, después de
su victoria en una revolución
europea de finales de los años ‘20
o principios de los ‘30, podría
acudir en ayuda de la Unión
Soviética.
En la primavera de 1923, Lenin se
retiró de la política debido a
sucesivas hemorragias cerebrales,
y los problemas económicos del
país empeoraron durante el verano
y el otoño. Un acalorado debate se
inició dentro del partido, y la lucha
por el poder se intensificó en sus
niveles más altos. En el curso de la
discusión dentro del partido,
Preobrazhensky elaboró sus ideas
sobre la ampliación de la
democracia en el partido y el
fortalecimiento del carácter
planificado de la economía. La
mayoría del Comité Central, sin
embargo, optó por reforzar el papel
del aparato.
En la XIII Conferencia del Partido
Comunista de Rusia (b) (enero de
1924), Preobrazhensky informó
sobre los asuntos partidarios, pero
el informe principal fue hecho por
Stalin. Esta conferencia y el XIII
Congreso del PC caracterizaron
las opiniones de la Oposición como
una “desviación
pequeñoburguesa”.
fall. A heated debate began within
the party, and the struggle for
power intensified at its highest
levels. In the course of the
discussion within the party,
Preobrazhensky elaborated his
ideas on the expansion of party
democracy and the strengthening
of the planned character of the
economy. The majority of the
Central Committee, however, opted
to reinforce the role of the
apparatus.
At the XIII Conference of the
Communist Party of Russia (b)
(January 1924), Preobrazhensky
reported on party matters, but the
main report was made by
Stalin. This conference and the XIII
PC Congress characterized the
Opposition's views as a "petty-
bourgeois
deviation". Preobrazhensky,
therefore, was identified as an
oppositionist and shortly after as
"Trotskyist." (Gorinov, Tsakunov
and Gurevich, 1991: 286-296).
The formation of the Left
Opposition
Pierre Broué, in his history of the
Trotskyists in the Soviet Union,
Communists against Stalin:
Massacre of a generation, adds
details about the life of
Preobrazhensky.
He indicates, for example, that it
was he (along with Sapronov,
leader of the "Decistas" - the
tendency of "democratic
Preobrazhensky, por lo tanto, fue
identificado como un oposicionista
y poco después como “trotskista”.
(Gorinov, Tsakunov y Gurevich,
1991: 286-296).
La formación de la Oposición de
Izquierda
Pierre Broué, en su historia de los
trotskistas en la Unión Soviética,
Comunistas contra Stalin: Masacre
de una generación, agrega
precisiones sobre la vida de
Preobrazhensky.
Indica, por ejemplo, que fue él
(junto con Sapronov, líder de los
“decistas” -la tendencia del
«centralismo democrático») quien
tomó la iniciativa de redactar,
después de una serie de
discusiones con Trotsky, la “Carta
de los 46” viejos bolcheviques del
25 de octubre de 1923, pidiendo el
fin de las prácticas burocráticas y
la vuelta a la democracia interna
dentro del partido -un respaldo a la
carta de Trotsky al Comité Central
del 8 de octubre de 1923, que
denunciaba las responsabilidades
del aparato burocrático por los
errores en la política económica
implementada por la “troika”
Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin (tales
como la ausencia de planificación)
y exigía un cambio de régimen. En
la “Carta de 46”, firmada por la flor
y nata de los bolcheviques de los
tiempos heroicos (menos los
exiliados de la diplomacia), se lee:
“El Partido ya no es, en gran
centralism") who took the initiative
to write, after a series of
discussions with Trotsky, the
"Charter of the 46 "Old Bolsheviks
of October 25, 1923, calling for the
end of bureaucratic practices and
the return to internal democracy
within the party - an endorsement
of Trotsky's letter to the Central
Committee of October 8, 1923,
which denounced the
responsibilities of the bureaucratic
apparatus for the errors in the
economic policy implemented by
the "troika" Zinoviev-Kamenev-
Stalin (such as the absence of
planning) and demanded a change
of regime. In the "Letter of 46",
signed by the cream of the
Bolsheviks of heroic times (except
exiles of diplomacy), we read:
"The Party is no longer, to a large
extent, an independent and living
community that directly reflects
reality by being linked to it with
thousands of threads. Instead, we
see a division that continues to
grow, but is always hidden,
between a hierarchy of secretaries
and the 'quiet people', between
professional officials and the mass
of a party that is part of everyday
life. "
The "Charter of the 46" resumed
criticism against the internal regime
of the Party:
"In the Party, free discussion has
practically disappeared; the public
opinion of the party is suffocated. In
our days, it is not the party, it is not
medida, una colectividad
independiente y viva que refleja
directamente la realidad por estar
ligado a ella con millares de hilos.
En su lugar, observamos una
división que no deja de crecer,
pero que siempre se oculta, entre
una jerarquía de secretarios y la
‘gente tranquila’, entre los
funcionarios profesionales y la
masa de un partido que forma
parte de la vida común”.
La “Carta de los 46” retomaba las
críticas contra el régimen interno
del Partido:
“En el Partido prácticamente ha
desaparecido la libre discusión; la
opinión pública del partido está
asfixiada. En nuestros días, no es
el partido, no son las amplias
masas las que promueven y eligen
a los miembros de los comités
provinciales y del comité central. Al
contrario, la jerarquía de
secretarios selecciona, en gran
medida, a los delegados para las
conferencias y congresos, que se
han convertido en asambleas
ejecutivas de esta jerarquía”.
Y concluía:
“Las dificultades que se avecinan
exigen una acción unida, fraternal,
plenamente consciente,
extremadamente vigorosa,
extremadamente concentrada, de
todos los miembros de nuestro
partido. Hay que acabar con el
régimen fraccional, y lo deben
hacer, en primer lugar, aquellos
the broad masses that promote and
elect the members of the provincial
committees and the central
committee. On the contrary, the
hierarchy of secretaries selects, to
a large extent, the delegates for the
conferences and congresses,
which have become executive
assemblies of this hierarchy ".
And it concluded:
"The difficulties that lie ahead
demand a united, fraternal, fully
conscious, extremely vigorous,
extremely concentrated action by
all the members of our party. We
must put an end to the fractional
regime, and it must be done in the
first place by those who have
created it. It must be replaced by a
regime of unity between comrades
and internal democracy. "
In the same vein, Preobrazhensky
publicly manifested on November
28, 1923 in an article published in
Pravda.
The leadership reacted with
fractional violence. In his eyes, the
criticisms of Trotsky and the 46
were intolerable and their
publication was strictly prohibited,
as well as the claims presented by
Preobrazhensky at the meeting of
the Central Committee and the
Control Committee: discussion at
all levels of the major issues
policies, total freedom of
expression in the Party, debate in
the press, re-elect those
responsible, re-examine the reports
que lo han creado. Debe ser
reemplazado por un régimen de
unidad entre camaradas y de
democracia interna”.
En el mismo sentido se manifestó
públicamente Preobrazhensky el
28 de noviembre de 1923 en un
artículo publicado en Pravda.
La dirección reaccionó con
violencia fraccional. A sus ojos, las
críticas de Trotsky y de los 46 eran
intolerables y su publicación fue
estrictamente prohibida, así como
las reivindicaciones presentadas
por Preobrazhensky en la reunión
del Comité Central y de la
Comisión de Control: discusión en
todos los niveles de las grandes
cuestiones políticas, libertad total
de expresión en el Partido, debate
en la prensa, volver a elegir a los
responsables, reexaminar los
informes de los que fueron
“trasladados” para verificar que no
se trataba de sanciones ocultas.
El 7 de noviembre de 1923 se
inició la discusión sobre el Nuevo
Curso. Fue Preobrazhensky quien
abrió el fuego con su contribución
del 28 de noviembre 1923:
“Era característico, en la época en
la que teníamos muchos frentes
abiertos, que la vida del partido
emanaba mucha más vitalidad y la
independencia de las
organizaciones fuera mucho
mayor. En el momento en que no
solamente han aparecido las
condiciones objetivas para la
of those who were "transferred" to
verify that these were not hidden
sanctions.
On November 7, 1923, the
discussion about the New Course
began. It was Preobrazhensky who
opened the fire with his contribution
of November 28, 1923:
"It was characteristic, in the era in
which we had many open fronts,
that the life of the party emanated
much more vitality and the
independence of the organizations
was much greater. In the moment
in which not only the objective
conditions for the resuscitation of
the internal life of the party and its
adaptation to the new tasks have
appeared, when there is also a real
need to do so, not only have we not
advanced one step in relation to
the period of war communism, but,
on the contrary, we have intensified
bureaucratization, petrifaction, the
number of issues prematurely
settled from above; we have
accentuated the division of the
party, initiated during the period of
the war, between those who decide
and have the responsibilities, and
the masses that apply those
decisions,
In the same vein Trotsky
pronounced on December 10, 1923
in a letter addressed to members of
the party of Krasnaya Presnia, a
district of Moscow. The contribution
of Trotsky, in the form of
interventions in the debates and
tribunes in the press, is well known
reanimación de la vida interna del for its subsequent edition, entitled
partido y su adaptación a las The New Course. It describes the
nuevas tareas, cuando existe anomalous situation in the Party
también la necesidad real de ("the appointment system, the
hacerlo, no solamente no hemos designation above the secretaries")
avanzado un paso en relación con and adds a series of demands: that
el periodo del comunismo de the apparatus be subordinated to
guerra, sino que, al contrario, the party, that free and fraternal
hemos intensificado la criticism be recovered, that the old
burocratización, la petrificación, el collaborate with the young
número de cuestiones zanjadas generation:
prematuramente desde arriba;
hemos acentuado la división del "Our youth should not just repeat
partido, iniciada durante el periodo our formulas. He must conquer
de la guerra, entre aquellos que them, assimilate them, form an
deciden y tienen las opinion, his own physiognomy, and
responsabilidades, y las masas be able to fight for his points of
que aplican esas decisiones, en view with the courage that provides
cuya elaboración no han tenido a deep conviction and complete
parte alguna” (citado en Broué, independence of character. Outside
2008: 44). the party the passive obedience
that mechanically follows the
En el mismo sentido se pronunció footsteps of the chiefs; out of the
Trotsky el 10 de diciembre 1923 en party the impersonality, the servility,
una carta dirigida a los miembros the carrerismo. The Bolshevik is
del partido de Krasnaia Presnia, un not only a disciplined man, but a
distrito de Moscú. La contribución man who, in each case and each
de Trotsky, en forma de thing, forges a firm opinion and
intervenciones en los debates y defends it courageously, not only
tribunas en la prensa, es bien against his enemies but within the
conocida por su ulterior edición, party itself "(Broué, 2008 : Four.
titulada El nuevo curso. Describe la Five).
situación anómala en el Partido (“el
sistema de nombramientos, la All this was deeply felt; The sudden
designación por arriba de los appearance of hundreds of letters,
secretarios”) y añade una serie de texts and articles sent to the stands
exigencias: que el aparato se of the party press, including
subordine al partido, que se Pravda, was impressive since the
recupere la crítica libre y fraternal, general public discussion was
que los viejos colaboren con la opened.
joven generación:
Around these documents, the Left
“Nuestra juventud no debe Opposition to the Stalin regime is
limitarse a repetir nuestras agglutinated as of 1923. In
fórmulas. Debe conquistarlas, Communists against Stalin, Broué
asimilarlas, formarse opinión, su draws the following profile of its
propia fisonomía, y ser capaces de members:
luchar por sus puntos de vista con
el coraje que proporciona una "They are, generally, people of
convicción profunda y una eminent intellectual and moral
completa independencia de qualities. They are not men of
carácter. Fuera del partido la apparatus, but militants of the mass
obediencia pasiva que sigue movement. They knew the
mecánicamente los pasos de los clandestinity and the prison, in
jefes; fuera del partido la addition to the emigration and the
impersonalidad, el servilismo, el vast horizons of the international
carrerismo. El bolchevique no es movement. There are fewer
solamente un hombre disciplinado, officials than leaders, more tribunes
sino un hombre que, en cada caso or agitators than administrators,
y sobre cada cosa, se forja una more writers than circulars. In
firme opinión y la defiende con power, they measure the dangers
coraje, no solamente contra sus of corruption that haunt them. They
enemigos sino en el seno del still believe in the world revolution,
propio partido” (Broué, 2008: 45). in the socialist future of
humanity. They believe in the
Todo esto fue profundamente strength of ideas, in the fertility of
sentido; fue impresionante la súbita their confrontation, in the conviction
aparición de centenares de cartas, that is born of this combat. They
textos y artículos enviados a las have confidence in their party, to
tribunas de la prensa del partido, which they want to recover, to
entre ellos a Pravda, desde que se return to the purity of their
abrió la discusión general pública. revolutionary years "(Broué: 2059-
60)
En torno de esos documentos se
aglutina la Oposición de Izquierda In 1926, Preobrazhensky published
al régimen de Stalin a partir de his main work: The New
1923. En Comunistas contra Stalin, Economy2, which Richard B. Day
Broué traza la siguiente semblanza subjected to a critical analysis in
de sus miembros: the present article, emphasizing
both its virtues and its divergences
“Son, generalmente, personas de with the economic conceptions of
eminentes cualidades intelectuales Trotsky, divergences that were
y morales. No son hombres de rooted in their interpretations
aparato, sino militantes del different from the law of value.
movimiento de masas. Conocieron
la clandestinidad y la prisión, After the formation of the Unified
además de la emigración y los Opposition with Trotsky, Zinoviev
vastos horizontes del movimiento and Kamenev, in a plenary session
internacional. Son menos of the Central Committee held on
funcionarios que dirigentes, más April 6-9, 1926, thirteen members
tribunos o agitadores que signed a declaration on "the
administradores, más escritores bureaucratic degeneration of the
que redactores de circulares. En el workers' state". On July 23, 1926
poder, miden los peligros de the CC condemned the "illegal" and
corrupción que los acechan. Creen "splitting" methods of the
todavía en la revolución mundial, Opposition. Attempts to "exit" the
en el futuro socialista de la Unified Opposition in the party cells
humanidad. Creen en la fuerza de in September-October 1926 failed
las ideas, en lo fecundo de su due to the lack of response from
confrontación, en la convicción que the militants. As a consequence of
nace de este combate. Tienen this failure, the Zinovievist party of
confianza en su partido, al que the Unified Opposition, frightened
quieren recuperar, para volver a la by the expulsions, condemned its
pureza de sus años own fractional activity and
revolucionarios” (Broué: 2059-60) proclaimed its resignation on
October 16, 1926. In spite of this,
En 1926, Preobrazhensky publicó at the end of October 1926 both
su obra principal: La nueva Zinoviev and Trotsky were expelled
economía2, que Richard B. Day from the political bureau.
somete a un análisis crítico en el
presente artículo, subrayando tanto The massacre in Shanghai on April
sus virtudes como sus 12, 1927,3 mobilized the militants
divergencias con las concepciones again, revalued the analysis of the
económicas de Trotsky, opposition and showed the need to
divergencias que tenían sus raíces fight against the gravediggers of
en sus interpretaciones distintas de the revolution. In a way, the
la ley del valor. Russian Unified Opposition was
reborn from the ashes of the
Luego de la formación de la Chinese revolution and Zinoviev,
Oposición Unificada con Trotsky, about to capitulate, regained his
Zinoviev y Kamenev, en un courage. In August 1927, the
plenario del Comité Central Opposition Platform was drafted
celebrado el 6-9 de abril de 1926, and its reproduction began. But on
trece miembros firmaron una the night of September 12-13,
declaración sobre “la degeneración 1927, the GPU agents found the
burocrática del Estado obrero”. El machines to hectograph and
23 de julio de 1926 el CC condenó detained many people:
los métodos “ilegales” y Mrachkovsky, Pevzner and an
“escisionistas” de la Oposición. Las unknown number of participants in
tentativas de “salida” de la
Oposición Unificada en las células
del partido en septiembre-octubre
de 1926 fracasaron ante la falta de
respuesta de los militantes. Como
consecuencia de ese fracaso, la
parte zinovievista de la Oposición
Unificada, asustada por las
expulsiones, condenó su propia
actividad fraccional y proclamó su press" in the XV Congress, which
renuncia a ella el 16 de octubre
1926. A pesar de ello, a fines de
octubre de 1926 tanto Zinoviev
como Trotsky fueron expulsados
del buró político.
La masacre de Shanghai, el 12 de erupted, with insults, threats and
abril de 1927,3 movilizó de nuevo a the launching of objects to the
los militantes, revalorizó los
análisis de los opositsioneri y
mostró la necesidad del combate
contra los sepultureros de la
revolución. En cierta forma, la
Oposición Unificada rusa renació
de las cenizas de la revolución
china y Zinoviev, a punto de
capitular, recobró su coraje. En
agosto de 1927 tuvo lugar la
redacción de la Plataforma de la
Oposición y el inicio de su
reproducción. Pero, en la noche
del 12 al 13 de septiembre 1927,
los agentes de la GPU encontraron his home, but managed to escape
las máquinas de hectografiar y
detuvieron a muchas personas:
Mrachkovsky, Pevzner y un
número indeterminado de
participantes en la empresa. Los
antiguos secretarios del partido
Serebriakov y Preobrazhensky,
que junto al zinovievista Charov
asumieron la responsabilidad de la
“imprenta clandestina”, fueron
the company. The former
secretaries of the Serebryakov and
Preobrazhensky party, who
together with the Zinovievist
Charov assumed responsibility for
the "clandestine printing press",
After the denunciation of the
"affaire of the clandestine printing
marked the end of the intervention
of the Opposition in the party, a
dismal battle broke out in the
meetings of the Central Committee
and the Executive of the
Comintern, where The violence
speakers of the Opposition. In
meetings organized illegally, and
even on the street, the
oppositionists were systematically
beaten and some were seriously
injured.
On November 7, 1927, a
demonstration of the Opposition
took place with its own slogans,
harshly repressed in Moscow and
crushed in its beginnings in
Leningrad. Since the morning,
Trotsky was under surveillance at
his guards and travel Moscow by
car with Muralov and Kamenev,
when they are shot four
times. Clashes attacked and
destroyed the apartments of Smilga
and Preobrazhensky, and beat their
occupants: Natalia Sedova,
Preobrazhensky and Smilga.
Finally, on January 12, 1928, the
excluidos del partido sin más GPU informed Trotsky that, under
miramientos. Article 58 of the Penal Code on the
suppression of counter-
Después de la denuncia del “affaire revolutionary activities, he was to
de la imprenta clandestina” en el be deported to Alma-Ata in
XV Congreso, que marcó el fin de Kazakhstan, where he was to leave
la intervención de la Oposición en on the 16th. from
el partido, se desató una batalla January. Trotsky's deportation was
descarnada en las reuniones del followed by a wave of deportations
Comité Central y del Ejecutivo de that included among others
la Comintern, donde afloró la Rakovsky, Smirnov,
violencia, con insultos, amenazas y Préobrazhensky, Muralov,
lanzamiento de objetos a los Serebriakov, Smilga, Radek,
oradores de la Oposición. En las Sosnovsky, Ter-Vaganian,
reuniones organizadas Mrachkovsky, Dingelstedt - that is,
ilegalmente, e incluso en la calle, the vast majority of leaders of the
los opositsioneri fueron Opposition.
sistemáticamente golpeados y
algunos resultaron seriamente The crisis of the Opposition due
heridos. to the turn to collectivization and
industrialization (1928)
El 7 de noviembre de 1927 tuvo
lugar una manifestación de la After the repression of the
Oposición con sus propias Opposition, the bureaucracy
consignas, duramente reprimida en launched a "turn to the left" that
Moscú y aplastada en sus ended up sinking the organization
comienzos en Leningrado. Desde of the opposition.
la mañana, Trotsky estuvo bajo
vigilancia en su domicilio, pero On February 15, 1928, when
consiguió escapar de sus guardias Trotsky had just settled in Alma-
y recorrer Moscú en coche con Ata, Pravda published an article
Muralov y Kamenev, cuando les with the title: "The kulaks (rich
disparan cuatro veces. Grupos de peasants) raise their heads". It
choque atacaron y destrozaron los reported that the Central
apartamentos de Smilga y de Committee had decided to
Preobrazhensky, y golpearon a sus requisition the grain stocks of the
ocupantes: Natalia Sedova, peasants and freeze the prices. He
Preobrazhensky y Smilga. stated that they were only
provisional measures, which did
Finalmente, el 12 de enero de not call into question the NEP.
1928, la GPU informó a Trotsky de
que, en virtud del artículo 58 del Oppositionists found that the crisis
Código Penal sobre la represión de had broken out, as they had
las actividades
contrarrevolucionarias, iba a ser
deportado a Alma-Ata en
Kazajistán, hacia donde debía
partir el 16 de enero. La
deportación de Trotsky fue seguida
por una ola de deportaciones que
incluyó entre otros a Rakovsky,
Smirnov, Préobrazhensky, Muralov,
Serebriakov, Smilga, Radek,
Sosnovsky, Ter-Vaganian,
Mrachkovsky, Dingelstedt -es decir,
a la gran mayoría de los dirigentes
de la Oposición.
La crisis de la Oposición debido
al giro a la colectivización y la
industrialización (1928)
Tras la represión de la Oposición,
la burocracia lanzó un “giro a la
izquierda” que terminó de hundir la
organización de los opositores.
El 15 de febrero de 1928, cuando
Trotsky acababa de instalarse en
Alma-Ata, Pravda publicó un
artículo con el título: “Los kulaks
(campesinos ricos) levantan
cabeza”. En él se informaba que el
Comité Central había decidido
requisar los stocks de granos de
los campesinos y congelar los
precios. Afirmaba que no eran sino
“medidas de urgencia”,
provisionales, que no ponían en
cuestión la NEP.
Los opositsioneri constataron que
la crisis había estallado, como ellos argued that it was a true turn to the
preveían, y que la adopción de
estas medidas indicaba el fracaso
de la política de Stalin respecto de "the growing discontent of the poor
predicted, and that the adoption of
these measures indicated the
failure of Stalin's policy towards the
kulaks, inspired by Bukharin, in the
face of the so-called "scissors
crisis" (the increase of the prices of
industrial products in proportion to
agricultural products) and the
consequent crises in the
distribution of grains, since the rich
peasants preferred to store or
consume the harvest themselves
before selling it at the official
prices, substantially lower than
those of the World Market.
In the plenary session of February
1928, Pravda published a veiled
threat against the "right": "In our
organization, party included, certain
strange elements are appearing
that do not see the classes in the
villages, which do not understand
the basis of the politics of They try
to work in such a way that no one
feels offended, that they live in
peace with the kulak and, in
general, they are popular in all the
rural sectors. "
As a result, a debate began to
develop within the Opposition that
raised the basic question: was it a
true left turn of official policy or a
simple zigzag?
In a text written in Uralsk, dated
June 2, 1928 and entitled "The
course to the left in the field and its
prospects", Preobrazhensky
left. According to him, this shift had
taken place under the pressure of
los kulaks, inspirada por Bujarin, and middle peasants against the
ante la así llamada “crisis de las capitalist
tijeras” (el aumento de los precios elements". Preobrazhensky then
de los productos industriales en thought that the Opposition should
proporción a los agrícolas) y ante "go collectively ahead of the
las consecuentes crisis en la majority of the party, regardless of
distribución de granos, ya que los the stupidities and baseness that
campesinos ricos preferían make him endure." He proposed
almacenar o consumir ellos that the Opposition make a
mismos la cosecha antes de statement in support of this policy,
venderla a los precios oficiales, without referring to the repression
sustancialmente inferiores a los del of which it was the object and
mercado mundial. without claiming the "right to meet"
En el pleno de febrero de 1928, of the deportees, stating that it was
Pravda publicó una amenaza necessary to "risk optimism"
velada contra la “derecha”: “En (Broué, 2008: 167)
nuestra organización, partido
incluido, están apareciendo ciertos On June 14, 1928, Radek, in a
elementos extraños que no ven las telegram, showed clearly the
clases en las aldeas, que no disagreement that was
comprenden la base de la política beginning. He reported an
de clase e intentan trabajar de intervention for which he had not
forma que nadie se sienta been mandated: "On June 14,
ofendido, que viva en paz con el 1928, we intervened in the
kulak y, en general, sea popular en negotiations in Moscow with the
todas las capas rurales”. Central Committee of the
Communist Party about our return
En consecuencia, comenzó a to the party. We will have to gather
desarrollarse en el seno de la a party conference to make the
Oposición un debate que planteó la decision. " He was attacked
cuestión de fondo: ¿se trataba de energetically on the left.
un verdadero giro a la izquierda de
la política oficial o de un simple Rakovsky told one of his friends
zigzag? that the mentality of
Preobrazhensky's economist made
En un texto redactado en Uralsk, him forget politics. Broué shares
fechado el 2 de junio de 1928 y the position of Rakosvky, according
titulado “El curso a la izquierda en to which the economic affairs
el campo y sus perspectivas”, clouded Preobrazhensky so much
Preobrazhensky sostuvo que se that they made him forget
trataba de un verdadero giro a la everything else. In the present
izquierda. Según él, este giro había article, Richard B. Day shows the
tenido lugar bajo la presión del theoretical basis of
“crecimiento del descontento de los
campesinos pobres y medianos
contra los elementos capitalistas”.
Preobrazhensky pensaba entonces
que la Oposición debía “ir
colectivamente por delante de la
mayoría del partido,
independientemente de las
estupideces y de las bajezas que
le hacen soportar”. Propuso que la
Oposición hiciera una declaración
de apoyo a esta política, sin aludir
a la represión de la que era objeto
y sin reclamar el “derecho a
reunirse” de los deportados,
afirmando que había que
“arriesgarse al optimismo” (Broué,
2008: 167)
El 14 de junio 1928, Radek, en un
telegrama, mostró a las claras el
desacuerdo que se iniciaba.
Informó de una intervención para la
cual no había sido mandatado: “El
14 de junio 1928 intervinimos en
las negociaciones en Moscú con el
Comité Central del Partido
Comunista sobre nuestro retorno al
partido. Habrá que reunir una
conferencia del partido para tomar
la decisión”. Fue atacado
enérgicamente por la izquierda.
Rakovsky dijo a uno de sus amigos
que la mentalidad de economista
de Preobrazhensky le hacía olvidar
la política. Broué comparte la
posición de Rakosvky, según la
cual los asuntos económicos
obnubilaban hasta tal punto a
Preobrazhensky que le hacían
olvidar todo lo demás. En el
presente artículo, Richard B. Day
Preobrazhensky's illusions in
Stalin's politics in the different
economic conceptions of
Preobrazhensky himself and
Trotsky.
Sosnovsky, specialist in agrarian
questions, did not see in the new
course more than measures of
circumstance and not a true turn to
the left that, to be real, should have
been translated into a change in
the party regime: "Obviously we
must observe what what happens
in the dome, but even more what
happens between the masses ".
Viktor Eltsin attacked
Preobrazhensky and Radek, who
had approached him, saying that
they approached the problem as
senior officials, worrying exclusively
about the struggles at the top of the
apparatus and in no way at the
basis of this policy: the
degeneration of the party, the
retreat of the working class in the
USSR and in the world. Such a
policy could, according to him,
create fearsome illusions; In other
words, serve the "majority". Now,
"centrism is twice as dangerous
when it plays a 'left' policy." And
this policy was nothing more than a
game, as the blows to the left
showed.
As for Rakovsky, for the first time
he issued an opinion that in his
eyes told a lot about what is
beginning to be called the "crisis of
the revolution": "I have always
understood what today has
muestra la base teórica de las become indisputable for
ilusiones de Preobrazhensky en la everyone; namely, that the question
política de Stalin en las diferentes of the method used by the party to
concepciones económicas del lead the unions and the State
propio Preobrazhensky y de dominates today all other issues.
Trotsky.
Preobrazhensky saw a danger in
Sosnovsky, especialista en the attitude of young people, who
cuestiones agrarias, no vio en el did not know what a match was:
nuevo curso más que medidas de "We have to go towards a
circunstancia y no un verdadero rapprochement with the party,
giro a la izquierda que, para ser otherwise we will become a small
real, debía haberse traducido en sect of 'true Leninists'" (Broué,
un cambio en el régimen del 2008: 168 ).
partido: “Evidentemente hay que
observar lo que pasa en la cúpula, In rethinking him, Viktor Eltsin
pero más todavía lo que pasa entre reminded him that it was
las masas”. "denouncing centrism, not
supporting it." And Ter-Vaganian
Viktor Eltsin atacó a wondered how the situation in the
Preobrazhensky y Radek, quien se USSR could be analyzed without
le había acercado, diciendo que saying a word about the
ellos abordaban el problema como international situation. Viktor
altos funcionarios, preocupándose Borisovich Eltsin launched a
exclusivamente de las luchas en la merciless request: "The high-
cima del aparato y de ninguna altitude fights, the subterfuges of
manera en la base de esta política: EA [Evgenii Alexeievich
la degeneración del partido, el Préobrajensky] and KB [Karl
retroceso de la clase obrera en la Bernhardovich Radek]" were but
URSS y en el mundo. Tal política useless detours, because "all the
podía, según él, crear temibles experience of the revolutionary
ilusiones; dicho de otra forma, struggle since 1923 shows that the
servir a la “mayoría”. Ahora bien, future of the Opposition depends,
“el centrismo es dos veces más in the last analysis, not on
peligroso cuando juega a una divergences at the top but on the
política de ‘izquierda’”. Y esta perspectives of the world revolution
política no era más que un juego, "(Broué: 170).
como lo demostraban los golpes a
la izquierda. The divergences were truly serious
and made people think of an
En cuanto a Rakovsky, por vez explosion. Preobrazhensky
primera emitió una opinión que a continued to develop illusions in the
sus ojos contaba mucho sobre lo "left turn" and requested that the
que empieza a llamarse la “crisis
de la revolución”: “Siempre he
entendido lo que hoy ha pasado a
ser indiscutible para todos; a saber,
que la cuestión del método
empleado por el partido para dirigir
los sindicatos y el Estado domina
hoy por hoy todas las demás
cuestiones”.
Preobrazhensky veía un peligro en
la actitud de los jóvenes, que
ignoraban lo que era un partido:
“Hay que ir hacia un acercamiento
con el partido, si no nos
transformaremos en una pequeña
secta de ‘leninistas verdaderos’”
(Broué, 2008: 168).
Al retrucarle, Viktor Eltsin le
recordaba que se trataba de
“denunciar al centrismo, no de
apoyarlo”. Y Ter-Vaganian se
preguntaba cómo podía analizarse
la situación en la URSS sin decir
una palabra sobre la situación
internacional. Viktor Borisovich
Eltsin lanzó una requisitoria
despiadada: “Las luchas de altura,
los subterfugios de E. A. [Evgenii
Alexeievich Préobrajensky] y K.B.
[Karl Bernhardovich Radek]” no
eran sino inútiles rodeos, pues
“toda la experiencia de la lucha
revolucionaria desde 1923 muestra
que el futuro de la Oposición
depende, en último análisis, no de
las divergencias en la cúspide sino
de las perspectivas de la
revolución mundial” (Broué: 170).
Las divergencias eran
verdaderamente serias y hacían
declaration on the International end
with the assertion that the
Opposition wanted peace with the
majority of the party on the basis of
the new course and the request for
reincorporation with the
commitment not to "resort to
fractional work".
Radek began to insist on the idea
of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, to emphasize the
revolutionary role of the peasantry
and to attack the theory of
permanent revolution. He
pronounced himself in favor of
asking for reinstatement, with the
promise of respecting
discipline. Trotsky responded by
reproaching him for trusting what
Stalin and his people said, for not
criticizing them and for acting as if
repression and slander no longer
existed and did not constitute a
problem.
Broué argues that, in the course of
the discussion, in opposing
Preobrazhensky and his vision of
economics, Trotsky and Rakovsky
emphasized political factors
(freedom of expression and
organization of the working class),
as well as factors essentials of the
world class struggle. This is clearly
seen in Rakovsky's text known as
the Letter to Valentinov or the
"professional dangers" of power
(August 1928) -and in the criticisms
he received in the USSR, to which
Trotsky responded with severity:
centrism it was the same and its
essence was the incessant
pensar en un estallido.
Preobrazhensky continuó
desarrollando ilusiones en el “giro
a la izquierda” y pidió que la
declaración sobre la Internacional
terminara con la afirmación de que
la Oposición quería la paz con la
mayoría del partido sobre la base
del nuevo curso y de la petición de
reincorporación con el compromiso
de no “recurrir al trabajo
fraccional”.
Radek comenzó a insistir en la
idea de la revolución democrático-
burguesa, a subrayar el papel
revolucionario del campesinado y a
atacar la teoría de la revolución
permanente. Se pronunció a favor
de pedir la reincorporación, con la
promesa de respetar la disciplina.
Trotsky le respondió reprochándole
que se fiara de lo que decían Stalin
y los suyos, que no los criticara y
que hiciera como si la represión y
las calumnias ya no existieran y no
constituyeran un problema.
Broué sostiene que, en el curso de
la discusión, al oponerse a
Preobrazhensky y su visión de la
economía, Trotsky y Rakovsky
hicieron hincapié en los factores
políticos (la libertad de expresión y
de organización de la clase
obrera), así como en los factores
esenciales de la lucha de clases
mundial. Esto se ve con claridad
en el texto de Rakovsky conocido
como la Carta a Valentinov o Los
“peligros profesionales” del poder
(agosto de 1928) -y en las críticas
que recibió en la URSS, a las que
movement of oscillation, which
excluded Radek-Preobrazhensky
reasoning. The analysis made by
Rakovsky about the bureaucracy,
at the functional and then social
principle, converted into a "new
social category",
On January 20, 1929 the GPU
informed Trotsky of his expulsion
from the USSR for "preparation" of
the armed struggle against the
Soviet power. Trotsky's exile to
Turkey was accompanied by the
arrest of several hundred
oppositionists.
A short time later, in April 1929, a
plenary session of the Central
Committee controlled by Stalin
condemned "the deviation of the
right". The bosses and supporters
of this trend were swept away in a
few months. Its leaders - Boujarin,
Rykov and Tomsky who, following
Zinoviev and Kamenev, began their
descent into abjection - abjured
their ideas and everything they had
up to that point.
The double break in the party
signaled an inescapable evolution
towards a Bonapartist regime
supported by the State and its
armed forces. Rising above the
other social forces (including those
that brought him to power), he
crushed society with all its weight
and, above all, the germs of
renewal: it was Soviet
Bonapartism, Stalinism, which
would end up burying the revolution
as Trotsky had predicted.
Trotsky respondió con severidad: el
centrismo era el mismo y su Preobrazhensky was convinced
esencia era el movimiento that the new policy adopted by the
incesante de vaivén, lo que excluía Stalin faction was the policy of the
los razonamientos a lo Radek- Opposition - or, more exactly, what
Preo- brazhensky. El análisis counted in his eyes, namely, his
hecho por Rakovsky sobre la economic program: industrialization
burocracia, al principio funcional y and the collectivization of the
después social, convertida en una countryside. Radek shared his
“categoría social nueva”, respondía ideas; as he seriously believed that
a las cuestiones urgentes sobre la the power of the Soviets was in
política del “centro” de Stalin, pero danger from the agitation of the
no pudo impedir la disgregación de kulaks, he argued that there was
la Oposición. nothing more important than to
support the leadership in this
El 20 de enero de 1929 la GPU matter, without stopping in personal
informó a Trotsky de su expulsión matters of self-love.
de la URSS por “preparación” de la
lucha armada contra el poder His opponents responded that
soviético. El exilio de Trotsky a there could be nothing positive in
Turquía fue acompañado por el economic policy without a
arresto de varios centenares de fundamental political change,
opositsioneri. because the "centrism" was always
himself, that the apparatus is too
Poco tiempo después, en abril corrupt to regenerate and that the
1929, un pleno del Comité Central party regime, the possibility of
controlado por Stalin condenó “la expressing itself was the condition
desviación de derecha”. Los jefes y of true regeneration and a true turn
partidarios de esta tendencia to the left - in other words, that
fueron barridos en pocos meses. politics was in the first place. Once
Sus dirigentes -Bujarin, Rykov y again, Richard Day's analysis
Tomsky que, siguiendo a Zinoviev deepens Broué's observations,
y Kamenev, comenzaron su showing the fundamental
descenso hacia la abyección- differences in the economic policy
abjuraron de sus ideas y de todo lo adopted by Stalin, which Trotsky
que habían defendido hasta ese did not consider in any way a mere
momento. plagiarism of the one proposed by
the Left Opposition.
La doble ruptura en el partido
señaló una evolución ineludible Rakovsky added socio-political
hacia un régimen bonapartista arguments derived from economic
apoyado en el Estado y sus policy, noting that workers were
fuerzas armadas. Elevándose éste asked to increase their productivity
por encima de las otras fuerzas
sociales (incluidas aquellas que le
llevaron al poder), aplastó con todo
su peso a la sociedad y, ante todo,
a los gérmenes de renovación: era
el bonapartismo soviético, el
estalinismo, que terminaría
enterrando la revolución como
Trotsky lo había predicho.
from 100 to 110% in exchange for a
58% rise in their real
wages. Therefore, for them there
was no "turn to the left" and, above
all, the total absence of a plan to
restore democracy within the party
meant that there was no guarantee
that today's positive measures
would be in force tomorrow.

Preobrazhensky estaba The capitulation of Radek,

convencido de que la nueva Preobrazhensky and Smilga
política adoptada por la fracción de (July 1929)
Stalin era la política de la
Oposición -o, más exactamente, lo The conciliators met in Omsk in
que contaba a sus ojos, a saber, su March 1929 and prepared a series
programa económico: la of theses. But difficulties arose:
industrialización y la colectivización
Preobrazhensky wanted to return
del campo. Ra- dek compartía sus to the party without denying the
ideas; como creía seriamente que Opposition and its
el poder de los soviets estaba en combat. Authorized to travel to
peligro por la agitación de los Moscow for the birth of his son, he
kulaks, argumentaba que no había met Ordjonikidze and discussed his
nada más importante que apoyar eventual re-entry with him. But he
en este asunto a la dirección, sin did not come out convinced of the
pararse en cuestiones personales interview and wrote to the
de amor propio. comrades, without hiding from the
policemen who evidently read his
Sus adversarios le respondían que mail: "Those of us who fought in
no podía haber nada de positivo en the ranks of the party ten, twenty
política económica sin un cambio years or more will come back with
político de fondo, porque el feelings very different from those
“centrismo” era siempre él mismo, that they had when they entered for
que el aparato está demasiado the first time: they return without
corrompido como para regenerarse the enthusiasm of the beginning,
y que el régimen del partido, la like men with a broken heart. If we
posibilidad de expresarse, era la reintegrate, we will receive the card
condición de una verdadera of the party as the one who accepts
regeneración y de un verdadero a heavy cross "(Broué: 178).
giro a la izquierda -en otras
palabras, que la política estaba en Radek did not reach that degree of
primer lugar. Una vez más, el honesty and lucidity. Trotsky
análisis de Richard Day profundiza thought that Radek was "too
las observaciones de Broué,
mostrando las diferencias de fondo
en lo concerniente a la política
económica adoptada por Stalin,
que Trotsky no consideraba de
ningún modo un simple plagio de la
que proponía la Oposición de
Izquierda.
Rakovsky añadía argumentos
socio-políticos derivados de la
política económica, señalando que
a los trabajadores se les pedía
aumentar su productividad de 100
a 110% a cambio de un alza del
58% en sus salarios reales. Por lo
tanto, para ellos no existía un “giro
a la izquierda” y, sobre todo, la
ausencia total de un plan de
restablecimiento de la democracia
dentro del partido hacía que no
existiera ninguna garantía de que
las medidas positivas de hoy
fueran a estar en vigor mañana.
La capitulación de Radek,
Preobrazhensky y Smilga (julio
de 1929)
Los conciliadores se reunieron en
Omsk en marzo de 1929 y
elaboraron una serie de tesis. Pero
surgieron dificultades:
Preobrazhensky quería volver al
partido sin renegar de la Oposición
y de su combate. Autorizado a
viajar a Moscú para el nacimiento
de su hijo, se reunió con
Ordjonikidze y discutió con él su
eventual reingreso. Pero no salió
convencido de la entrevista y
escribió a los camaradas, sin
ocultarse de los policías que
Marxist and too internationalist to
understand the Stalinists", but he
was completely wrong. On the way
to Moscow, he stopped at the Ichim
station and, when engaging in a
discussion with a group of
deportees, told them: "I have
completely broken with
Trotsky. From now on we are
political enemies. The thing is
simple: on the side of the 'direction'
there has been a conference that
has restored the Leninist path, and
on the other a League of Bolshevik-
Leninists has been formed. It is a
second party, the party of the
counterrevolution "(Broué: 178).
Smilga - the former successor
appointed by Trotsky and,
therefore, the heart of the
Opposition - who had been very ill,
was authorized to move to Moscow
for personal reasons, because
Yaroslavsky and the GPU wanted
to make a move and agree on an
agreement with Radek,
Preobrazhensky and Smilga ("the
Three"), which will provoke a crisis
in the Opposition. And they got it.
The semi-freedom enjoyed by "the
Three", who pretended to speak on
behalf of their comrades, and the
material and moral isolation of
many others, who circulated
alarmist rumors, led to the July 10,
1929 "the Three", meeting in
Moscow, they wrote a statement
that appeared in Pravda on July 13,
1929. The publication of the
capitulation of Radek,
Preobrazhensky and Smilga
evidentemente leían su correo: caused the disbanded ranks of the
“Aquellos de nosotros que Opposition, where it was felt that
combatieron en las filas del partido Moscow was developing a
hace diez, veinte años o más negotiation and that a "commission
volverán con sentimientos muy of the Three" had been formed, in
diferentes de los que tuvieron charge of negotiating the conditions
cuando entraron por primera vez: of a return to the party and normal
vuelven sin el entusiasmo del life. In fact, it was a capitulation in
principio, como hombres con el order.
corazón roto. Si nos reintegramos,
recibiremos el carné del partido The text began with a declaration
como el que acepta una pesada of rupture with "the current that, on
cruz” (Broué: 178). the basis of the political line of LD
Trotsky, has been grouped around
Radek no llegaba a ese grado de the so-called 'Center of the Leninist
honestidad y de lucidez. Trotsky Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union.' It
pensaba que Radek era declared its support for the
“demasiado marxista y demasiado industrialization policy, the struggle
internacionalista para entenderse against the kulaks and agrarian
con los estalinistas”, pero se capitalism, the politics of the
equivocaba completamente. En sovjozes and the koljozes, 4 as
ruta a Moscú se detuvo en la well as all steps towards the
estación de Ichim y, al entablar una independent organization of the
discusión con un grupo de poor peasants, "the struggle
deportados, les dijo: “He roto against bureaucratism in the
completamente con Trotsky. A apparatuses of the State and the
partir de ahora somos enemigos party ", the struggle against the
políticos. La cosa es simple: por el right -which reflected objectively
lado de la ‘dirección’ ha habido una the discontent of the capitalist and
conferencia que ha restablecido la petty-bourgeois elements of the
vía leninista, y por el otro se ha country- and the struggle of the
formado una Liga de Bolcheviques- Communist International against
Leninistas. Es un segundo partido, reformism. Finally, he affirmed that
el partido de la contrarrevolución” the main danger in the communist
(Broué: 178). movement was the right-wing
danger.
Smilga -el antiguo sucesor
designado por Trotsky y, por tanto, Likewise, "the Three" declared that,
el corazón de la Oposición-, que in spite of the "bureaucratic
había estado muy enfermo, recibió deformations of the Soviet
la autorización para desplazarse a apparatus and the elements of
Moscú por motivos personales, degeneration", they considered
porque Yaroslavsky y la GPU "Soviet power as that of the
querían hacer una jugada y pactar
un acuerdo con Radek,
Preobrazhensky y Smilga (“los
Tres”), que provocara una crisis en
la Oposición. Y lo consiguieron.
La semilibertad de la que gozaban
“los Tres”, que pretendían hablar
en nombre de sus camaradas, y el
aislamiento material y moral de
muchos otros, que hacían circular
rumores alarmistas, dieron lugar a
que el 10 de julio 1929 “los Tres”,
reunidos en Moscú, redactaran de
una declaración que apareció en
Pravda el 13 de julio 1929. La
publicación de la capitulación de
Radek, Preobrazhensky y Smilga
provocó la desbandada de las filas
de la Oposición, donde se tenía la
impresión de que en Moscú se
desarrollaba una negociación y
que se había formado una
“comisión de los Tres”, encargada
de negociar las condiciones de una
vuelta al partido y a la vida normal.
De hecho, se trataba de una
capitulación en regla.
El texto comenzaba por una
declaración de ruptura con “la
corriente que, sobre la base de la
línea política de L.D. Trotsky, se ha
agrupado alrededor del pretendido
‘Centro de los Bolcheviques
Leninistas de la Unión Soviética”.
Declaraba apoyar la política de
industrialización, la lucha contra los
kulaks y el capitalismo agrario, la
política de los sovjozes y de los
koljozes,4 así como todos los
pasos hacia la organización
independiente de los campesinos
dictatorship of the proletariat". They
rejected the slogan of the secret
vote, the claim of legitimation of the
fractions in the party and the
freedom of criticism. According to
them, Trotsky and his friends
distanced themselves from the
party: "Only thus can the
emergence of Trotsky in the
bourgeois press be explained (...)
and the creation of the Bolshevik-
Leninist Center of the Soviet Union,
which constitutes a step towards
the formation of a new party and
the legalization of the Bolsheviks-
Leninists "(Broué: 179-180).
For Stalin the capitulation of
Radek, Preobrazhensky and
Smilga meant an important victory,
from which he could break the
Opposition. The postal blockade
had already caused enormous
damage, because no militant
received reliable information, only
those that came from renegades or
candidates for capitulation.
"Treason" or "unprecedented
betrayal" are the most frequent
words that appear in the
letters. The opositsioneri expected
a negotiation with positive results
and what they were presented with
were clauses of capitulation. Soon
after, the indignation gave way to
the instinct of conservation and
many oppositionists went to the
Stalin faction with the argument
that later it would be too late.
The authorities played on the one
hand with collective fear, with
pobres, “la lucha contra el rumors about the peasant uprisings
burocratismo en los aparatos del and the massacres they gave rise
Estado y del partido”, la lucha to, with the rebirth of a permanent,
contra la derecha -que reflejaba terrorist danger from whites; and,
objetivamente el descontento de on the other, making the grandiose
los elementos capitalistas y perspectives of the future socialist
pequeño-burgueses del país- y la construction shine.
lucha de la Internacional
Comunista contra el reformismo. The figures are eloquent: 344
Finalmente, afirmaba que el members left the Opposition in July
principal peligro en el movimiento 1929, 115 in August, 141 in
comunista era el peligro de September - in total, 609 officially
derecha. registered. The most serious was
the competition that arose among
Asimismo, “los Tres” declaraban some of them about who would
que, a pesar de las “deformaciones denounce more resistant
burocráticas del aparato soviético y comrades. The Stalinist apparatus
de los elementos de asked each renegade candidate to
degeneración”, consideraban “el denounce those he knew as
poder soviético como el de la oppositionists. The palm of the
dictadura del proletariado”. betrayal was taken by Karl Radek,
Rechazaban la consigna del voto who gave the names of 767 fighting
secreto, la reivindicación de comrades, and Ivan Vrachev, quite
legitimación de las fracciones en el behind, with 137 delations (Broué:
partido y de la libertad de crítica. 182).
Según ellos, Trotsky y sus amigos
se alejaban del partido: “solamente In August 1929, a declaration of the
así puede explicarse la aparición Opposition written by Rakovsky
de Trotsky en la prensa burguesa and signed by 400 militants
(...) y la creación del Centro de los stopped the panic, but on October
Bolcheviques-Leninistas de la 27 Smirnov and Boguslavsky
Unión Soviética, que constituye un capitulated and dragged several
paso hacia la formación de un hundred deportees, among them a
nuevo partido y la legalización de good number of worker militants.
los Bolcheviques-Leninistas”
(Broué: 179-180). On November 3, 1929 blood ran for
the first time, with the execution of
Para Stalin la capitulación de Yakov Blumkin and two
Radek, Preobrazhensky y Smilga others. Blumkin had visited Trotsky,
significó una importante victoria, a bringing to the USSR a message
partir de la cual podía quebrar a la for his supporters. It was passed by
Oposición. El bloqueo postal había arms, by decision of the political
causado ya enormes estragos, bureau of the Party, erected in
porque ningún militante recibía court. Two more men were
informaciones fiables, sólo executed for having disclosed the
aquellas que procedían de information. Half a year later, in
renegados o de candidatos a la June 1930, the forced labor camp
capitulación. system known as Gulag was
created, by its Russian name,
“Traición” o “inaudita traición” son Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Lageray:
las palabras más frecuentes que General Directorate of corrective
aparecen en las cartas. Los labor camps and colonies (Vorkuta
opositsioneri esperaban una will be the largest of the fields of
negociación con resultados the Gulag in European Russia).
positivos y lo que se les presentó
fueron cláusulas de capitulación. By the winter of 1930, Smirnov's
Poco después, la indignación dio outwardly disciplined group was in
paso al instinto de conservación y fact an organized network of
muchos opositsioneri se pasaron a opponents who attracted not a few
la fracción de Stalin con el capitulators, starting with Smilga
argumento de que después sería and Preobrazhensky, and
demasiado tarde. numerous former opposition
workers.
Las autoridades jugaron por un
lado con el miedo colectivo, con los The "Block of Oppositions", the
rumores sobre las sublevaciones "Great Purges" and the end of
campesinas y las masacres a las Preobrazhensky
que daban lugar, con el renacer de
un peligro permanente, terrorista, In June 1932, the "Block of
procedente de los blancos; y, por elOpposition" was formed on the
otro, haciendo brillar las initiative of IN Smirnov. When
perspectivas grandiosas de la Smirnov disavowed the Opposition,
futura construcción socialista. Trotsky predicted he would return,
and Smirnov returned. Smirnov had
Las cifras son elocuentes: 344 considered that the first step to
miembros dejaron la Oposición en take to clarify the situation was to
julio 1929, 115 en agosto, 141 en unite the oppositions, whose
septiembre -en total, 609 natural dynamics, in the course of
oficialmente censados. Lo más the crisis, had already brought
grave fue la competición que them closer to each
surgió entre algunos de ellos sobre other. Therefore, it was necessary
quién denunciaría a más to enter into a relationship with
camaradas resistentes. El aparato Trotsky, not only because he was
estalinista pedía a cada candidato the main adversary of Stalin, the
a renegado que denunciara a los number one enemy of the regime,
que conocía como opositsioneri. La and a union without him ran the risk
palma de la delación se la llevaron of being a union against him, but
Karl Radek, que dio los nombres also because he needed it. as a
de 767 camaradas de lucha, e Iván counselor and ally. This is how he
Vrachev, bastante por detrás, con decided to contact himself,
137 delaciones (Broué: 182). personally, with Liova Sedov, the
son of Trotsky, whom he had
En agosto de 1929, una known since childhood and whom
declaración de la Oposición he knew would not be
redactada por Rakovsky y firmada obstacles. They said that they had
por 400 militantes frenó el pánico, crossed by chance at the exit of the
pero el 27 de octubre Smirnov y huge Berlin shopping center
Boguslavsky capitularon y KDW. It is the concrete proof of
arrastraron a varios centenares de what Trotsky and his people had
deportados, entre ellos a buen affirmed for years: that they were
número de militantes obreros. the only ones to have the correct
perspective to overthrow the
El 3 de noviembre de 1929 la regime of the Stalinist bureaucracy
sangre corrió por primera vez, con and its police dictatorship, and
la ejecución de Yakov Blumkin y de prevent the restoration of
dos personas más. Blumkin había capitalism.
visitado a Trotsky, trayendo a la
URSS un mensaje para sus The "opposition bloc" was formed
partidarios. Fue pasado por las within the dramatic framework of
armas, por decisión del buró the famine of 1932-33, provoked by
político del Partido, erigido en forced collectivization: "Overall,
tribunal. Dos hombres más fueron hunger will affect, throughout the
ejecutados por haber divulgado la USSR, 30 million peasants; of
información. Medio año después, them, 7 million will die "(Marie,
en junio de 1930, se creó el 2003: 440). It included the group of
sistema de campos de trabajo Zinoviev, the Workers Opposition
forzado conocido como Gulag, por and the "without bosses" of
su nombre en ruso, Glavnoye Safarov. Trotsky attached great
Upravlyeniye Lageray: Dirección importance to the fact that his ex-
General de campos de trabajo comrade Preobrazhensky belonged
correctivos y colonias (Vorkuta to the group. He was one of "the
será el más grande de los campos Three" who had led the Opposition
del Gulag en la Rusia europea). to the coup de grâce in 1929, and
now he was fully self-
Para el invierno de 1930, el grupo critical. Smilga was also in contact
de Smirnov, exteriormente with Smirnov and sympathized with
disciplinado, era ya de hecho un him, but the GPU was following him
grupo de opositores organizado en closely and forcing him to leave
red que atrajo a no pocos Moscow.
capituladores, empezando por
Smilga y Preobrazhensky, y a But, already on January 13, 1933,
numerosos obreros ex- Smirnov was arrested and
opositsioneri. sentenced to ten years in prison. A
hundred members of his group
El “Bloque de las Oposiciones”, shared their fate between January
las “Grandes Purgas” y el fin de and March 1933, receiving
Preobrazhensky sentences ranging from several
years of exile to a few years of
En junio de 1932 se formó el isolator: Mrachovsky and Smilga
“Bloque de las Oposiciones” por were sentenced to five years in the
iniciativa de I.N. Smirnov. Cuando Verjneuralsk isolator. Smirnov went
Smirnov renegó de la Oposición, to Suzdal, from where he only left
Trotsky predijo que volvería, y in May 1936 to be sent to the
Smirnov volvió. Smirnov había central prison of the GPU. The
considerado que el primer paso a "oppositions block" died just
dar para aclarar la situación era born. Its center never met, but the
unir las oposiciones, cuya dinámica consequences of its ephemeral
natural, en el transcurso de la existence lasted for years and were
crisis, ya había hecho que se one of the causes of Stalin's "great
aproximaran las unas a las otras. purges" in 1936-38.
Por lo tanto, era necesario entrar
en relación con Trotsky, no sólo Between January 26 and February
porque él era el principal 10, 1934 took place the XVII
adversario de Stalin, el enemigo Congress, called the "congress of
número uno del régimen, y una the victors" by the Stalinists, since
unión sin él corría el riesgo de ser they had broken the peasant
una unión contra él, sino también resistance, at the cost of a collapse
porque lo necesitaba como in agricultural production and the
consejero y aliado. Así es como death of millions of people due to
decidió entrar en contacto él hunger. On that occasion,
mismo, personalmente, con Liova Preobrazhensky ridiculed Stalinist
Sedov, el hijo de Trotsky, a quien unanimity by pretending to exalt
conocía desde la infancia y de him: "I understood today, he said,
quien sabía que no pondría what I had not grasped ten years
obstáculos. Contaron que se ago; To vote well, the important
habían cruzado por casualidad a la thing is not to understand the text
salida del enorme centro comercial but to vote as the boss, even when
berlinés KDW. Es la prueba you have reservations or
concreta de lo que Trotsky y los doubts. And he congratulated
suyos afirmaban desde hacía Stalin for having carried out in the
años: que ellos eran los únicos en party a unity never achieved by
tener una perspectiva correcta Lenin. The delegates burst out
para derribar el régimen de la laughing, Stalin would not forgive
burocracia estalinista y su him "(Broué: 275).
dictadura policial, e impedir la
restauración del capitalismo. In that year, 1934, there was a rest
on the repressive plane: three
El “bloque de las oposiciones” se times fewer arrests than in 1933. It
conformó en el marco dramático de was in this apparent atmosphere of
la hambruna de 1932-33, repose that two of the oldest and
provocada por la colectivización most venerated members of the
forzosa: “En conjunto, el hambre Opposition collapsed: Sosnovsky
afectará, en toda la URSS, a 30 capitulated the February 9 and
millones de campesinos; de ellos, Rakovsky on February 18 of that
morirán 7 millones” (Marie, 2003: 1934.
440). Incluía al grupo de Zinoviev,
a la Oposición obrera y los “sin Everything changed brutally with
jefe” de Safarov. Trotsky dio una Kirov's assassination on December
gran importancia al hecho de que 1, 1934. Kirov had replaced
su ex-camarada Preobrazhensky Zinoviev as party secretary in
perteneciera al grupo. Él era uno Leningrad in 1926. Stalin wanted to
de “los Tres” que habían llevado a foist the crime on the Opposition:
la Oposición al golpe de gracia en the investigators received the order
1929, y ahora realizaba una to disguise the murderer, Nikolayev
autocrítica completa. Smilga , as an opositsioneri and to promise
estaba también en contacto con him that he would be saved if he
Smirnov y simpatizaba con él, pero accepted to denounce the men
la GPU lo seguía de cerca y lo who had instigated him, all former
obligó a abandonar Moscú. Komsomols opositsioneri of
Leningrad. He denounced them
Pero, ya el 13 de enero de 1933, and they denied it until the
Smirnov fue detenido y condenado end. Thus the former members of
a diez años de prisión. Un centenar the Communist Youth, II Kotolynov,
de miembros de su grupo NN Chatsky and others, who
compartieron su suerte entre enero claimed their innocence, were
y marzo de 1933, recibiendo penas shot. The process took place
que iban desde varios años de behind closed doors; LB Kamenev
destierro hasta algunos años de was implicated by a statement of
isolator: Mrachovsky y Smilga Zinoviev. Serguei Sedov, son of
fueron condenados a cinco años Trotsky, involved in this matter
en el isolator de Verjneuralsk. because of his kinship, was
Smirnov fue a parar a Suzdal, de sentenced to forced labor. On
donde sólo salió en mayo de 1936 December 4, 1934, 66 executions
para ser enviado a la prisión took place, and on December 16,
central de la GPU. El “bloque de 1934, Zinoviev, Kamenev and
las oposiciones” murió apenas
nacido. Su centro no se reunió
nunca, pero las consecuencias de
su efímera existencia perduraron
por años y fueron una de las
causas de las “grandes purgas” de
Stalin en 1936-38.
Entre el 26 de enero y el 10 de
febrero de 1934 tuvo lugar el XVII
Congreso, llamado el “congreso de
los vencedores” por los
estalinistas, puesto que habían
roto la resistencia campesina, al
costo de un colapso en la
producción agrícola y de la muerte
de millones de personas por
hambre. En dicha oportunidad,
Preobrazhensky ridiculizó la
unanimidad estalinista fingiendo
que le exaltaba: “He comprendido
hoy, afirmó, lo que no había
captado hace diez años; para votar
bien, lo importante no es
comprender el texto sino votar
como el jefe, incluso cuando
tengas reservas o dudas. Y felicitó
a Stalin por haber realizado en el
partido una unidad jamás lograda
por Lenin. Los delegados
estallaron en carcajadas, Stalin no
se lo perdonaría” (Broué: 275).
En dicho año, 1934, hubo un
reposo en el plano represivo: tres
veces menos detenciones que en
1933. Fue en esta atmósfera
aparente de reposo cuando dos de
los más antiguos y de los más
venerados miembros de la
Oposición se desmoronaron:
Sosnovsky capituló el 9 de febrero
y Rakovsky el 18 de febrero de ese
others were arrested on the death
of Kirov. It was the beginning of the
"Moscow Trials" (the first of which
took place in August 1936) or
"Great Purges", in the framework of
which Stalin murdered
approximately one million people.5
Other members of the party were
passed by the guns without being
subjected to any public process,
either because they refused to
make any statement, or because
they were not presentable after the
torture suffered. This is the case of
Yuri Gaven, shot on a stretcher on
October 4, 1936; of Smilga,
transferred to Moscow and shot on
January 10, 1937; of
Preobrazhensky, shot on July 13,
1937; of Sosnovsky, shot by simple
administrative decision on July 5,
1937 and Alexander G.
Shliapnikov, shot on September 2,
1936.6
Daniel Gaido
* Source: Richard B. Day, "Trotsky
and Preobrazhensky: The Troubled
Unity of the Left Opposition,"
Studies in Comparative
Communism, Volume 10, Issues 1-
2 (Spring-Summer 1977), p. 69-86.
NOTES
1. The gubernias were
administrative subdivisions of
imperial Russia, maintained during
the first epoch of the Revolution,
1934.
Todo cambió brutalmente con el
asesinato de Kirov el 1° de
diciembre de 1934. Kirov había
reemplazado a Zinoviev como
secretario del partido en
Leningrado en 1926. Stalin quiso
endilgarle el crimen a la Oposición:
los investigadores recibieron la
orden de disfrazar al asesino,
Nikolayev, como un opositsioneri y
de prometerle que se salvaría si
aceptaba denunciar a los hombres
que lo habrían instigado, todos
antiguos komsomols opositsioneri
de Leningrado. Los denunció y
ellos lo negaron hasta el fin. Así
fueron fusilados los antiguos
miembros de las Juventudes
Comunistas, I. I. Kotolynov, N.N.
Chatsky y otros, que clamaban su
inocencia. El proceso tuvo lugar a
puerta cerrada; L. B. Kamenev fue
implicado por una declaración de
Zinoviev. Serguei Sedov, hijo de
Trotsky, implicado en este asunto
por su parentesco, fue condenado
a trabajos forzados. El 4 de
diciembre de 1934 tuvieron lugar
66 ejecuciones, y el 16 de
diciembre de 1934 fueron
detenidos Zinoviev, Kamenev y
otros por la muerte de Kirov. Era el
comienzo de los “Juicios de
Moscú”(el primero de los cuales
tuvo lugar en agosto de 1936) o
“Grandes Purgas”, en el marco de
las cuales Stalin asesinó
aproximadamente a un millón de
personas.5
Otros miembros del partido fueron
equivalent to governorates or
provinces (editor's note).
2. You can download your edition in
Spanish at https://goo.gl/5GN8iF
3. The Chinese CP had joined the
bourgeois nationalist party
(Koomintang) by subordinating
itself to its leadership, despite
Trotsky's warnings. On April 12,
1927, the Kuomintang expelled the
Communists and began a
massacre that culminated with
hundreds of murdered and 5,000
missing. In the following year, some
300,000 people died in China, due
to the campaigns of suppression of
communists executed by the KMT
(editor's note).
4. The koljoz or koljós were
cooperative farms; the sovjoz or
sovjós, agricultural holdings directly
dependent on the Soviet state
(editor's note).
5. "The best estimate that can be
made of the number of deaths from
repression in 1937-38 is in the
range of 950,000-1.2 million"
(Ellman, 2002: 1162).
6. Those interested in deepening
on the subject can consult the
documents edited by Pierre Broué
in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, No. 6
(1980) and No. 7/8 (1981) under
the title: Les trotskystes en Union
Soviétique (https: / /goo.gl/IGaf6F).
References
pasados por las armas sin que se
los sometiera a ningún proceso
público, ya sea porque rechazaban
hacer cualquier declaración, ya sea
porque no estaban presentables
luego de las torturas sufridas. Es el
caso de Yuri Ga- ven, fusilado en
una camilla el 4 de octubre de
1936; de Smilga, trasladado a
Moscú y fusilado el 10 de enero de
1937; de Preobrazhensky, fusilado
el 13 de julio de 1937; de
Sosnovsky, fusilado por simple
decisión administrativa el 5 de julio
de 1937 y de Alexander G.
Shliapnikov, fusilado el 2 de
septiembre de 1936.6
Daniel Gaido
* Fuente: Richard B. Day, “Trotsky
and Preobrazhensky: The Troubled
Unity of the Left Opposition”,
Studies in Comparative
Communism, Volume 10, Issues 1-
2 (Spring-Summer 1977), pp. 69-
86.
NOTAS
1. Las gubernias eran
subdivisiones administrativas de la
Rusia imperial, mantenidas durante
la primera época de la Revolución,
equivalentes a gobernaciones o
provincias (nota del editor).
2. Puede descargarse su edición
en español en
https://goo.gl/5GN8iF
Broué, Pierre (1980-1981), "Les
trotskystes en Union Soviétique",
Cahiers Léon Trotsky, No. 6 and
No. 7/8. Available on the internet at
marxists.org/francais/clt Broué,
Pierre (2008), Communists against
Stalin: Massacre of a generation,
Málaga: Editorial
Sepha. http://tinyurl.com/pf7b29l
Day, Richard B. Day, MM Gorinov
and EA Preobrazhensky (2014),
The Preobrazhensky Papers:
Archival Documents and Materials,
Brill, Leiden and Boston.
Ellman, Michael (2002), "Soviet
Repression Statistics: Some
Comments", Europe-Asia Studies,
Vol. 54, No. 7.
Gorinov, MM, SV Tsakunov and
Konstantin Gurevich (1991), "Life
and Works of Evgenii Alekseevich
Preobrazhenskii", Slavic Review,
Vol. 50, No. 2 (Summer), pp. 286-
296. https://goo.gl/vAGDEf Marie,
Jean-Jacques (2003), Stalin, Word.
Preobrazhensky, Evgenii (1970),
The new economy, Barcelona:
Ariel. https://goo.gl/5GN8iF
3. El PC chino había ingresado en
el partido nacionalista burgués
(Koomintang) subordinándose a su
dirección, a pesar de las
advertencias de Trotsky. El 12 de
abril de 1927, el Kuomintang
expulsó a los comunistas y
comenzó una masacre que
culminó con cientos de asesinados
y 5.ooo desaparecidos. En el
siguiente año, unas 300.000
personas murieron en China,
debido a las campañas de
supresión de comunistas
ejecutadas por el KMT (nota del
editor).

4. Los koljoz o koljós eran granjas

cooperativas; los sovjoz o sovjós,
explotaciones agrícolas
dependientes directamente del
Estado soviético (nota del editor).

5. “La mejor estimación que puede

hacerse del número de muertes
por la represión en 1937-38 está
en el rango de 950.000-1,2 millón”
(Ellman, 2002: 1162).

6. Los interesados en profundizar

sobre el tema pueden consultar los
documentos que editó Pierre Broué
en Cahiers Léon Trotsky, No. 6
(1980) y No. 7/8 (1981) bajo el
título: Les trotskystes en Union
Soviétique (https://goo.gl/IGaf6F).

Referencias

Broué, Pierre (1980-1981), “Les

trotskystes en Union Soviétique”,
Cahiers Léon Trotsky, N° 6 y N°
 7/8. Disponible en internet en
marxists.org/francais/clt Broué,
Pierre (2008), Comunistas contra
Stalin: Masacre de una generación,
Málaga: Editorial Sepha.
http://tinyurl.com/pf7b29l Day,
Richard B. Day, M. M. Gorinov and
E. A. Preobrazhensky (2014), The
Preobrazhensky Papers: Archival
Documents and Materials, Brill,
Leiden and Boston.

Ellman, Michael (2002), “Soviet

Repression Statistics: Some
Comments”, Europe-Asia Studies,
Vol. 54, N° 7.

Gorinov, M. M., S. V. Tsakunov y

Konstantin Gurevich (1991), “Life
and Works of Evgenii Alekseevich
Preobrazhens- kii”, Slavic Review,
Vol. 50, N° 2 (Summer), pp. 286-
296. https://goo.gl/vAGDEf Marie,
Jean-Jacques (2003), Stalin,
Palabra.

Preobrazhensky, Evgenii (1970),

La nueva economía, Barcelona:
Ariel. https://goo.gl/5GN8iF.

http://62.103.28.111/infopubl/7761/files/assets/basic-html/page-3.html