Leon Trotsky
“Trotsky’s assassination
ranks among the most politically consequential crimes of the 20th century, with
far-reaching implications for the international working class and the world
socialist movement. And yet, for decades, the circumstances surrounding the
assassination remained shrouded in secrecy. The massive scale of the Stalinist
conspiracy against Trotsky was the subject of a carefully orchestrated
cover-up.”
Duncan Hallas, along
with Tony Cliff and 30 others, was a founder-member in the 1950s of a small,
anti-Trotskyist political group, which was the forerunner of the current Socialist
Workers’ Party (Britain),
This book, published
some twenty years after his death, contains a selection of his writings freely
available on the Marxist Internet Archive[1]
and includes sections written by others about Hallas and his ideas.
Hallas was well thought
of inside the SWP. Alex Callinicos wrote in an obituary: “Not for Duncan the
abstractions and obscurities of academic Marxism. He wrote plain English,
punctuated by short, pithy sentences.” And Paul Foot said, "He was the
most coherent socialist I ever knew, whether he was writing or speaking.”
Given Hallas’s
popularity, it is perhaps a little perplexing why the SWP waited twenty years
to publish this book. The clue may be that it contains many attacks on the Socialist
Labour League, the British section of The International Committee of the Fourth
International(ICFI). It would not have gone unnoticed inside the SWP that today
the ICFI, through its publication The World Socialist Website(wsws.org), has undergone
a massive increase in its influence and is, by far, the most widely read
Marxist-socialist internet-based publication worldwide. The
total number of WSWS pages viewed in 2022 was 25,995,248. During the first
month of this new year, the World Socialist Web Site recorded 1,882,673 page
views.
If Hallas were alive
today, he undoubtedly would have authored an attack on the ICFI as he did on
previous occasions. Unlike many in the SWP, Hallas was unafraid to get his
hands dirty and wrote several unprincipled attacks on the ICFI, particularly the
Socialist Labour League. Many of these articles were written not only during an
upsurge in the working class but saw an increase in the influence of the
Trotskyist movement worldwide.
Hallas’s first attack on
the Socialist Labour League came in 1969. His article was called Building the
Leadership -“Orthodox Trotskyism” and the Political Roots of the Socialist
Labour League[2].
He writes, “ The
Socialist Labour League (SLL) is noted on the British Left for the activism of
its members and its sharp hostility to all other political organisations. The
sectarianism of the League (for example, its refusal to participate in the
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) and the lengthy polemics carried by its press
against more or less obscure “revisionists” are well known. So are the
complaints of ex-members of the organisation's allegedly bureaucratic and
authoritarian internal regime. But the most characteristic features are the
extreme emphasis the SLL places on the twin themes of “leadership” and
“betrayal” together with constant predictions of the imminence of catastrophic
economic crisis. The SLL claims to be the embodiment of “orthodox Trotskyism”.
The claim has considerable justification. The League’s present policies are
rooted in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International. Its errors
arise from the attempt to apply this analysis to a world situation in which it
is irrelevant or false.”
Hallas’s article contains
nothing new. It is a rehash of old Stalinist lies under a pseudo-left guise. Hallas
inadvertently shows the SWP up for what it is an anti-Marxist and anti-Trotskyist
organisation that is wedded to the Labour and Trade Union bureaucracy. The
article attacks every basic Marxist concept Leon Trotsky fought for, from the
Transitional Programme and the Permanent Revolution to the class nature of the Soviet
Union. Trotsky’s designation of the first worker's state as a Degenerated
Workers’ State was rejected, and in its place was Tony Cliff’s State capitalism
theory which Hallas completely agreed with.
Trotsky opposed the
conception that the USSR represented a variety of "state capitalism"
or a ruling class of a new type. He wrote, "The class has an exceptionally
important and moreover a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A
class is defined not by its participation in the distribution of national
income alone but by its independent role in the general structure of the economy
and by its independent roots in the economic foundations of society. The
bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in
the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property
roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule”.[3]
As an article by the Marxist
writer Peter Daniels points out, Cliff’s theory was hardly original, “Cliff developed his version of the theory of
Soviet state capitalism in 1948. He added little to the arguments made in favour
of the theory years earlier. As far as Cliff was concerned, the destruction of
the Soviets and the loss of political power by the working class meant that the
ruling bureaucracy, presiding over the rapid industrialisation of the First
Five-Year Plan, had been transformed into a ruling class of state capitalists. As
we discussed briefly, Trotsky had answered these arguments many years earlier.
Cliff never explained how the ruling caste, with no right of inheritance and no
special property relations, had become a ruling class. Cliff's abandonment of
the theory of the degenerated workers' state had a definite political significance.
It represented a capitulation to the ideological and political pressure of
"democratic" capitalism in response to the difficulties faced by the
revolutionary movement.
Just as Shachtman had
adapted to the moods among petty-bourgeois intellectuals at the time of the
Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Cliff and his supporters adapted to the pressures
of the Cold War. Quite simply, they found it too difficult and uncomfortable to
defend Marxism in the face of the anti-Communist campaign of this period. Only the
genuine Trotskyists were able, as Cannon put it so well in The Open Letter, to
fight imperialism without capitulating to Stalinism and to fight Stalinism, in
the final analysis, a petty bourgeois agency of imperialism, without
capitulating to imperialism.”[4]
As was said earlier,
Hallas completely agreed with Cliff’s attack on Leon Trotsky. Hallas‘s book Trotsky's
Marxism 1979 further elaborates the SWP’s bitter hostility towards Trotsky and
the very founding of the Fourth International.
Hallas’s book contains
so many attacks on Trotsky and Trotskyism it is hard to know where to begin. As
Daniels writes, “One could not ask for a more explicit repudiation of Marxism. His
outlook sums up the "tactical opportunism" of the state capitalists.
Seeking to root themselves in the British working class based on partial
demands, not an international program, is how they have functioned all these
decades. "Rank-and-files" and collaboration with the bureaucracy in
the trade unions; single-issue middle-class protest as in their Anti-Nazi
League of the 1970s and 1980s; collaboration today with Tommy Sheridan and
Scottish nationalism, and with George Galloway in the Respect electoral
coalition”.
While it is impossible
to cover every rotten attack by Hallas mentioned in the book and elsewhere, it
would be amiss of me not to highlight and oppose the scurrilous attack made by
Hallas and the SWP on the ICFI’s Security and the Fourth International investigation.
In an article published in 1985 entitled Workers Revolutionary Party Cult comes
a cropper[5]. Hallas
writes, “The loving up to various dictators in the Middle East, the ‘imminent
danger of Bonapartist police dictatorship in Britain, the grotesque Security
and the Fourth International campaign – aimed at the now deceased Joseph Hansen
and the SWP US.
In 1975, the
International Committee of the Fourth International launched the first
systematic investigation by the Trotskyist movement into the assassination.
This investigation, known as Security and the Fourth International, exposed the
network of GPU and American intelligence agents within the Fourth International
that ensured the success of Stalin’s conspiracy against Trotsky’s life and
facilitated state surveillance in the following decades. The investigation was
bitterly opposed by Pabloite and pseudo-left organisations, like the Socialist
Workers PartyUK, which denounced the exposure of spies inside the Trotskyist
movement as “agent-baiting.” This has remained their position, even though
state intelligence documents released following the dissolution of the Soviet
Union confirmed the findings of the International Committee and vindicated
Security and the Fourth International.[6]
Indomitable Revolutionary
by Duncan Hallas is not only a worthless book. It contains numerous attacks not
just on Leon Trotsky but on the heritage of Trotskyism, in Britain and worldwide.
Therefore, I have included a list of books that should be consulted when examining
the heritage we defend.
Further Reading
The Heritage We Defend:
Contribution to the History of the Fourth International Paperback – 1 Dec. 1988
by David North
Leon Trotsky and the
Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century-David North
The Revolution Betrayed-Leon
Trotsky
Security and the Fourth
International-ICFI-Mehring Books
Agents: The FBI and GPU
Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement-Eric London
How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism-1973
— 1985 -Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hallas/index.htm
[2] International Socialism (1st
series), No.40, October/November 1969, pp.25-32. Marxists’ Internet Archive.
[3] The Class Natureof the Soviet
State (October 1, 1933)- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm
[4] The Revolution Betrayed and the
fate of the Soviet Union
Peter
Daniels- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/rev1-f25.html
[5]From Socialist Review, No. 82,
December 1985, p. 25.
Transcribed
& marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/icfiCategory/security
