With this text we want to offer a contribution of reflection to comrades who are militants in Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione (SCR) or the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), or who are approaching the organization. We are open, as always, for any discussion and deepening. As the Leninist tradition dictates. The original Italian text is here.

The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) current is inseparable from its history. The paradox is that its history is as emphatically mythologized by its leaders as it is effectively unknown to the vast majority of militants in its sections. This is no accident.

One of the defining features of this current is its self-proclaimed status as the only Marxist current existing in the world. All other organizations in the Trotskyist movement, national or international, are denounced as sects on the fringes of the workers’ movement and treated in derogatory terms. This is so, even in the presence of Trotskyist organizations infinitely more deeply rooted and representative than the local sections of the IMT, as in the case of Argentina and France (where the IMT is totally marginal or little more than virtual). In fact, as is easy to understand, there is no more sectarian conception than that which denounces indistinctly the bulk of the Trotskyist movement in the world as a “sect.” This self-centered sectarianism of the IMT has a definite political-theoretical foundation that rests on its genesis and history. Knowing it is decisive for understanding the current cipher of the IMT.

The origins of the IMT

The IMT current grew out of a minority split from the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) in 1992. The CWI has its roots in the history of the British section of the Fourth International, specifically in its majority faction within the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), headed by Ted Grant.

In the International Conference of 1946 and the Second World Congress of 1948, Grant had correctly criticized the majority position of the International, which denied the postwar capitalist recovery and the expansion of Stalinism. At the same time, he rejected the policy of total entrism into the Labour Party proposed by the International Secretariat and later implemented by the minority of the British section, led by Gerry Healy. Hence, Grant’s marginalization in the International.

The failure to build an independent organization to the left of the Labour Party led Grant in 1950 to disband the RCP and reconcile with the Healy-led faction working in the Labour Party. But Healy expelled Grant and the few remaining militants with him by bureaucratic methods. The result was that Grant found himself out of the international Trotskyist movement precisely in the crucial years of its crisis (1951-1953), when the majority of the International, led by Michel Pablo, reacted to the refutation of naive postwar optimism (world crisis of capitalism, imminence of world revolution) with adaptation to Stalinism, in the name of ultra-catastrophism (the imminent Third World War). A profound revisionist turn that attributed a progressive historical role to Stalinism, initiated entrism sui generis in Stalinist parties, reduced the role of Trotskyism to critical pressure on Stalinism, and renounced the building of independent Trotskyist parties. A centrist degeneration with lasting and devastating effects on the life and history of the entire international Trotskyist movement.

Ted Grant found himself out of the international battle against Pabloite revisionism in the very decisive years. On the other hand, he arranged with extreme unscrupulousness to capitalize on its effects. Since the British section led by Gerry Healy had rejected the revisionist turn by forming the International Committee of the Fourth International (along with the PCI of France, the Swiss section, and the prestigious American Socialist Workers Party), Ted Grant sought a space to rejoin the Pabloite International: without raising the slightest political question about past and present differences, he offered himself to the International Secretariat as its British section. The International Secretariat naturally accepted with equal ease (1957). Grant’s British organization would remain in the Pabloite International Secretariat for eight years, until 1965, when the United Secretariat demoted it to a sympathizing organization, hiring another British group (led by Pat Jordan and Ken Coates) as its official section in 1969. It was only then, in 1965, that Grant’s group separated from the United Secretariat. Significantly, both in the years of the split of the Fourth International (1951-1953) and in the years of its own stay in the international Pabloite tendency (1957-1965), the Grantite historiography, generally so prolific, is particularly stingy.

However, Ted Grant’s theoretical elaboration had already experienced an important turning point in 1959. In that year, Grant produced a text titled Problems of Entrism, which would lay the foundations for the entire subsequent strategic approach of his current. Reversing his own (mistaken) rejection of Labour Party entrism in the 1940s, Grant theorized out of the blue the need for an indefinite strategic entrism not only in the British Labour Party, but generally in all mass-based reformist parties, particularly the social-democratic parties. The fact that Grant’s historiographical narrative simultaneously claims both strategic entrism in the Labour Party and its own absurd rejection of entrism in the 1940s bears no more relation to logic than to the myth of Grant’s infallibility.

The turn to strategic entrism (1959)

Strategic entrism represented a revision of Trotskyism. Trotsky had claimed in the 1930s an entrist tactic in several social-democratic parties, at a time when they knew internally the development of strong leftist tendencies, for the purpose of a revolutionary regrouping of forces for the construction of independent parties. In Trotsky’s conception, and in the practice that followed (particularly in France and the U.S.), the tactic of entrism incorporated within itself, from the outset, the prospect of a break with the social democracies. More: it was exactly in the service of that prospect. Grant’s strategic entrism instead removed precisely that end.

The new theory was this: since the masses take the major workers’ parties as their reference, and since Trotskyists must not separate themselves from the masses, the role of revolutionaries becomes that of defending the ideas of Marxism within the mass social-democratic parties. Period. Of course, Grant was not denying, in the abstract, from a theoretical point of view, the necessity of the revolutionary party for the purposes of the socialist perspective. He simply removed it from his own political action, entrusting it to history. The politics of revolutionary regroupment in the service of Leninist party-building were replaced by sine die propaganda positioning within the social democracies, awaiting the “events” of history.

Yet, in 1970, Ted Grant wrote:

On the basis of events, mass revolutionary tendencies in the countries of the West, where Stalinism is the main current, will be formed in the communist parties, and where the reformists are a mass tendency, within the social-democratic parties… Nationally and internationally, the ideas of our tendency can gain a mass support over the epoch. (Ted Grant, Programme of the International, 1970)

It was thus a matter of preserving the entrist presence in the Stalinist or social-democratic parties in anticipation of the “events” and the masses. In fact, even when the “events” came (May 1968 in France, the mass rising in Italy between 1969 and 1976, the Portuguese revolution of 1974-1975) without the expected “mass revolutionary tendencies” arising in the reformist parties (but with the formation to their left of significant spaces for the vanguard) the line theorized by Grant was to remain in the mass parties at all costs: in the PCF that had betrayed the French May, in the PCI of the historic compromise, in the counterrevolutionary Portuguese PS. To their left, in fact, there would only be room for the notorious “sects.”

This was the cornerstone of Grant’s entire policy for almost the entire postwar period. A self-conserving policy covered by messianic predictions, regularly disproved. When the majority of his international current in 1991-1992, after the collapse of the USSR, questioned this pillar, initiating a leftward, if contradictory, turn, Grant gathered around him a minority that preserved the old strategic entrist approach. The IMT current was born in 1992 out of this minority split from the CWI.

You might say that this is all about the past, but it is not. The strategic entrism in the social democracies had multiple consequences for different aspects of Grant’s policy. It was not simply a revisionist theory. But of a prolonged political experience that exposed the organization to the inevitable pressures of the social-democratic milieu. Such pressures did not erase in Grant’s thinking the reference to revolutionary Marxism, which indeed was constantly reaffirmed and professed. But they certainly produced political adaptations, with profound theoretical reflections. Anti-Leninist theoretical reflections that have persisted over time and still represent the IMT’s identifying code on the international stage.

It is true: the IMT has experienced a partial “leftward” turn in recent years, in the form of the exalted rhetoric of a supposed mass radicalization of the working class and youth of the world as an effect of the economic catastrophe of capitalism. We shall see later the impressionistic nature of this turn and the falsity of the interpretive method on which it is based. But it is significant that the partial turn to the left coexists with the legacy of an unchanged genetic heritage. The heritage of a centrist distortion of Trotskyism.

Grant and Woods against Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?

A first example is Grant’s explicit critique of the Leninist conception of What Is to Be Done? around the theme of proletarian consciousness. For Lenin, the spontaneous consciousness of the working class is trade-unionist. The fundamental function of the vanguard party is to bring to the class a socialist political consciousness. This consciousness does not spontaneously mature from the immediate experience of the class struggle. It must be brought into the class “from outside” by a militant organization based on a revolutionary program and equipped with the historical memory of the proletarian movement.

Naturally, to say that the spontaneous consciousness of the working class is of the trade-unionist type (“the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.”, as Lenin writes in What Is to Be Done?) is by no means to argue that the spontaneous dynamic of the class struggle cannot transcend, under particular conditions, the trade-unionist level. Prerevolutionary or overtly revolutionary crises, cyclically recurring and always possible, do not, in fact, arise from subjective consciousness, but from the objective and unpredictable combination of a thousand factors (inability of the ruling classes to preserve the traditional forms of their domination, willingness of the masses to react with struggle to the worsening of their material condition, division and polarization of the middle classes, etc., according to Lenin’s own theoretical generalization). However, when the level of confrontation transcends the spontaneous level of consciousness and, at the same time, lacks a party that knows how to raise that consciousness to the height of a revolutionary perspective, even the most radical mass movement is doomed to defeat. Because other parties (social democrats, Stalinists, nationalists, populists, etc.) each time leverage the myriad folds of the backward consciousness of the masses (spontaneously trade-unionist) to subordinate it in various ways to the established order. This is what happens, moreover, in the normal day-to-day routine of the class struggle.

Does bringing socialist consciousness into the class mean reducing revolutionary politics to doctrinaire preaching (as in the Bordighist tradition)? Not at all. Revolutionary politics must always know how to relate to the concrete experience of the masses, in all its complexity and in all its stratifications, contradictions or evolutions. The propaganda or agitation of the program of transitional demands, the tactics of the united front toward reformist parties, the revolutionary use of bourgeois electoral forums (when possible), and the revolutionary battle within the trade unions, starting with the mass unions, are all forms of living relations with the workers’ consciousness in order to raise it above its spontaneous level. As is the battle for proletarian and anti-capitalist hegemony within all progressive movements that are not directly proletarian (gender, environmental, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, etc.).

On all sides, bringing socialist consciousness among the oppressed, above the trade-unionist level, is the basic content of all revolutionary politics. This is an elementary conception that Lenin inherits from Marx and Engels, and on which he bases the very structure of Bolshevism. Moreover, the entire historical experience of the workers’ movement, and all the more so the current retreat of the political consciousness of the proletariat in the world (to which we shall return), have fully confirmed the Leninist thesis, albeit mostly in the negative.

Ted Grant and Alan Woods challenged this conception at its root, theorizing the spontaneity of the socialist consciousness of the working class. Alan Woods’s polemic is a direct revolt against Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?:

Written between late 1901 and early 1902, this work was intended as a final settling of accounts with the Economists, and therefore has an extremely polemical slant throughout. Undoubtedly, there is a rich seam of ideas present in this work, which is, however, seriously flawed by a most unfortunate theoretical lapse. While correctly polemicising against the Economists’ slavish worship of ‘spontaneity’, Lenin allowed himself to fall into the error of exaggerating a correct idea and turning it into its opposite. In particular, he asserts that socialist consciousness: “[W]ould have to be brought to them [the workers] from without.” (Alan Woods, Bolshevism — The Road to Revolution, 1999)

Denouncing Lenin’s position as “one-sided and erroneous,” Woods positively formulates an opposing theory:

From a lifetime’s experience of exploitation and oppression, the working class, beginning with the active layers which lead the class, acquires a socialist consciousness. That is precisely the basis of the historical process which led to the birth of the trade unions and the mighty parties of the Second and Third Internationals… The class struggle itself inevitably creates not only a class consciousness, but a socialist consciousness. It is the duty of Marxists to bring out what is already there, to give a conscious expression to what is present in an unconscious or semi-conscious form. (Woods, Bolshevism, original emphasis)

This thesis of Woods is actually refuted by the entire experience of the workers’ movement. The Second International and the Third International were by no means the products of the spontaneous socialist consciousness of the working class. They were, if anything, the builders of that consciousness, starting a tough political battle of demarcation: in the first case, by bringing to a conclusion the programmatic battle of the Communist Manifesto against all petty-bourgeois positions and theories peculiar to other tendencies (including tendencies that relied on “spontaneous consciousness”); in the second case, in breaking with counterrevolutionary social democracy (which had relied on the “spontaneous” chauvinist sentiments of vast class sectors during the imperialist war). Proof of this is that after the destruction of that enormous historical heritage of socialist consciousness (at the hands first and foremost of Stalinism), no experience of class struggle spontaneously “recreated” it. To say a century later that class struggle inevitably creates socialist consciousness — which revolutionaries should simply bring to light — means contradicting not only Lenin but the irrefutable evidence of the facts.

This profound devaluation of the very meaning of the Leninist revolutionary party, however, has a definite root in Grant’s thought. At a time when one was theorizing and practicing strategic entrism in social democracy, one had to formulate an ideological rationalization of that choice. The best way to do this was to say that the class struggle would solve the problem of the revolutionary leadership of the workers’ movement. Since the class struggle takes as its reference the mass parties, it was sufficient to defend Marxist ideas within these parties, and sooner or later the masses, guided by their own experience, and thus by the “socialist consciousness” that spontaneously emanates from it, would inevitably recognize themselves in those ideas.

The apologia of spontaneous “socialist consciousness” served as a cover for subaltern politics. Even the experience of the Bolshevik party was reconstructed for the use of this ideological scheme, presenting it basically as a prolonged “entrist” experience up to the threshold of the Russian Revolution. It is not theory that rests on history, but history that is redrawn according to the needs of theory.

The rejection of the Leninist conception of “bourgeois workers parties”

A second example, related to the first, concerns Grant’s rejection of the Leninist conception of social-democratic parties as bourgeois workers parties, in the name of their simplified characterization as “workers parties” or “reformist workers parties.” This is not only an analytic question, it is also a strategic question.

For Lenin and the Communist International of the first four congresses, the parties of social democracy (then of the Second International) had a contradictory class nature. On the one hand, they had deep roots in the working class, whose main mass organizations they headed, starting with the trade unions. On the other hand, they were dominated by a conservative bureaucratic apparatus of bourgeois society, a true “agent of the bourgeoisie” within the workers’ movement. The task of the communist parties was to expose the bourgeois nature of the social-democratic apparatuses to the mass base they controlled, in order to destroy their influence in the workers’ movement and win within it an alternative hegemony. Hence, the combination of political denunciation with the articulation of tactics (the tactics of the united front and the workers’ government) for the purpose of winning the majority of the proletariat. Tactics were subordinate to strategy. The united-front proposal was aimed at bringing the communists closer to the mass base of social democracy in order to wrest it from its leaderships. The same for the tactics of the workers’ government: a proposal-challenge to the leaderships of the workers’ movement to break with the bourgeoisie on the basis of an anti-capitalist rupture program, with the aim of exposing their nature as agencies of the bourgeoisie in the workers’ movement. Trotsky’s Transitional Program recovered and updated this approach by extending it to the Stalinist parties. The Bolshevik policy toward the reformist parties during the Russian Revolution was taken in this regard as a paradigm of reference.

Ted Grant revised that approach to its foundations. The strategic entrism in social democracy, starting with the British Labour Party (but also in the Stalinist parties), led him to embellish their nature. Their bourgeois side was removed; only their workers’ side remained. The social-democratic and Stalinist parties ceased to be an agency of the bourgeoisie in the workers’ movement, and become simply a reformist expression of the workers’ movement. The task of the communists was no longer to destroy their bourgeois influence in the working class, but to preserve within them the space of Marxist ideas. The “workers’ party government,” as such a bourgeois government, was repeatedly turned into the goal and claimed as an advancement of the workers’ movement. For example, as we will see below, the demand of a PDS-PRC government was central to FalceMartello propaganda in Italy in the 1990s and 2000s. The very possible evolution of a social-democratic party into a bourgeois party tout court (as in the case of the Italian DS) was denied in the name of the working-class nature of social democracy.

Here again, the removal of the bourgeois element in the material constitution of social democracy and Stalinist parties was regularly accompanied by apologetic predictions about the spontaneous force of the masses and their consciousness. A force that would overwhelm the apparatchiks, particularly in the advanced West:

Let us go further and pose the problem that in a country like Italy or France, where the proletariat plays an overwhelmingly decisive role and where its latent power has been further reinforced by the development of industry, that the Stalinists under the influence of the revolutionary wave should be pushed into power, which is not theoretically excluded. It is true that at the present time both the [Italian and the French Stalinist] parties are second-line defenders of the bourgeois state but, under the impact of a revolutionary wave, they would put forward their most left face.

If they were pushed in the direction of taking power, it could only be with a mobilisation of the full resources, revolutionary energy and capacity for organisation and struggle on the part of the proletariat. Such a proletariat would not allow the development of bureaucracy as in the backward countries…

The changed consciousness of the masses will be revealed in the mass Communist parties, especially in France and Italy. Never again will the ranks of the Communist parties tolerate without mighty movements of protest, the sell-outs and betrayals of 1936 in France and Spain and in 1944-7 in France and Italy. (Ted Grant, The Colonial Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1964)

It would be easy to observe that the whole order of these predictions would be mercilessly refuted a few years later in the very countries indicated. But what is important to note here is Grant’s theoretical removal of the organic counterrevolutionary nature of the Stalinist parties as instruments of bureaucratic control of the masses on behalf of the bourgeoisie. To the point of a substantial reversal of the relationship between the masses and their apparatuses. A reversal of Leninism and Trotskyism.

The theory of the peaceful transition to socialism

A third example of political adaptation concerns the Grantite theory of the peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. It is the most serious form of revision of Trotskyism because it assails the very subject of revolution. It is the most blatant sign of the pressures of social democracy and its milieu.

Marx and Engels asserted at the very conclusion of the Communist Manifesto that the stated aim of the communists is the violent overthrow of the bourgeois order. Engels reiterated until the end of his days the inevitability of revolutionary rupture against the pacifist distortions that were emerging in German social democracy. Lenin stated in State and Revolution, written at the height of the Russian Revolution, that:

The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels. (Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917)

Trotsky recovered and developed this background of revolutionary Marxism against all forms of petty-bourgeois pacifism. Worthy are the pages of his History of the Russian Revolution devoted to the preparation of insurrection (The Art of Insurrection), or the assessment of the failure of the 1923 German revolution in Lessons of October, where Trotsky points out the lack of attention to the subject of insurrection as one of the worst legacies of the old school of the Second International. Moreover, the entire historical experience of the international workers’ movement in the following century confirmed, mostly to the negative, the strategic centrality of this theme.

The school of Ted Grant and Alan Woods has operated in the opposite direction. Its entire elaboration focuses on the concept of peaceful transition. Grant and Woods do not contest — how kind of them — the need to break up the bourgeois state apparatus and replace it with the power of councils. They simply present such a rupture as an outlet for peaceful mass action, capable of avoiding insurrection.

Alan Woods’s text Marxism and the State is entirely devoted to this concept. In an effort to legitimize his own positions, Woods revises the positions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky in a pacifist key. Even Engels’s famous introduction to Marx’s text on The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850 is dredged up to testify to the supposed pacifist evolution of Engels’s positions, as well as the same falsifying quotation from it at the time by the leadership of the German Social Democracy and against which Engels himself protested. More, Woods reconstructs in a “pacifist” key the history of the revolutions of the 1900s. The Russian Revolution itself is incredibly portrayed as a “pacifist revolution,” neglecting the detail of two insurrections (February and October) against the background of imperialist war, and all of Trotsky’s splendid historical reconstruction about the relationship between revolution and insurrection in his History of the Russian Revolution. In which Trotsky explains that certainly the Russian Revolution was a complex process that cannot be reduced to insurrection, but that without the meticulous organization of the insurrection (including its conspiratorial aspect), it could not have been successful.

Woods’s text lingers at length on all the folds of the tactical articulation of Bolshevik policy in 1917, from the challenge issued to Mensheviks and revolutionaries to seize power to the presentation of October as a “legal” defense of the Congress of Soviets. The purpose is to demonstrate the peaceful posture of Bolshevism. But in reality, all the important and valuable tactical articulations of Bolshevik policy were aimed at winning the masses to the revolution, including its insurrectional outlet. If this was true in a country already marked by the February insurrection, by the disarticulation of the old state apparatus that that insurrection had already brought about, by the presence of the soviets and the Red Guards in arms, it would be all the more true in less favorable and advanced revolutionary scenarios.

Woods insists on using the experience of postwar revolutionary crises in Europe to demonstrate their peaceful potential. In particular, he points to the revolutionary crises of May 1968 in France and Portugal in 1974-1975 as exemplary proof of a possible painless transition. But in the first case, he removes De Gaulle’s military preparations of the French troops stationed in Germany to intervene against the revolution. In the second case, he ignores the decisive role, in a counterrevolutionary sense, ultimately played by the military hierarchies, all the more significant in the context of the disarticulation of the Portuguese army by the collapse of the old regime and the revolutionary rise. Woods’s central notion is that the majority leaderships of the workers’ movement could have taken power peacefully. In fact, they refused to take power precisely to avoid the inevitable confrontation with the bourgeois state and its forces. And they avoided it because of their own nature as the counterrevolutionary agency of the bourgeoisie within the workers’ movement. Exactly the Leninist concept that Grant and Woods removed.

Moreover, it is significant that from the broad (distorted) overview of the real revolutions of the 1900s, Woods downplayed the experience of the German revolution of 1918-1919 and ignored the revolutionary crisis in Chile (1970-1973): the former suppressed in blood by the “workers’ party government” (that of Noske and Scheidemann) and its Freikorps, the latter resolved by Pinochet’s infamous fascist coup after the workers’ movement had been disarmed materially and politically by preaching about the “peaceful transition” to socialism.

On the other hand, Woods points to the collapse of Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall under pressure from the masses as evidence of a possible peaceful transition. But in that case, it was a peaceful bourgeois counterrevolution at the hands of a parasitic caste that converted itself into a new property class, changing the social nature of its rule but in many respects in continuity with it (a possibility Trotsky foresaw as early as 1936). What analogy is ever possible with the dynamics of a socialist revolution that must break the bourgeois state apparatus by inevitably clashing with its resistance?

Alan Woods adds that revolutions in the present era, at least in imperialist countries, may be even more peaceful than in the past because of the greater structural weight of the workers’ movement:

The entire situation is different to the period between the two world wars. Then, the fascists had massive social reserves in the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, including the students. Now all that has changed. The working class is a thousand times stronger, the peasantry has all but disappeared, and large sections of the white-collar workers — teachers, civil servants, bank workers, etc. — have drawn much closer to the proletariat. (Alan Woods, Marxism and the State)

This is a very simplified and one-sided representation. It combines the right understanding of proletarianization with the removal not only of the historical backwardness of proletarian consciousness (to which we will return), but also of the reactionary potential that is concentrated in vast sectors of the backward provinces. Are not Trumpism and Bolsonaroism illuminating examples of this?

More generally, Woods reverses exactly the basic meaning of Trotsky’s reflection on the parallel between the Russian Revolution and revolution in the West. A revolutionary dictatorship in the advanced West, Trotsky asserted repeatedly, will certainly have more room to maneuver because of incomparably greater economic resources. On the other hand, the revolutionary seizure of power will be far more difficult than in Russia in the face of an infinitely more robust and experienced bourgeois state:

There is every indication that in the countries of Central and Western Europe it will be much more difficult for the proletariat to conquer power … our basic and, we believe, incontestable postulate, that the actual process of the conquest of power will encounter in Europe and America a much more serious, obstinate, and prepared resistance from the ruling classes than was the case with us — makes it all the more incumbent upon us to view the armed insurrection in particular and civil war in general as an art. (Trotsky, Lessons of October, 1924)

This is the exact opposite of Alan Woods’s semi-pacifist view. The truth is that a revolutionary politics must educate the workers’ movement, and first of all, its vanguard, to understand the inevitability of confrontation with reaction. It is only by preparing for the inevitability of confrontation, against all pacifist illusions about the possibility of avoiding it, that the workers’ movement and its vanguard will be able to reduce the costs of revolution to their own advantage. Those who preach against the necessity of violence are simply preparing to suffer it, as so much of the actual history of revolutions shows.

It is important to understand the common thread that unites, in Grant’s and Woods’s thinking, these different aspects of the revision of Trotskyism. The thread lies not in the heaven of theory but in political adaptation to environmental pressure and the self-preservative logic of one’s own organization. All the furious polemic against the so-called “sects” serves only to protect its own.

The IMT’s capitulation to chavismo

Protecting one’s own organization as the end of political action needs myths on which to feed. The so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” has been one such myth for over a decade. For more than a decade, Grant and Woods made the apologia of chavismo, against the “prejudices” of the “sects,” the main element of public recognition of their own international organization. We could say that all the centrist distortions of Trotskyism peculiar to the school of Grant and Woods found concentrated expression in Venezuela. The collection of Alan Woods’s writings with the title La revolución bolivariana — Un análisis marxista in Spanish and The Venezuelan Revolution — a Marxist perspective in English, offers unequivocal summary documentation in this regard.

In its reality, which is different from myth, chavismo represented a variant of nationalist Bonapartism with an anti-imperialist posture, not new in the Latin American historical tradition. Just think of the Cárdenas regime in Mexico in the late 1930s, characterized by Trotsky as “bonapartism sui generis,” or the Peronist phenomenon in postwar Argentina. Leveraging a sector of middle officers in the Venezuelan military, Hugo Chávez rose to power in the late 1990s by benefiting from the demand for a breakthrough by the vast majority of the country’s poor population. A demand already expressed in 1989 with a revolutionary uprising suppressed in blood (the Caracazo). In 2002, the coup attempt to unseat Chávez, which resoundingly failed, fostered a broad popular reaction in support of him, with elements of undoubted radicalization. Chávez worked to regiment popular support by incorporating mass organizations into his own party (first the Fifth Republic Movement, then the United Socialist Party of Venezuela), subordinating trade unions to his government, and elevating himself above the classes.

Thus, a petty-bourgeois Bonapartist regime was born within the framework of a bourgeois state. Thanks to the growing fortunes of the oil rent, Chávez developed a redistributive policy in the direction of the poor population (particularly in health, education, housing, subsidies) consolidating his support. It was the policy of the so-called misiones. But at the same time, it restricted union rights, imposed anti-strike legislation in the public sector, repeatedly resorted to direct repression of workers’ struggles through the use of the Policía Nacional, and above all, avoided any policy of breaking with the bourgeoisie and imperialism.

Even on the strictly democratic and “anti-imperialist” ground, his progressivism was very moderate, even after the failed 2002 coup. Land reform left 75% of the land in the hands of the top 5% of landowners. Nationalizations of foreign property were very limited and overcompensated. Foreign debt with foreign capital continued to be honored to the last penny. Banks remained in private hands (mainly Spanish) as did telecommunications (North-American owned). The domestic bourgeoisie was entirely spared, starting with the big food groups. While the intermediation between the government, private capital and foreign trade fostered the development of a newly enriched bourgeoisie (the “bolibourgeoisie”) to support the regime. The military caste was a central part of this environment.

No doubt, Salvador Allende’s popular-front bourgeois government in Chile in the very early 1970s had been infinitely more radical than the Chávez government on each of these grounds. As, moreover, had been, on a different level, even Argentine Peronism. The truth is that Chávez’s hold on the social front rested solely on the price of oil and the redistributive margins it allowed. When oil prices collapsed with the great international capitalist crisis of 2008, chavismo’s fortunes declined. The Maduro regime, the direct heir to Chávez and his system of power, reacted to the decline by further expanding measures to open up to the bourgeoisie and foreign capital.

An elementary policy from a Marxist point of view was and is to defend the political independence of the working class from the chavista regime. Supporting, of course, every progressive measure, unconditionally defending Venezuela from every reactionary threat from imperialism, but denouncing chavismo’s policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie (and imperialism itself), its renunciatory timidity on even the democratic terrain, its policies of attack on the proletariat. In other words, placing itself in opposition to petty-bourgeois Bonapartism from a class side, and developing from that side an active relationship with the mass movement on the terrain of an anti-capitalist program and perspective. The policy that Marx already indicated to the Communist League in 1850 in the face of an eventual rule of petty-bourgeois democracy in Germany. The policy that Lenin and the Communist International pointed out to communists in colonial and semicolonial countries: where even an eventual common anti-imperialist front with petty-bourgeois nationalist movements required the explicit refusal to endorse any of their false “socialist” rhetoric and the defense of the independence of the proletariat.

Grant and Woods had an opposite policy. They magnified Chávez’s “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. They credited his self-interested “socialist” demagoguery, totally lacking in any real-life evidence. They presented his measures (called “impressive”) as the beginning of the socialist revolution in Venezuela. They extolled beyond all limits the personal figure of the commander-in-chief himself, in lyrical and embarrassing tones:

From my limited contacts with Hugo Chavez, I am firmly convinced of his personal honesty, courage and dedication to the cause of the masses, the oppressed and exploited. … Even his declared enemies and critics cannot deny that he has shown colossal courage. … For the first time in the almost 200 years history of Venezuela the masses feel that the government is in the hands of people who wish to defend their interests. … The Revolution’s list of practical achievements is impressive. … Hugo Chavez for the first time gave the poor and downtrodden a voice and some hope. That is the secret of the extraordinary devotion and loyalty they have shown him. … [Chavez and his supporters] did not originally have a socialist perspective, but only the notion of clearing out corruption and modernising Venezuela. They wanted a fairer, more just and equal society, but imagined that this was possible without breaking the bounds of capitalism. But this immediately brought them into conflict with the bourgeoisie and imperialism. The masses took to the streets and imparted an entirely different dynamic to the process. The mass movement has provided a stimulus to Chavez and in turn he has encouraged the movement in a revolutionary direction. … President Hugo Chavez has consistently revealed an unerring revolutionary instinct. (Alan Woods, The Venezuelan Revolution — a Marxist perspective)

In other words, the score of the peaceful transition to socialism would find in Chávez its outstanding interpreter. Within this framework, the task of Marxists, according to Woods, was to work in the Bolivarian movement in support of its “revolutionary” leadership to provide it with the Marxist ideas it lacked. Alan Woods’s meetings with Hugo Chávez (which Woods smugly exhibits) had this stated purpose: to provide Chávez with Marxist readings, especially readings by Alan Woods. Moreover, Woods himself assured that Chávez “was sincerely interested in the ideas of Marxism and eager to learn about them.” Chávez’s interest in covering himself on the left by exploiting (also) Woods’s courtier approach was portrayed as evidence of Alan Woods’s influence on Chávez. So, of the influence of Marxism on the Bolivarian revolution. For his part, Woods repaid Chávez’s attentions by frontally attacking those from the left who challenged his policies:

The greatest danger for the Venezuelan Marxists is impatience, sectarian and ultraleft moods. … Frustration is already growing among the activists. This is a warning. This frustration could lead to moods of impatience and ultraleft adventures on the part of a layer of activists who have moved far ahead of the rest of the class. This could have negative consequences for the revolution. (Woods, The Venezuelan Revolution)

Instead of giving an independent political translation to the growing dissatisfaction of vanguard class sectors, both inside and outside the Bolivarian movement, Woods’s policy took them as a polemical target to protect Chávez.

This position of capitulation to chavismo was also extremely serious because of its international significance. Chávez was, not surprisingly, one of the most celebrated references of the so-called radical reformist left in Europe (in Italy, Bertinotti, Cossutta, Rizzo), and of the neo-reformist petty-bourgeois leaderships of the No Global movement. Chávez was the revered host of the Porto Alegre World Social Forum in January 2005, where he managed to pass as a “revolutionary” while praising the bourgeois governments of Lula and Kirchner, and boasting of his relations with Putin. Woods’s current effectively joined this caravan of flatterers. Of course, in the name … of “Marxism.”

What is striking today is the absolute lack of any accounting by the IMT of a position sustained for ten years. Venezuela suddenly seems to have disappeared from the IMT map. A significant and embarrassing silence.

Colonial Revolution and Proletarian Bonapartism

The same failure to take stock invests other resounding IMT positions throughout its history. For example, on colonial revolutions.

This is the case with the theory of so-called “proletarian Bonapartism.” This was Grant’s arbitrary extension of the Trotskyist category of the deformed workers’ state. Trotsky in the Transitional Program had considered the possibility that petty-bourgeois parties, Stalinists included, under exceptional conditions, would go beyond their own intentions on the ground of breaking with the bourgeoisie. This is what happened after World War II in some colonial and backward countries, as in the case of China, Cuba, and Vietnam. When revolutionary processes, predominantly peasant-based, brought Stalinist or nationalist parties to power, they ended up expropriating the bourgeoisie, giving rise to property relations based on the planned economy. In a world scenario marked by the presence of the USSR, the international expansion of Stalinism, and the crisis or marginality of revolutionary Marxism, petty-bourgeois and/or Stalinist formations took the lead in anti-imperialist colonial revolutions, welding the natural tasks of democratic revolution with the destruction of the old state apparatus and the socialist transformation of property relations. It was the deformed expression of permanent revolution. The capitulation of the Trotskyist movement’s Pabloite tendencies to the resulting bureaucratic regimes was a manifestation of the centrist revision of Trotskyism.

Grant grasped the nature of the deformed workers’ states. He did not capitulate to their regimes, like the Pabloites. But he tended to extend that category to many petty-bourgeois nationalist uprisings of a Bonapartist stamp. Nasser’s Egypt (1952), Qasim’s Iraq (1958), the Baath’s Syria (1963), Boumédiène’s Algeria (1965), Menghistu’s Ethiopia (1978), even Buddhist Burma (1962), Grant characterized or predicted to become deformed workers’ states. In reality, these were nationalist regimes born out of military coups, within the framework of the bourgeois state apparatus, headed by uniformed petty-bourgeois leaderships, which certainly carried out advanced democratic measures in the field of land reform or in the relationship with imperialism (incomparably more advanced than those carried out by Venezuelan chavismo), sought and obtained the support of the USSR (or China, in the Burmese case), but without structurally breaking with capitalism. Without a Cuban or Chinese solution. These were petty-bourgeois regimes with “state capitalism,” which were balanced in the international relations of the time. After the collapse of the USSR, their room to maneuver dissolved, and they reverted to normal dependent states, subordinate to imperialism.

Grant, instead, gave this phenomenon the category of “proletarian Bonapartism,” which tended to lump all “anti-imperialist” petty-bourgeois regimes indiscriminately under its wings. A category with which he identified the general objective trend line of colonial revolutions in Asia and Africa as an inevitable reflection of the delay of revolution in the West (which tended to remove the program of permanent revolution as the subjective program of revolutionary Marxists in backward countries). Even the Portuguese revolution of 1975 was framed in this theoretical scheme, by predicting that it would tend toward a deformed workers’ state under the leadership of the MFA. Although in this case, Grant stated that such an outcome would be prevented by the “revolution approaching in Spain and the repercussions this will have in Europe and the world” (Ted Grant, The Revolution in Portugal , 1975). Yet another euphoric prediction belied.

On all these matters, the IMT has never felt the need to draw a balance or make corrections. Grant’s writings on the subject have been republished with pomp and circumstance (The Unbroken Thread: The development of Trotskyism over 40 years, 1989) without a line of commentary. It is a celebration of the infallibility of the bard.

National Question: Palestine, Ireland … Padania

A second sensitive issue concerns the question of oppressed nationalities. The national question has long been a terrain characterizing the IMT. A lengthy essay by Alan Woods and Ted Grant in 2000, republished by Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione (SCR) in 2015, fully vindicates in this regard fifty years of its own current history on the subject, of course as opposed to the “sects”:

To such critics we say only this: that we are proud of the fact that only the Marxist tendency represented by Socialist Appeal and In Defence of Marxism has kept its head and maintained the classical position of Marxism on this question—and on all others. Our record speaks for itself. We are not ashamed to re-publish today anything we have written for the past fifty years. The problem is that those who speak in the name of Lenin on this question merely demonstrate their ignorance of the position of the Bolshevik Party on the national question. The purpose of this document is to put the record straight. It is, of course, not addressed to the sects who are incapable of learning anything. In Defence of Marxism (Alan Woods-Ted Grant, Marxism and the National Question)

We take him at his word. Woods and Grant’s entire text, net of many scholastic references, focuses on the theme of the right of self-determination of oppressed nations. The basic idea is that Marxists, as internationalists, must never capitulate to nationalism, even that of oppressed peoples. The concept is, of course, right. But only if it is combined with the rejection of any capitulation or adaptation to imperialist and/or colonial nationalism. Unfortunately, this is precisely the case with the IMT.

Let us take the crucial issue of Palestine. Woods and Grant’s text insists at length on the correct critique of the Palestinian nationalist leaderships of the 1980s and 1990s. But it subordinates the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination to recognition of Israel’s colonial state:

Nevertheless, Israel now exists as a state, and the clock of history cannot be turned back. Israel is a nation and we cannot call for its abolition. (Alan Woods-Ted Grant, Marxism and the National Question)

A resounding capitulation to Zionism, and the imperialism that underpins it. A position that repudiates the historical approach of the original Fourth International on the liberation of Palestine. Today, fortunately, the IMT’s international position seems to have changed, coinciding substantially with ours (for a united, secular, socialist Palestine, with national rights for the Jewish minority, within a socialist Middle East Federation). But what about tomorrow? Without a reasoned and rationalized stocktaking of one’s positions and their changes, one risks swinging empirically between one position and its opposite. This is the pendulum of centrism.

A problem also arises on the Irish national question, which, more than others, involved the British IMT organization (or, before 1992, the CWI, the IMT’s parent organization) for obvious reasons. Behind an internationalist and class rhetoric, the CWI came to equate IRA activists with loyalist paramilitary forces. Hence, beginning in the 1970s, the rejection of the elemental demand for the withdrawal of British occupation troops from Northern Ireland in the name of peace between Catholics and Protestants. The 2000 document, republished in 2015, reiterates the position unchanged:

The lessons of Yugoslavia are a terrible confirmation of this. Precisely for that reason, there was, and is, no question of London withdrawing its troops from the North. … But the problem is that withdrawal would provoke a bloody chaos which would spill over into the rest of the United Kingdom. This is the nightmare scenario which London cannot permit to happen. Therefore they are condemned to remain. (Alan Woods-Ted Grant, Marxism and the National Question)

Here it is not the critique of the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships of the Irish nationalist movement, but the adaptation to British imperialism. The same that the CWI manifested in 1982 during Mrs. Thatcher’s government, when Britain militarily attacked Argentina in the Malvinas War, refusing to defend Argentina against its own imperialism in the name of a position of bilateral defeatism and the wholly abstract demand for a “socialist war” against Argentina. In reality, these opportunist positions toward its own imperialism, particularly on the Irish question, reflected an adaptation to the widespread sense of British workers and the pressures of the Labour Party in which the British section operated. But to explain the reasons for a position is not to remove its seriousness. All the more so if they are retrospectively vindicated in their entirety.

Moreover, the adaptation to reactionary moods of one’s proletariat is not only a characteristic of the British section. This is evidenced by the position of the Italian section of the IMT in the 1990s around the Northern League’s claim to a referendum on Padania. Bossi’s Lega Nord claimed at the time the secession of the North in the name of the interests of a reactionary northern small and middle bourgeoisie that wanted free hands for its anti-worker affairs. This was, from every point of view, a reactionary secessionism against which to mobilize unitedly the workers’ and trade union movement. Instead, the position of FalceMartello, forerunner of the present SCR, was exactly opposite:

The workers’ movement has every interest in ensuring that the will of any population that feels oppressed by the Italian state can express itself freely through the referendum or other channels. What is more, the workers’ movement should not oppose such a consultation, but declare itself willing to mobilize for its results to be respected, whether it be a demand for greater autonomy in the cultural or economic spheres, or an actual referendum on secession. (FalceMartello, “The bosses use nationalisms to divide the workers! How to convince a League worker?”, September 1997)

Unbelievable. The same organization that questions the right of self-determination of oppressed nations, in the name of criticism of their petty-bourgeois leaderships, supports the right to reactionary secession of a non-existent nation invented by a racist employers’ party. There is no logic in this. Except that of adaptation to the leghisti moods of a significant part of the northern proletariat of the time. The theory of the “spontaneous socialist consciousness” of the class removed the contrast of its reactionary prejudices. The paradox is that in parallel, the cited text by Woods and Grant (Marxism and the National Question) recognized en passant that “the demand of the Northern League in Italy for the right to split off to form a separate state clearly has a reactionary character.” But the fact that he has been silent about the opposite position of his Italian section, which is objectively abnormal, gives the measure of a nonchalant empiricism that leaves it to each section to adapt to the pressures at home. The exact opposite of the international ideological rigor that the IMT claims.

The new myth of imminent world revolution

The death of one myth makes another. Beginning in 2008, the great international capitalist crisis marked a turning point for the IMT and its narrative. The chavista mythology has been replaced by the theory of the imminence of revolution as an effect of capitalist catastrophe. It is the thesis of the progressive radicalization of the world proletariat and youth as a result of the crisis of capital. An ideological mixture that is not new in the history of the workers’ movement and the debate among revolutionaries, replacing the Marxist analysis of complexity with a profoundly false impressionistic scheme.

First, the IMT tends to overemphasize the depth of the economic crisis of world capitalism. To be sure, the 2007-2009 crisis was the deepest crisis in the international capitalist economy since the 1930s, according to some indicators, the worst since 1982 according to others. But the enormous development of China’s capitalist power, if it deepened inter-imperialist contradictions, bringing them to a new historical level, also economically cushioned the capitalist crisis in the West. The next ten years saw a recovery of the world economy. In 2020, the cyclone of the Covid epidemic, intersecting with the exhaustion of economic recovery, again plunged the world economy into an international recession more concentrated and extensive than that of 2008 (with a 3.4 percent decline in world GDP compared to the 1.3 percent decline in 2009). But enormous Keynesian intervention by states and central banks — on the one hand, with deficit spending, on the other hand, with lower interest rates — quickly initiated a turnaround, bringing the world economy in 2022 to pre-pandemic levels. Of course, the recovery dragged in new contradictions, such as the gigantic expansion of public debt and rising inflation, which in turn triggered a restrictive monetary turn by central banks (with the general raising of interest rates) and consequently new impulses for stagnation. But if we look at the overall dynamics of the capitalist crisis as it unfolded, we see a sine wave curve, not a flat diagram, much less a linear vertical fall. More importantly, we see the ability of the ruling classes to maneuver, in spite of everything.

The IMT, conversely, theorized a catastrophic crisis of last resort for capitalism. The text of the IMT’s international leadership of September 12-13, 2020 (A World on the brink: revolution looming) is in this regard emblematic in its rhetorical representations. “The Bank of England has said this will be the deepest crisis for 300 years, but even this is insufficient. In reality, the situation we are experiencing is unique,” while “the economy has suffered a crisis that is far worse, and has taken a grip far faster, than in the 1930s.” Economist Nouriel Roubini’s comments are taken at face value: “The contraction that is now underway looks to be neither V- nor U- nor L-shaped (a sharp downturn followed by stagnation). Rather, it looks like an I: a vertical line representing financial markets and the real economy plummeting..” And again, “we are heading for a deep depression,” the chances of economic recovery are “an illusion.” Consequently, the reaction of the bourgeoisie to the pandemic is one of “blind panic,” its press is “close to despair.” And so on.

This apocalyptic depiction has nothing Marxist about it. And especially nothing to do with reality. One only has to read the data on the world economy in 2022, with strong global GDP growth, to pulverize the IMT’s predictions. Rather, the arguments used are reminiscent of Bukharin’s arguments about the “final crisis of capitalism” (1921), or, at a different level, the similar arguments of the Stalinist “third period” of the Comintern between 1929 and 1933. In both cases, Trotsky properly flogged them not only on merit but on method. By educating revolutionary Marxists to avoid consolatory and grotesque optimism about the crisis of the enemy, not to confuse a general crisis with its linear precipitation, and to understand the extraordinary resilience of capitalism to its own crises. Which is decisive in rationalizing the complexity of revolutionary politics and its tasks. If this was true after the Bolshevik revolution, all the more so in the current historical context.

Capitalist crisis and mass radicalization

But the central distortion of the IMT lies not only or primarily in the catastrophic portrayal of the economic crisis of capital, but also in the alleged connection between capitalist crisis and mass radicalization. Here, too, caricatured tones and representations of reality are squandered.

Naturally, there is no doubt that the capitalist crisis after 2008, in its ups and downs, has propelled vast processes of social polarization around the world. These have also included, repeatedly, prerevolutionary or overtly revolutionary crises. Such have been, on different planes and in different forms, the Arab revolutions of 2010-2011, the rise of the mass movement in Greece of 2012-2015, the recurrent social explosions that occurred in Chile, Ecuador, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria in 2018-2019, the revolutionary crisis in Colombia in 2021 and Sri Lanka in 2022, the great mass movement of predominantly women in Iran in 2022. A number of imperialist countries have also gone through major mobilization dynamics, such as the extraordinary Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., or the repeated mass struggles that ran through France from 2018-2023. To fail to see the revolutionary potential related to the crisis would be to fail to see the reality.

But to see only the revolutionary potentials is to confuse reality with one’s own desires. The same social crisis, which in a given political context may fuel mass radicalization, may in a different context propel opposite dynamics. More precisely, reactionary dynamics. Reactionary dynamics often propelled either by the defeat of previous risings, through the political responsibility of their leaderships, or by the ebb of the workers’ movement.

The truth is that the figure of the world today is neither revolution nor reaction, but their combination and alternation within a framework of heightened international political instability. Trotsky himself, moreover, in controversy with Stalinist “third period” views, had made it clear that there is no mechanical relationship between capitalist crisis and mass radicalization:

It speaks of the radicalization of the masses as a continuous process. … Such a mechanical idea does not correspond with the real process of development of the proletariat and of capitalist society as a whole. … The risings of the class struggle are followed by its tailings, the flood-tides by the ebbs, depending upon complicated combinations of material and ideological conditions, internal and international … The characteristic of our epoch is the especially sharp changes of different periods, the extraordinary abrupt turns in the situation… (Trotsky, The “Third Period”
of the Comintern’s Mistakes, 1929)

The IMT tends, instead, to see the world only with the color of revolution. What is more, with that of the “imminent revolution,” as it was phrased, with some imprudence, in 2020. Thus, while erasing from its view the ebbs of struggle and the reactionary drifts, the IMT emphasized to a grotesque degree the actual processes of radicalization. For example, the very important mass movement of the BLM in the U.S. became “an insurrectionary movement,” “engulfing one US city after another,” “a kind of dress rehearsal for the American revolution,” “a developing revolutionary situation,” “almost like a civil war on the streets.” In Lebanon, the resurgence of mobilization, then ebbed, in 2019, became “a colossal upsurge in the revolution, with all sections of the working class uniting in struggle.” For Latin America, “enormously encouraged by developments in the United States,” “a new social explosion is being prepared,” i.e., the American revolution on the march. For China, “a future explosion of the class struggle in China” was predicted, despite the crushing of the movement in Hong Kong. For Italy (to which we will return), “an explosion of the class struggle such as has not been seen since the 1970s” was announced, with “serious implications for the whole of Europe.”

To ward off any room for doubt, this emphatic representation is global and uniform:

But now we see revolutionary movements everywhere: from France to Lebanon, from Belarus to Thailand, from the USA to Chile. In other words, we already see the outlines of world revolution. … Up until recently, globalisation served to impel the development of capitalism to new heights. Now the same thing will serve to spread revolution on a world scale. (IMT, A world on the brink: revolution looming, 2020)

These are all quotes extracted, among many others, not from some agitational pamphlet, but from the resolutions of the IMT’s international leadership of September 12-13, 2020.

It would be easy to observe that the “imminent revolution” announced in 2020 has not found the comfort of facts. But the point is the method. An emphatic reading of reality, without relation to reality, is the negation of the Marxist method. It serves perhaps to artificially feed an enthusiastic imaginary with which to feed and fence one’s organization. It certainly does not help revolutionary politics, nor the credibility of one’s reference to Trotskyism.

Mass radicalization and revolutionary consciousness

The myth of imminent revolution is wedded, in the IMT’s approach, to the theory of the parallel development of the political consciousness of the proletariat. The advance of revolution in the world would develop the consciousness of the masses in a revolutionary sense, particularly the consciousness of the youth. It is then a matter of giving political leadership and program to this emerging revolutionary consciousness. All of the IMT’s current rhetoric is ultimately summed up in this concept. It is the intersection of Woods’s polemic against Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and the new vision of catastrophist optimism.

Unfortunately, here too, Marxism is replaced with an ideological schema that is foreign to it. Of course, it is true that the capitalist crisis since 2008 has weakened the ideological hegemony of traditional bourgeois parties and old governmental formulas. The liberal-neoliberal emphasis of the 1990s around the progressive fortunes of capitalism has long been a distant memory. The social dissatisfaction of the subaltern classes has unquestionably broadened. A critical sense toward constituted power and the logic of profit has spread to broad proletarian and working-class sectors. But it is by no means certain that this crisis of the old bourgeois ideological forms will, in itself, propel the political consciousness of the class forward. Much less does it, in itself, propel consciousness in the direction of revolution. Vast sectors of the industrial proletariat, particularly in imperialist countries, have repeatedly translated their social dissatisfaction into adherence to reactionary proposals of various kinds (as in the U.S., France, Italy). Not only have they not landed on socialist anti-capitalism, but in some cases they have even gone backwards from their own trade-unionist tradition: where the opposition between worker and master has been replaced by that between people and politicians or, worse, between nation and migrants. Conversely, processes of mass radicalization in several countries have found political expression in the reemergence of old reformist illusions, as in Syriza, or Podemos, or Sanders, whose inevitable disappointment has generated ebb or even reactionary retreat. The case of Chile is paradigmatic: the great social explosion of 2019 that toppled the Piñera regime and paved the way for Boric quickly ebbed in little more than a year to the benefit of a rightwing or far-right majority with clear Pinochetist strands. In other cases, impressive mass revolutions, such as those that toppled Ben Ali and Mubarak, coexisted with an extremely backward political consciousness, easy prey, during the ebb, to a reactionary (fundamentalist or military) recovery.

All this dynamic tells us not only about political instability, but also about the contradictory relationship between class struggle and consciousness, even between revolution and consciousness. Above all, it brings us back to an underlying fact that transcends political contingency and which the IMT totally removes: the historical retreat of political class-consciousness on the world stage over the past century, due first to social democracy and Stalinism, then to the rightward collapse of the Soviet Union, and finally to the widespread liberal drift of the old parties of the workers’ movement. The progressive overlapping of these factors dissolved in the imagination of the majority of the working class the reference to socialism and often the class-struggle vocabulary, even in their deformed version, prompting a profound regression.

This regression, of course, by no means prevents possible processes of mass radicalization or even revolutionary explosions, normally propelled by need and not by consciousness. But it certainly measures the crisis of the subjective factor in its full extent. And thus it measures the need to overcome this crisis, starting with the construction of vanguard revolutionary parties, targetting the backward development of consciousness. Of the mass and, first of all, of its vanguard.

The historical space for building such parties not only exists, but in a sense has expanded. While the collapse of Stalinism itself has been capitalized predominantly on the right, it has removed a historical obstacle on the ground of the possible development of Trotskyism, particularly in the vanguard of the young generation. But on the sole condition of understanding the complexity of the enterprise. And therefore, first of all, to work on the unitary regrouping, in every country and on a world scale, of all the forces that identify with the principles and program of revolutionary Marxism, outside all self-preserving logic. This is the theme of the construction of the Revolutionary International. It is the method by which Lenin pursued the construction of the Third International, starting with the revolutionary regroupment of the Zimmerwald left. It is the method by which Trotsky worked on the construction of the International Left Opposition and then the Fourth International, starting with the regroupment around a strict line of programmatic demarcation of forces and tendencies of different location and origin. Against centrist opportunism and against sectarian self-sufficiency.

The IMT’s sectarian self-sufficiency

The IMT removes this issue at the root, replacing it with an elementary schematic: free-fall crisis of capitalism, therefore mass radicalization, therefore… the IMT’s impetuous advance. Blessed are the simple, one might say. Actually, it is the theorized renunciation of serious party-building work, covered by literary frescoes:

Capitalism today resembles a monster that is dying on its feet, terminally sick, decrepit and decaying. But it refuses to die. And the consequences for humanity for this prolongation are frightful in the extreme. However, that is only one side of the picture. Beneath the symptoms of terminal decay, a new society is struggling to be born. …the masses are desperately seeking to find a way out of the crisis. They are ready to take the revolutionary road, but they lack a clear programme and perspective for the way forward. … The masses are being forced at last to face reality. … But that can only come about through the most powerful social and economic catastrophes… (A world on the brink)

The mass radicalization that began in 2008 would see a second wave today:

The first wave of radicalisation that followed the collapse of 2008 brought to the front what you might call the left reformists… The hopes of the masses were raised to the heights — only to be dashed. (Alan Woods, Are you a communist? editorial for In Defense of Marxism, No. 43, 2023)

Woods refers to Tsipras (Syriza) and Iglesias (Podemos) in Greece and Spain, Sanders and Corbyn in the US and Britain. But now the second wave of radicalization takes over, where reformism’s disillusioned turn left, preparing “the way for the rise of a genuine communist trend.”

We see clear evidence of this in many countries, including the United States. … As a result, many of the most advanced youth no longer wish to be associated even with the word ‘socialism’, which they identify with cowardly capitulation to the present system. They are seeking a clean banner and clear and unambiguous dedication to the class war and social revolution. They want communism, and nothing else will do! (Are you a communist?)

The whole international campaign Are you a communist? Then get organized! is based on this bombastic rhetoric, which confuses partial (and important) elements of new critical sensitivity to the existing order present in youth sectors with a general communist demand emerging in the world’s youth, which would seek reference in the IMT. Marxist analysis of reality is replaced by its propagandistic caricature. It is worth noting an opportunistic implication of this ecstatic vision. Since the transition to the revolutionary camp of the disappointed left reformists would be underway, the IMT recommends not to disturb it by denouncing the reformist leaders:

The opportunists make no criticism of the Lefts and become in effect a kind of fan club. At the other extreme, the mindless sectarians who think they are great revolutionaries because they have read a few lines of Trotsky, without understanding a single word, declare loudly that this or that left leader will betray. There is no room in the ranks of the IMT for either of those deviations. It is hard to say which of the two does more harm to the cause of genuine Marxism. (A world on the brink)

In other words, there is no need to predict and denounce betrayals, because that is already being taken care of by experience and the ongoing radicalization. As if predicting and denouncing bureaucratic betrayals were not decisive in developing the consciousness of the masses and fostering the revolutionary maturation of the vanguard.

Emphatic and messianic tones. The political psychology of a self-preserving organization

If the IMT’s central role is not to oppose the reformist leaderships, but to stand at the head of the emerging communist demand in the youth, emphatic and even messianic tones inevitably follow:

In the seventeenth century in England, the first bourgeois revolution was fought out under the banner of religion. Puritans believed the end of the world was approaching, and that the kingdom of God was at hand. They believed this was inevitable.

The Calvinists believed fervently in predestination. Everything was preordained by the will of God… But this conviction did not in any sense reduce their revolutionary fervour…

On the contrary, it spurred them on to great feats of revolutionary bravery and audacity. Exactly the same task faces revolutionaries today. And we will approach it with exactly the same spirit of revolutionary determination. The difference is that, unlike them, we will be armed with the scientific theories of revolutionary Marxism. (A world on the brink)

The “Calvinist” determination would in turn propel the overwhelming development of the IMT, which would go from victory to victory:

The IMT is making steady progress. This is acknowledged by our friends and our enemies alike. Our recent World School showed that our ideas are already reaching thousands of the most advanced workers and youth who are looking for the revolutionary road.

That was a huge step forward, but it is only the beginning. The thousands will be transformed into tens of thousands, and will ultimately enable us to reach millions. It is not at all the same thing to enter a new stage of the world revolution with a group of 20 as with an organisation of a thousand. That is quite a difficult task, but an unavoidable one.

The hardest task is to pass from the first small handful to the first hundred. From the first hundred to the first thousand is also not simple, but it is far easier. But to pass from a thousand to ten thousand is easier still. And to pass from ten thousand to a hundred thousand is only one step.

To borrow a phrase from physics, we need to reach the critical mass — that point where the IMT can really enter as a decisive factor in the situation. Above all, we must pay attention to the education of the cadres. We start with quality, which at a certain point becomes transformed into quantity, which, in turn, becomes quality.

That is the task before us. Only by achieving it will it be possible to put an end to the nightmare of capitalism, and open the way to a new and better world under socialism. (A world on the brink)

This is the conclusion of the IMT’s 2020 text A world on the brink. We do not know whether the announced geometric progression of IMT forces in the four years following the “imminent revolution” has been realized. We have some doubt about that, not having faith at hand. But the point is of political significance. The IMT sees its own development as the natural outcome of the coming world revolution, and it nominates itself as the political leadership of the revolution. The issue of the revolutionary party, in each country and on a world scale, would be resolved through the IMT’s self-preservation and self-development. The process of building or rebuilding the Revolutionary International, in all its complexity, is simply removed by the simple fact that it would already be in the process of being resolved. The IMT would in fact be elevated by the crest of the wave of the coming revolution and the communist demand of the youth.

The very announcement of the launching of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), formulated in February 2024 and planned for the summer of 2024 (to which we will return in a forthcoming specific intervention), is nothing but the self-proclamation of the IMT, in an even more bombastic rhetorical package. Confirming its totally self-centered logic.

Sectarian self-sufficiency is the hallmark of the IMT. “You shall have no God but me” is the school in which its cadres and the collective psychology of the organization itself are trained. The IMT is the international “Marxist trend” (we have actually seen with what political and programmatic distortions). Their founders and leaders, Grant and Woods, are the heirs of Marx, of Lenin, of Trotsky. Their history and experience are the history of Trotskyism. The other organizations of the Trotskyist movement, national and international, (altogether several tens of thousands of revolutionary militants around the world) are considered indistinctly “the myriad of sects that swarm around the periphery of the labour movement,” marked by “defeatism, scepticism and demoralisation” (Alan Woods, (Are you a communist?), because they are incapable of understanding the coming world revolution. Or in any case, because they are alien to IMT history or have broken from it.

This is the case with major revolutionary organizations around the world. It is the case of the Russian Revolutionary Workers Party, the main Trotskyist formation in Russia, which broke with Alan Woods in recent times. It is the case of the new NPA in France, recently born out of a break with the Pabloite line of the old organization, endowed with an important presence among the youth and in the trade unions. This is particularly the case with the organizations of Argentine revolutionary Marxism, now gathered in the FIT-U, which organize a total of 6000-7000 Trotskyist militants in Argentina alone, lead mass struggles, and have a parliamentary presence resulting from a consensus of 800,000 voters. These are all organizations with which the PCL and the International Trotskyist Opposition seek confrontation and pursue regroupment. For the IMT, none of this exists. Worse, it is a heap of sects, unworthy of attention. What is more, in countries where, we repeat, the IMT is absent or very marginal, in any case irrelevant.

The political psychology of a cult is very demanding. It demands the rejection of any serious comparison with other organizations and trends. It demands the absence of critical balances that might call into question the infallibility of leaders by damaging their sanctity. It demands the absence of real internal confrontation of positions (complete with the right of tendency): it is no coincidence that all IMT resolutions, including congressional ones, are always taken unanimously and as such publicly presented. Nor, moreover, is it possible to have documentation of any discussion and confrontation of positions within the IMT and/or its sections, as democratic centralism and the tradition of Bolshevism would have it. These are not marginal remarks. They are a reflection of the political nature of an organization.

FalceMartello and SCR, the Italian tracing of the IMT

The Italian section of the IMT, yesterday FalceMartello (FM), today Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione (SCR), was and is a tracing of its British section. In its history, in its political approach, in its nature.

The parabola of strategic entrism has been followed for decades. First into the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), then even into the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), finally into the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC). In each of these contexts, the approach was never the accumulation of forces in the perspective of split, but the preservation of a sine die propaganda space for “Marxist ideas.” Such was the case during its long tenure in Rifondazione Comunista.

The difference in method with our approach to entrism in the PRC was immediately evident. The Associazione Marxista Rivoluzionaria — AMR Proposta (later Progetto Comunista), forerunner of the future PCL — from the outset conceived of entry into the PRC as a function of a policy of revolutionary regroupment. From its inception, the entry was to take part in a process of political recomposition of the Italian workers’ movement, propelled by the dissolution of the PCI, then the collapse of international Stalinism. Its aim was to gather and train, on Marxist bases, the best part of the forces that the PRC had polarized, in the perspective of building an independent revolutionary party, that is, an inevitable rupture.

The rupture in turn would require two conditions: the development in the PRC of a revolutionary Marxist organization-faction for the purpose (subjective factor) and the maturation of the political contextual conditions that would make the choice of rupture comprehensible (objective factor). From the late 1990s, we rationalized the perspective in precise terms: we would break with the PRC the moment that party entered a bourgeois center-left government, a central goal of its leadership group from the beginning. Because that event, on the one hand, would have represented the consummation of a class betrayal, and on the other, it would have freed a recognizable political space on the left. We conceived the shift of Progetto Comunista from a congressional area in the PRC to a programmatic and organizational area in function of that perspective. It was the method of Trotskyism, the revolutionary conception of entrism.

The strategic entrism of FalceMartello in Rifondazione

FalceMartello followed a completely different logic. In the wake of the strategic entrism into the PCI, it remained in the PDS after the Bolognina turn, not understanding the dynamics of recomposition around Rifondazione Comunista of a large sector of the vanguard of the workers’ movement. It took more than two years, with the PRC’s electoral breakthrough in Milan and Turin and its relative overtaking of the PDS, for Grant and Woods to dictate to FalceMartello a change of location. But joining the PRC was conceived as simply a change of house to which they could move their stuff, with no strategic perspective. All the more so with no prospect of rupture. Voting for the congressional documents of the opposition within the party, led by our organization, was a simple act of positioning. When Progetto Comunista changed from a congressional area to an organization, by a decision of a national assembly of delegates, the comrades of FalceMartello decided to abstain in order to mark their reservation. The reservation had a precise meaning: the refusal to even consider the prospect of breaking with the PRC.

The demarcation of FalceMartello from Progetto Comunista also involved substantive positions. Progetto Comunista understood the liberal mutation of the DS, driven by the long center-left legislature (1996-2001) and the multiplication of its material relations with the big bourgeoisie, which, moreover, had assumed precisely the center-left as its representation in the Second Republic. FM, on the contrary, continued to theorize as if nothing had happened about the “working-class” nature of the DS. Progetto Comunista countered the bloc with the DS and other bourgeois forces, pursued by Bertinotti, with the need for an autonomous class pole, of which the PRC was the pivot and catalyst. FM, on the contrary, developed the proposal of a “united front” between PRC and DS as a translation of class unity. Progetto Comunista made the battle against the PRC’s governmentalist perspective the axis of regrouping internal opposition, combined with its revolutionary Marxist qualification. FM advanced the proposal of a PRC-DS government as a “workers’ government,” in open polemic against our anti-governmentalist bias.

This progressive differentiation spanned the crucial years of Bertinotti’s parabola. At the V Congress of the party (2002), FM presented a set of amendments to the congressional text of Progetto Comunista, which in fact configured another overall position. At the VI Congress in Venice (2005), focused on the impending turn in government, FM presented its own separate congress document. It was not only a substantive choice on the political positions of our text. It was first and foremost a choice to demarcate itself from a perspective of rupture with the PRC on the very eve of its turn.

The rift between Progetto Comunista and FM came, not coincidentally, at the moment of the PRC’s entry into government. We immediately denounced the nature of the operation from a class point of view: the PRC was going from being the “heart of the opposition” (so said the PRC’s first slogans and election manifestos in 1992), albeit on a reformist program, to a component of the capitalist government of the seventh imperialist power in the world. Against this relocation, we demanded the immediate convening of the party’s extraordinary Congress. We denounced the betrayal of the social and political reasons for the party and the movements of struggle. We denounced the capitalist nature of Romano Prodi’s program, on which the Union between the Ulivo and the PRC was realized:

Not an “ambiguous” or “deficient” or “insufficient” program, as the critical leaders of Ernesto and Erre insist on considering it. But the program of the industrialists and bankers. Not an “inadequate” program for the alternative, but the program of Italian capitalism against the workers and movements of struggle of recent years. (Marco Ferrando, editorial in Progetto Comunista, February 2006)

Finally, we declared that:

As for us in the Progetto Comunista, we demand that a democratic debate be developed among the membership on this further slide to the right of the party, with a delegate conference. If this does not happen and entry into the confindustrial government is realized, consistent with what we have been saying for a long time, namely that “no bourgeois government will be deprived of a class and communist opposition,” we will draw the consequences and open among all critical militants in the party, from whatever congressional background and even among those on the left outside the PRC, the prospect of building a new class and communist political force. (Franco Grisolia, summary speech at the PRC CPN, April 22-23, 2006)

It was an honest and public announcement of the reasons for the split. An open assumption of responsibility. FM opposed the choice head-on:

The PRC’s difficulties cannot be responded to with split adventures … by turning one’s back on a party that was nonetheless invested with so many hopes for change (Sergio Dalmasso, Rifondazione Comunista — Dal movimento dei movimenti alla chiusura di “Liberazione”, storia di un partito nella crisi della sinistra italiana)

The fact that hopes for change were being betrayed in the name of bourgeois ministries and a House presidency was deemed irrelevant. The important thing was to preserve, at any cost, one’s strategic entrism in the PRC. As the British school dictated.

Staying in the PRC during the Prodi years and after its collapse. Support for former minister Ferrero in 2008

In the two years of the Prodi government’s social butchery with the involvement of Minister Paolo Ferrero (including the vote for war missions and the biggest tax breaks for the profits of big banks and corporations), FM maintained its role in the PRC’s leading bodies. In the CPN convened to support keeping Italian troops in Afghanistan (June 17-18, 2006), FM’s critical document took two percent of the vote. In the National Directorate convened on the same issue (July 17), only one vote. In exchange for witnessing critical marginality, the choice to remain in the PRC ended up covering the PRC from the left, at the moment of its maximum compromise with the bourgeoisie, against the birth of the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (PCL). The choice of remaining within the PRC was maintained a year later, even after the separation of Sinistra Critica (Pabloite, now Sinistra Anticapitalista), following Turigliatto’s expulsion.

After two years of governmental compromise (2006-2008), the PRC emerged with broken bones, starting with the loss of more than three million votes. As the reference party of the broad vanguard of movements, Rifondazione Comunista had collapsed, as was predictable and as Progetto Comunista had predicted. The fact that the PRC’s compromise and collapse occurred mainly in a passive form, in the direction of abandonment and disintegration, certainly complicated the construction of the PCL. But, surely, the collapse of Rifondazione has affected the Italian workers’ movement and the very credibility of the political left in Italy, opening the door to mass passivity and reactionary populism. All this on the eve of the great capitalist crisis of 2008.

Nevertheless, FM not only remained in the PRC but organically joined the party’s new ruling majority led by former minister Paolo Ferrero, the one most responsible and coresponsible for the PRC’s destructive compromise around Prodi’s anti-worker policies. Instead of confronting Ferrero with his responsibilities and the disastrous record of his policies, FM endorsed his transformist conversion by voting for him as the party’s new secretary. The quid pro quo for capitulation was FM’s entry into the PRC secretariat at the Chianciano Congress (2008).

When the Vendolian right wing of the party activated its separation to give birth to Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, FM presented the event as evidence of an unlikely “turn to the left” by Ferrero. In reality, the only real turn was the PRC’s forced relegation to the opposition, with no real balance sheet and no change of perspective. In fact, Ferrero’s rhetoric of the “social party” and its early actions (selling basic necessities at low prices through participation in solidarity purchasing groups and promoting social initiatives) covered the PRC’s search for a revival as a negotiating subject of a possible new center-left. Hence, on the occasion of the European elections (2009), the birth of a new electoral political cartel between the PRC, Diliberto’s PdCI, Cesare Salvi’s Socialismo 2000 of DS origin, and other minor parties (Consumatori Uniti). An aggregation with the old center-left governmental left to try (in vain) to gain 4 percent and get back into the game of broader alliances. Not coincidentally, moreover, the PRC continued to support local bourgeois center-left juntas.

FM, in the majority, effectively covered the “new” course. Only to be dumped by Ferrero in the name of recomposition with the internal right of Vendolian origin (September 2009) and the announced launching of the Federation of the Left with Diliberto and Salvi. A Federation whose first proposal would be a recomposition of the electoral alliance with Bersani’s “new” PD, and with Antonio Di Pietro… So much for a “turn to the left.” All the false rhetoric of Chianciano had vanished like snow in the sun. FM found itself out of the national secretariat after coresponsibility for more than a year (and what a year!) in support of a former minister, in a collapsed party.

FM would remain in the PRC in the following years until 2016, participating in the 2011 and 2013 congresses with its own alternative documents, under the banner of “Left, Class, Revolution.” The exit in 2016 was presented as the result of the exhaustion of the reason for Rifondazione as an instrument for building a class party, without a single line of assessment of its own support for Ferrero in 2008 (Our exit from Rifondazione Comunista, Jan. 8, 2016). The truth is that the collapse of the PRC had deprived strategic entrism of its residual space, demonstrating the failure of an approach. See in this regard what the PCL wrote at the time, commenting on FalceMartello’s statement (On FalceMartello’s exit from Rifondazione Comunista. Neither a balance sheet nor a perspective, January 14, 2016).

SCR at Sea. The myth of the impending social explosion in Italy

At the same time, SCR had tuned in to the IMT’s new post-2008 narrative about the imminence of world revolution. SCR’s own exit from the PRC, with the unprecedented experience of sailing the high seas, was partly influenced by the new suggestion. Certainly, the latter affected the organization’s political postures in various forms. Both on the analysis of the Italian scenario and on SCR’s choices.

On the level of analysis, SCR removed for a decade the central element of the Italian scenario: the depth and duration of the ebb of the workers’ movement, with no points of comparison among imperialist countries. An ebb that began, not surprisingly, with the traumatic experience of the Prodi government and unfolded in a non-straightforward form over the following decade.

The eruption of the international capitalist crisis not only did not propel the mass radicalization of the Italian working class but, intersecting with a descending political parabola, ended up fueling the latter, as Trotsky’s dialectical method (as opposed to the IMT’s) allowed us to understand. Hence, the rapid propagation among wage-earners of various forms of reactionary populism (Grilloism, Salvinism, Melonism), all relatively unstable, but in succession with each other. This in turn aggravated the marginality of a political left that had already collapsed with Prodi and which in vain sought a way out by tuning in to populist and non-class moods (see the endless sequence of civic operations with the Di Pietro, the Ingroia, the De Magistris), thus ending up contributing to them.

Naturally, this negative situation is not stabilized sine die. As we have always said, openly countering all catastrophist pessimism, the Italian situation remains exposed to the possibility of abrupt turns, all framed in the world instability. A revolutionary organization must always be ready to register and intercept them. But under the condition of starting from the understanding the reality, that is, with the method of Marxist analysis.

The SCR leadership group has done the opposite. Its basic thesis, in accordance with the IMT texts, was and is that the capitalist crisis drives the “inevitable” radicalization of the Italian working class. Every element of reality was traced back to this preconstituted ideological scheme.

The explosion of the 5 Star Movement among wage earners between 2012 and 2018 was read, not as a passive reflection of the ebb, but as an expression of class radicalization. With some grotesque misfortunes. At a time when the first M5S was being colored with populist-reactionary hues, fortunately passive, against the very existence of unions and parties (in the name of “one is worth one” ideology), SCR called on the M5S to move from words to deeds by convening “people’s assemblies” to overthrow the government:

But what about the Five Stars? What are the various Grillo, Di Maio, Di Battista, etc., waiting for to appeal to the squares? To organize assemblies, protests, demonstrations? The M5S has the following of millions of voters, if it called them to active mobilization to oust the government and demand elections, the response would be huge. (editorial in Revolution No. 27, Feb. 1, 2017)

In fact, a call for reactionary populism in the name of the people. The exact opposite of Marxist politics. Renzi’s defeat in the 2016 institutional referendum, obviously important and positive in itself, but an expression of a summation of cross-party, even populist, moods, was hailed as evidence of mass radicalization and imminent explosion. Totally erased was the fact that after the mass strike against the Good Schools law and the struggles against the Jobs Act, there was no other real crest of participatory and recognizable general confrontation. The social explosion was either in the making or was always and in any case on the threshold, as indeed the IMT claimed. If the facts did not agree with the theory, so much the worse for the facts.

Another implication of the rising theory was the prediction of a “new labor party” on the initiative of Maurizio Landini. Landini’s maneuvers to climb the CGIL Secretariat, including his political postures on the need for a “Social Coalition” (2015), were actually interpreted as the preparation of a new mass party of the working class, with Landini at its head, imposed by the irrepressible pressure of struggles. Hence, a critical SCR endorsement of Landini and a plea to avoid polemical excesses against him, even by the opposition within the CGIL. An opportunist posture. For it would be and is one thing to demand, as the PCL does today, a party of the working class on the basis of an anti-capitalist program as a weapon of struggle against the politics of the union bureaucracy (which thinks nothing of this prospect). It is another to support the bureaucracy by attributing to it the will to express the political representation of the class under overwhelming class pressure. A prediction, moreover, resoundingly belied by the facts.

Even the Revolutionary Left experience in 2018 — an electoral bloc between the PCL and SCR — was conceived by SCR with distorted lenses. For the PCL, it was a choice imposed by an electoral law that, in the given conditions, prevented the independent presentation of our party. We knew that the PCL’s failure to present itself with its own recognizable symbol would have a negative impact on the outcome. And above all, we were aware of the general context of retreat in the class struggle that made the electoral presence of revolutionary Marxists as important as it was inaccessible and against the current. Instead, SCR was acting on the thesis of the mass radicalization of the youth of the world, and therefore also of Italy. The unprecedented participation in the elections was intended to put itself in the wake of this great flux. In the election campaign, Claudio Bellotti, SCR’s leader, avoided any controversy with the other competing leftist lists precisely in the name of direct interlocution with the great demand for a breakthrough by the youth. Faced with the precise question in the concluding Electoral Tribune, “What distinguishes you from other leftist lists?”, the answer was “I am not here to make polemics on the left.” With the effect of damaging, in an already unequal situation, the recognizability of the reasons for a revolutionary list. When the bad result (worse, in truth, than our already modest predictions) belied the radicalization thesis, SCR’s reaction was to deny the evidence, extolling the result itself (0.08%) and its own organization’s election campaign.

The impending revolution and “March Days” in the CGIL

The ideological exaltation of the “imminent uprising” also had other repercussions on important SCR choices. The split of the CGIL minority and the establishment of its own party organization in the CGIL (“The March Days”) in 2020 was one of them. In March 2020, at the time of the dramatic Covid explosion, there were spontaneous strikes in several factories in the North to demand job security against the bosses’ demands. This was an important episode, precisely because it ran counter to the dynamics of passivization, which moreover led union bureaucracies to sign an agreement (scam) with the Conte government to calm things down. It was certainly a matter of valorizing the episode, of pointing out its potential, of making it a ground for confrontation with the politics of the bureaucracy by denouncing its responsibilities. But without losing sight of the overall context.

SCR, on the other hand, saw in what it called the “March Days” the unmistakable sign of the great explosion so long announced, the reflection in Italy of the world dynamic: “a mobilization that had a clear global character unprecedented in history.” The theses approved at the third national conference of SCR workers (“From the March Days to the mobilizations of the future,” July 5, 2020) leave no room for doubt. Strikes become “a disruptive and general class thrust that … compacts within a few days if not a few hours,” “a fundamental breaking point” that swept away “the last 10 years of union apathy” (the one SCR had always denied), “to see again a generalization of spontaneous strikes one has to go back as far as 1992/93,” “a growth in consciousness of the role that [workers] occupy in society,” “a phenomenon that has generalized worldwide.”

More importantly, the social explosion would have revealed:

The complete inability [of union leaders] to control the class. Today’s union apparatus is not the one of the late 1970s, which went to the factories to defend the politics of sacrifice. On the contrary, as soon as something moves, they are forced to get behind it… Already by this summer and even more so by the fall, we will see the explosion of spontaneous and self-organized mobilizations. The union leadership will not be able to oppose this wave of struggles, they do not have sufficient authority to restrain the workers, we are no longer in 2009-2012 when the working class was stunned by the impressiveness of the crisis, that experience has already been made, and today we have entered a completely different phase. (“From the March Days to the mobilizations of the future,” July 5, 2020)

From this fresco, the political conclusion. If mass radicalism is exploding, if trade union bureaucracies, far from controlling it, are forced to move in tow, it is necessary to set up on one’s own in the CGIL, namely to build one’s own party current as the natural reference of the coming struggle. Hence, the split of the opposition within the CGIL (at that time, “The union is something else”).

Paradoxically, a split “to the right.” “The Trade Union is Another Thing” — in fact, aligned with its current leadership as “Her Majesty’s Opposition” — was accused of making “pompous statements of high treason on all kinds of issues towards the trade union apparatus and the majority of the CGIL” (an attitude that was “useless and harmful” to SCR) for simply not having “believed in the slightest in the potential of this movement.” of failing to recognize the “decisive evidence of the class struggle.” Hence, the irrevocable prediction of its demise.

Naturally, the facts once again turned out to be different from their apologetic or catastrophic narrative. The announced social explosion has not occurred. The union bureaucracy continues its policy of betrayal. “The March Days” remained an indecipherable title to most. And at the last CGIL congress (2023), the union faction of SCR had to lock horns with those union lefts that were supposed to disappear. But that is not the point. The point is that all of SCR’s choices descend from a reading that is indifferent to the facts and, moreover, removed from any critical review. As the long history of IMT dictates.

A broken record with no memory

After all, the aforementioned IMT document of 2020 (A world on the brink) had presented precisely Italy as “the center of the EU crisis,” marked by “rage and indignation”:

Sudden and sharp changes in consciousness are evident. … The bosses are on the offensive, but union leaders seek a social pact… This contradiction is leading to a rapid loss of authority of the trade union leadership, which prepares the way for even bigger explosions in the coming period. The stage is set for an explosion of the class struggle such as has not been seen since the 1970s. This has serious implications for the whole of Europe. (A world on the brink)

In this framework, Giorgia Meloni’s election victory itself, and the establishment of a post-fascist-led government (September-October 2022), was read by the IMT as:

…a deeply worrying development for the Italian bourgeoisie and imperialism. … The present crisis, with soaring inflation, low wages, high unemployment, together with reactionary policies on questions such as abortion rights, immigration, etc., is a ready-made recipe for an explosion of the class struggle and protests of workers and youth. (IMT, The world in 2023: crisis, war and revolution, 2023)

An eternal broken record, with no memory. Which educates neither the masses nor the vanguards.

In conclusion. The preservation of a cult, the construction of a party

How do SCR and the IMT live with the systematic denial of their own predictions, interpretations, positions? With the rhetoric of their own organization. In Italy, as internationally. With the artificial construction of a self-exalting bubble that each time refers in the future tense to its unfailing triumphs, without ever turning a glance to the previous paragraph of the book. It is the opposite of the Marxist method.

The construction of a revolutionary party is a terribly complex thing. All the more so in a long unfavorable scenario, such as the Italian one. As the PCL, we verify this every day. The same is true internationally. We do not glorify the results of our path of construction. We see all its difficulties. But we can boast of certain characteristics that distinguish us, and that we consider decisive for the future. Loyalty to the program of revolutionary Marxism and readiness to develop it on its own basis. The use of the dialectical method in the analysis of reality, outside of imaginative and distorted schemes. The habit of free and democratic confrontation of positions, as dictated by the tradition of Leninist democratic centralism. The ability to question our limitations. The will to unite revolutionary Marxists on common principles in the same party, nationally and internationally, against opportunist revisionism and sectarian self-conservation. These are not sufficient resources, but they are certainly necessary.

The IMT and SCR are, in every respect, of another school. They are not the solution, but part of the problem. The problem of an international Trotskyist movement marked in its majority either by political-programmatic revisionism, or by sectarian conservation of its own faction, or by a combination of both. The IMT (and by reflection, SCR) represents in the Trotskyist movement only one of many international factions. Its distinctiveness lies in the fact that it combines a centrist revision of Trotskyism, borrowed from a long tradition, with its own total isolation from the rest of the Trotskyist movement, and even its unwillingness to confront other organizations, denounced for half a century as “sects.” These characteristics of an authentic sect do not prevent the IMT from temporary successes, in this or that situation, as, moreover, happened and happens to other trends and organizations in the world, revisionist and/or sectarian, often to a much more significant extent. They certainly prevent it from representing a response to the crisis of the Trotskyist movement.

Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori
February 2024

The IMT and the war in Ukraine

The Ukrainian army is in disarray, being taken hopelessly off guard by the suddenness of the attack. In any case, it was in no position to resist the might of the Russian army. …

Whether these reports are true or false, it is only a matter of time before the Ukrainian capital is in Russian hands. The war will then, to all intents and purposes, be over. …

Whether these reports are true or false, it is only a matter of time before the Ukrainian capital is in Russian hands. The war will then be, for all intents and purposes, over. …

Biden and co. never had the slightest intention of providing military support to Kyiv. …

While it is too early to say that the war is over, nobody can doubt that the Russians will achieve all their declared objectives in a very short time. …

This may provide Putin the basis for setting up a pro-Russian government in Kyiv. …

When Putin says he does not intend to occupy Ukraine, there is no reason to doubt his word. To be more precise, he will not occupy it for a long time. It would be too difficult and very expensive. (Alan Woods, Imperialist hypocrisy and the invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2022)

The Nature of War

The war in Ukraine is an important ground for confrontation in the field of revolutionary Marxism. It is important to grasp, in their intertwining, the two different elements that converge in the war scenario. On the one hand, the element of inter-imperialist framing, marked by the planetary confrontation between old (U.S., EU, Japan) and new (Russia and China) powers vying for the partition of the world. On the other hand, the war between Russian imperialism and Ukraine, marked by Moscow’s aims toward what it considers an old province of the Russian Empire. Those who deny either element are mistaken in both analysis and political position. Those who grasp their connection must define a political positioning that takes on their complexity, and identifies their center of gravity.

Outside the inter-imperialist world framework, the war in Ukraine would be indecipherable. The expansion of NATO after the collapse of the USSR, the desire of Russian imperialism to recover its old area of influence in Europe, the military support of NATO imperialisms for Ukraine, are all elements that combine to compose the framework of the war. But the war is not reducible to these elements. The center of gravity of the war is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and thus the clash between Ukraine and Russia. This is the central battlefield today. NATO imperialisms intervene there, in their own interests, but they do not replace it.

As the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO), we consistently oppose both imperialist poles involved. First and foremost, imperialism at home. That is why we have not participated in the calls to send arms to Ukraine; we denounce the arms race of all imperialisms; we denounce the shameful vote in favor of the military budgets of NATO imperialisms by so-called radical leftists who present themselves as pacifists (as in Spain and Finland); we denounce the designs of NATO and its expansion in Europe (Sweden and Finland) and in the Pacific, opposed to China; we denounce the Western sanctions against Russia, which affect Russian workers and wage earners of the West, moreover providing valuable weapons for Russian chauvinist propaganda; we denounce all the more the hateful Russophobic hysteria in the field of culture and sports, in all its facets.

But in parallel, and first and foremost, we oppose Russian imperialism’s war in Ukraine. A war of invasion that has its specific imperialist reasons. A war that declared from the start the will of the Putin regime to subjugate Ukraine, erase its right to self-determination (a crime that Putin explicitly imputed to Lenin), subordinately annex part of its territory (well beyond Crimea, which is Russian). A war that is being fought on Ukrainian soil, raging with bombings on cities and infrastructure throughout Ukraine, has produced ten million displaced Ukrainians, largely proletarians, in two years.

In this war, we have defended and are defending Ukraine’s right of resistance. So, the right on the Ukrainian side to use the weapons it can get, which today are weapons from NATO. Did NATO give the weapons to Ukraine according to its own imperialist interests? It is obvious. It is the reason why we do not demand to send them, nor do we support the requests to send them. But why would Ukraine not have the right to use such weapons to counter Russian imperialism’s war of invasion? This is the reason why we do not support the boycott of sending arms to Ukraine, while, for example, we support with all our might the boycott of sending arms to the Zionist state. In the one case, as in the other, we defend a right of resistance against imperialist (or Zionist) forces of occupation. In the one case, as in the other, without providing any political support to the resistance leaderships: neither to the pro-Western bourgeois government of Zelensky, nor to the reactionary fundamentalism of Hamas.

On the merits, we demand the withdrawal of the troops of Russian imperialism from the territories occupied after February 24, 2022; we support the right of self-determination of the peoples of the Donbas, which we have defended since 2014 against the reactionary post-Maidan Ukrainian government (even when the “separatist” republics were supported, in its own interests, by Russian imperialism); we support Crimea’s belonging to Russia, against the claims of Ukrainian nationalism.

We add that if Russia withdraws its troops from the occupied and annexed territories, and Ukraine prolongs the war, or if the war turns into a direct military confrontation between Russian imperialism and NATO imperialisms, the nature of the war would change, and, consequently, we would shift to a position of bilateral defeatism.

This is the methodological position Lenin argued toward Serbia in 1914, claiming that if the war was limited to just Austria and Serbia, then the duty of socialists would be to defend the latter. But the war against Serbia being only an infinitesimal part of the great imperialist world war, it was necessary to take a defeatist position on both sides.

This is the method that Lenin and Trotsky stated on countless occasions (as we have documented extensively in our journal Revolutionary Marxism, No. 19). A position that takes as its benchmark the independent reasons of the international working class and oppressed nations. It legitimately exploits every contradiction between imperialisms in the service of these reasons. It always opposes all imperialisms, from a class and internationalist angle.

A “proxy war”?

The IMT has taken a different position on the war in Ukraine, basically one of bilateral defeatism. This is not a scandal in itself. But we consider profoundly mistaken and (as we shall see) contradictory the analysis on which it relies; totally arbitrary the claim to justify its position by referring to Trotsky; particularly puzzling the total absence of the most elementary demand in the face of an imperialist war of invasion: that of the withdrawal of occupation troops from territories conquered after February 24. A demand, mind you, that formally would be due even within the framework of a position of bilateral defeatism that wanted to be minimally consistent. It is proof of the opportunist and equivocal nature of the IMT’s positions on the war.

Let’s start with the analysis. Alan Woods and the IMT leadership have systematically presented the war in Ukraine as a NATO proxy war against Russia “to the last drop of [Ukrainian] blood” (Alan Woods, Imperialist hypocrisy and the invasion of Ukraine, 2022). Not a particularly original representation, which, let it be said in passing, even coincides in the terms used with the current propaganda portrayal of Russian imperialism on its own domestic side. The point is that Alan Woods, on this issue, has repeatedly come into contradiction with himself.

In 2022, at the outset of the invasion, the IMT ruled that “The western imperialist vultures deliberately pushed [the Ukrainians] into a war” (The Ukrainian war: an internationalist class position – IMT Statement, March 1, 2022). This was the outgrowth of the “proxy war” thesis. But on April 8, 2022, a few weeks later, Alan Woods wrote:

Did Putin miscalculate?

…The Ukrainians saw themselves as fighting a defensive war to ‘save their Fatherland’. And defence is always a more tenable option than offence.

Zelensky — going against the advice of the West — did not flee the country, but stayed in Kyiv and called for a national defence, galvanising the resistance of his army and parts of the Ukrainian population. (Alan Woods, The war in Ukraine: fact and fiction, April 8, 2022)

All true. Within hours of the invasion, the West, through Biden, had actually proposed to Zelensky that he abandon the country, because it did not believe in his ability to resist. It was Zelensky who declined the offer. But is this not the most resounding refutation, by Woods’s own admission, of the whole rhetoric of proxy war? Far from commissioning the war, NATO imperialism did not foresee either the February 24 Russian invasion or Ukrainian resistance to the war. The resistance began because it was galvanized, to use Woods’s words, by its government and military staff, which in turn were backed by national sentiment. It was only at that point that NATO imperialisms prepared, in their own self-interest, to support Ukraine militarily: unwilling to concede it to a rival imperialism, and not being able to present themselves to their allies as unreliable defenders on pain of humiliation of their own role as gendarmes on the international stage. Would this be … a proxy war?

And yet, the IMT maintained this characterization. In February 2023, one year after the Russian invasion, Alan Woods wrote:

Washington sees Russia as a threat to its global interests … The placing of a NATO member on Russia’s doorstep was a very clear act of unprovoked aggression and a provocation of the most blatant and brazen kind. Moscow could never accept it. … The most important point is that this is a proxy war between Russia and US imperialism. Russia is not fighting a Ukrainian army but a NATO army … It is the USA that pays the bills and dictates everything that happens. … in the last analysis it is Washington that decides. (Alan Woods, Ukraine’s bloody anniversary: a balance sheet and perspectives, February 24, 2023)

In reality, the concrete events of the war tell us about a different and far more complex reality. It is not Russia, but China, that is the global threat to Washington. Russia is an adversary as an ally of China. One part of U.S. imperialism, the part closest to the Pentagon, fears that the war in Ukraine will strengthen the bloc between Russia and China, benefiting the latter on a global scale. It is no coincidence that the staffs of NATO armies have repeatedly applied the brakes on military aid to Ukraine because they do not want to deplete their arsenals in view of a possible confrontation with China over the Pacific. All the more so, they see like the plague the risk of direct NATO involvement in the military confrontation with Russia in Europe.

To this must be added political problems of consensus on the domestic front of Western imperialisms and the difficult election pending in the US. The overall result was the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive due to the decisive lack of air cover. The idea that NATO is aiming at the prolongation of the war “to the last drop of Ukrainian blood” thus clashes with a different scenario: the same major imperialist diplomacies, which had not foreseen either the Russian invasion or the Ukrainian resistance, have long been working behind the scenes to seek a way out of the conflict. If possible, without losing face. Certainly, without any scruples for Ukrainian goals of recovering territories lost after February 2022. It is the search for a proxy peace. For an imperialist peace.

The creeping political crisis in Ukraine today is not only the effect of the attrition of two years of war on its own territory, with the immense human and material sacrifices that has entailed. It is also the effect of the cynicism of imperialist policy.

As for Ukraine’s entry into NATO as a provocation triggering Putin’s war, this is nonsense. The entry had been announced, in the future tense, in 2008. Such it had remained in 2014. No accession was in sight in 2022. If accession ever happens, it will be the final outcome of the Russian invasion of 2022, certainly not its trigger. The same is true of Ukraine’s entry into the EU, much heralded as much as kept at arm’s length, because of the complicating effects, economic and political, on the EU’s arrangements. Ukraine is not the battering ram of NATO imperialisms in their war against Russia, but the sacrificial victim of their shifting interests and contradictions. This is all the more reason to bring Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion back to the perspective of socialist revolution, on a national and European scale: the only perspective that can liberate it from all imperialist oppression. Not only, first and foremost, from the imperialism that invades it today, but also from the imperialism that supports it as the rope supports the hanged man.

The imperialist motivations for the Russian invasion

The main implication of portraying the war in Ukraine as NATO’s proxy war against Russia is to ignore or downplay the imperialist motivations of the Russian war. Here, too, Woods chases his own contradictions.

On April 8, 2022, Woods asserted that “The initial target [of Russia] was to take control of the capital Kyiv.” (Alan Woods, The war in Ukraine: fact and fiction ), a goal later replaced, in the face of unexpected Ukrainian resistance, by a desire to conquer the southeastern coastal strip and the Donbas as a whole. Correct analysis: Putin had missed the goal of installing his own puppet government in Kyiv and had to fall back on the goal of annexing to Russia “only” four Ukrainian provinces. But is this not in any case its own imperialist reason, and not a defensive retort to the West’s proxy war?”

What is, moreover, striking in Woods’s article is the benevolent and generous portrayal of the characters of the Russian invasion:

…the Russians have shown restraint in order to reduce civilian casualties … It is a well-documented fact that the Ukrainian army routinely places artillery in residential areas next to schools and hospitals… Russian atrocities — real or staged? … alleged Russian atrocities in Bucha… (The war in Ukraine)

Et cetera. Tones and arguments bordering on denialism, of which the pro-Russian propaganda of campist circles is chock-full.

In February 2023, after the first year of the war, Woods deepened this denialist thesis on a more general level:

The notion that he would like to restore the old, reactionary Tsarist Empire is slightly more credible, but is also based on the flimsiest and most stupid assumptions. … The idea that Vladimir Putin’s actions are motivated by some grand design to restore the Tsarist Empire does not correspond in the slightest degree to all that we know about the man. … Russia’s declared aims were still quite moderate… (Ukraine’s bloody anniversary)

But if “Russia’s initial target” was to take Kyiv and the subordinate one to annex a part of Ukraine, as Woods claimed the year before, are these “moderate goals”? Is it not instead a design of restoration, in whole or in part, of old imperial borders, which goes far beyond a simple defensive action of interdiction? The truth is that it was Putin himself who publicly proclaimed to the world the neo-Tsarist historical meaning of the special military operation, when he solemnly stated in his speech on February 22, 2022, that the Ukrainian people, the Belarusian people and their relative independence were an invention of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Hence, the Russian claim that the war is an act of reparation for a historical wrong suffered by Russia “because of the Communists” and of regaining the unity of the Russian people. Hence, the textual vindication of the so-called decommunization of Ukraine, that is, its return in whole or in part to the Russian orbit. Hence, also, Putin’s evocation of the historical figure of Stolypin, the Great Russian prime minister and arch-reactionary of Tsar Nicholas II, and the quotation of his words at the Federal Assembly after a year of war: “When it comes to defending Russia we must all unite … to assert Russia’s only supreme historical right: the right to be strong.” A right that Stolypin invoked precisely to erase any distinction between Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

The paradox is that Woods himself, in the February 2023 article, along with a thousand contortions about proxy war, was forced to acknowledge that

In theory, Putin could claim victory if Russia manages to take control of all of the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea. But he would certainly like more, for example, to take Odesa and the Black Sea coast.

That would strangle Ukraine economically, and reduce it to a state of vassalage. It would be a crushing blow to NATO and would expose the limits of US power. Naturally, the Americans will do everything in their power to prevent that. But it is far from certain that they can succeed. (Ukraine’s bloody anniversary)

Notwithstanding predictions (and parochial overtones), it is an accurate analysis of Russian objectives. But if, even after the failed conquest of Kyiv, the Russian war maintains the goal of reducing Ukraine to “vassalage,” a goal moreover deemed realistic by Woods, is this not a measure of the imperialist nature of the Russian occupation? Historically, Ukraine has long been a vassal of Russia, first under Tsarism, then on a different basis under Stalinism. Great Russian chauvinist propaganda has always called Ukraine “little Russia” and Ukrainians “little Russians.” If Russian imperialism retraces the steps of its own history, aiming at vassalage of Ukraine, is this not reason enough to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression?

What Trotsky says, and what the IMT says

Faced with the glaring contradictions of its position, especially from a Trotskyist point of view, the IMT felt the need to defend it on a historical and theoretical level. Arms to Ukraine? To those abusing Trotsky’s words, we say: “Learn to think!” is the title of a November 2022 article by Joe Attard, an IMT leader.

The rhetorical operation is simple. In order to defend its refusal to support Ukraine against the Russian war of invasion, the article targets the wrong position of those organizations and tendencies in the Trotskyist movement that have demanded sending NATO weapons to Ukraine. But the IMT’s criticism of someone else’s mistake fails to hide its own mistake.

Attard’s article is forced to cite Trotsky’s positions in controversy with the ultraleftists and their indiscriminately and prejudicially defeatist positions. He cites Trotsky’s position in favor of not boycotting a possible sending of arms by fascist Italy to the Algerian rebellion against French imperialism; he cites Trotsky’s position in favor of not boycotting the sending of arms by the French government to a possible proletarian government in Belgium in the course of the imperialist war; he recalls that in both cases Trotsky rightly polemicized with the ultraleft positions. But he concludes:

There is an important difference here. What is happening in Ukraine is not a revolutionary uprising by an oppressed colony or a case of self-defence by a proletarian regime. Ukraine is headed by a reactionary bourgeois government. (Joe Attard, Arms to Ukraine? To those abusing Trotsky’s words, we say: “Learn to think!”)

The rhetoric is unfortunate. There is no question that Ukraine is run by a reactionary government, and not by… a proletarian regime. Just as there is no question that we are not in the presence of an Algerian-style colonial revolution. But the question is, does the presence of a reactionary government (or leadership) at the head of a nation invaded and occupied by an imperialist power require that revolutionaries refuse to support its resistance to the invading imperialism? Put in correct form, the answer is simple: not at all. On the contrary.

Trotsky unconditionally defended negus Ethiopia from the war of invasion of fascist imperialism despite the fact that it was headed by a feudal negus, just as he defended China from the war of invasion of Japanese imperialism despite the fact that its resistance was led by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, a bloodthirsty repressor of Chinese workers and communists. There were no proletarian regimes or colonial revolutions in those cases. But two non-imperialist countries invaded by an imperialist country. One cannot be neutral or defeatist bilaterally in such a war.

So in the more recent tradition of Trotskyism. We supported Iraq’s resistance to the war of invasion by Western imperialisms, despite the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. We defended Serbia’s resistance to the war of NATO imperialisms, despite Milosevic’s reactionary regime. We defended Afghanistan’s right of resistance against the Western war of invasion, despite the fact that it was directed by the Taliban arch-reactionaries. We unconditionally defend the people of Palestine and their resistance to the Zionist occupation, despite the fundamentalist leadership of Hamas and its reactionary regime in Gaza. Perhaps Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, the Taliban, Hamas are … to the left of Zelensky? In each of these cases, revolutionaries defend the nation and people attacked by imperialism, without sharing any political responsibility for their governments. They defend it from their own autonomous, class-based, internationalist, revolutionary angle. This is the elementary position of Trotskyism.

Attard is forced to concede that, indeed, “the reactionary nature of the government is not in itself sufficient to prevent support for Ukraine against Russia.” The example of Trotsky’s support for the negus’s Ethiopia is too obvious to ignore. But the author defends himself in the corner with the argument of the different political consequences of the two wars. A negus victory would have meant a victory against imperialism as a whole, while a Ukrainian victory would mean “the strengthening of U.S. imperialism, the most reactionary force on the planet.” Unfortunately for Attard, there is a problem. The Ethiopia of negus, like Chiang Kai-shek’s China, was also supported militarily, in its own interests, by British imperialism, the dominant imperialist force on the planet at the time, like the U.S. today. But that did not stop Trotsky from supporting them against the invasion by Italian and Japanese imperialism, respectively. Because the defeat of an imperialist aggression always has a positive historical value, regardless of the immediate benefits of this or that competing power, even if it is the most powerful in the world.

In the specific case, moreover, things are in many ways in opposite terms to how Attard presents them. A defeat of the Russian invasion would, on the one hand, precipitate the crisis of the Putin regime, help the development of the mass movement in Russia, encourage the revolt of the nationalities oppressed by Russian imperialism: in other words, it could open a crisis of revolutionary magnitude in that immense country, as in 1905 or 1917, with potentially enormous repercussions for the world proletariat. On the other hand, the Ukrainian working class would be emboldened to present the bill to its ruling classes for the sacrifices it has made to defend the country, and would not passively accept the horse cure required for Ukraine’s entry into the EU. In short, the costs of victory for the Ukrainian government and for the EU itself would be anything but painless. In history, the victory of an oppressed country against a military occupation often unlocks liberating potential.

“Absolutely impossible” a future world conflict?

The refusal to defend Ukraine in favor of bilateral defeatism on both sides would be justified from a Trotskyist point of view in the event of a growing over of the current war into a direct confrontation between Russian and NATO imperialisms. That is not the current scenario. It is a scenario that all the imperialist powers in play want to avert. It is a highly unlikely scenario because, given the importance of the powers at stake, it would take the form of a world conflict. A conflict with uncontrollable effects in the nuclear age.

However, in the historical perspective, a clash between the old and new imperialist powers for the partitioning of the world is tragically possible. Trotsky rightly scoffed at those pacifists or liberal-progressives who theorized the impossibility of a second imperialist war because of the destructive power of the new armaments. This is also true for the future. The collision course between U.S. imperialism and Chinese imperialism is in place. It is, in prospect, the fault line of a possible new war. Russian imperialism’s own war of invasion in Ukraine indirectly stands on this fault line: Putin thought he could use the U.S. distraction over the Pacific to expand his area of influence in Europe by military means. A calculation that turned out to be in many ways unsuccessful, but not without foundation.

The paradox is that the IMT excludes absolutely the possibility of a new world war:

There is absolutely no question of a new world war between the United States and Russia, nor between the US and China, in part, precisely because of the threat of nuclear war, but also because of the resolute opposition to such a war on the part of the masses. (The Ukrainian war: an internationalist class position — The IMT Statement, Feb. 28, 2022)

This is an assessment replicated in dozens of IMT documents and articles. Here, the IMT’s position on the war is welded with its emphatic depiction of mass radicalization and imminent revolution. Ultimately, the argument is that war would be impossible because of the revolutionary threat. An argument belied by the historical experience of the two world wars. And sadly lacking a historical basis for the future. An irresponsible position.

The Trotskyists’ position is the opposite: the international revolutionary perspective is also necessary to avert the risk, in prospect, of a new great war. This is also why it is necessary to fight against any imperialism and any of its wars, in defense of all oppressed nations and the world proletariat. The revolutionary defense of Ukraine against Russian imperialism’s war of invasion is part of this general perspective.

Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori
February 2024

An “old” controversy about “workers’ government”

The positions of FalceMartello (Motion 5) on the central issue in the Party’s debate
The alleged “Marxist tendency” against Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky
A response to FM’s theoretical arguments on “workers’ government”

The following text was written in December 2004 by Franco Grisolia, a leader of the Associazione Marxista Rivoluzionaria — Progetto Comunista, an organization from which the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (PCL) would be born in 2006, after the split from the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) following the latter’s entry into the second Prodi government. FalceMartello, forerunner of Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione (SCR), as part of the debate in the run-up to the PRC’s VI Congress, expressed an important difference on the concept of the “workers’ government,” and in particular its propaganda directed at the organizations of the workers’ movement, going so far as to brand as extremist and outdated by the Communist International, Rosa Luxemburg’s positions on the necessity of the destruction of the bourgeois state as a prerequisite for a true revolutionary workers’ government. It criticized as “nonsense” of the “pseudo-revolutionary sects at all latitudes” the propaganda we were advancing as AMR for the rupture of workers’ organizations with the bourgeoisie on a program of power. In this sense, it repudiated the concepts of the Transitional Program, which repeated the approach of the Bolsheviks in the 1917 revolution. This went so far as to lead the main leader of FalceMartello, Claudio Bellotti, to publish in a controversy with our faction the text of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, totally cut out sentence by sentence to remove its most “radical” concepts, even to the point of changing one sentence to “modernize” its meaning. The following text represents the response to FM, the alleged “Marxist tendency,” in defense of the revolutionary Marxist conception of “workers’ government,” demanded then as now by the PCL.

The development of the preparatory debate for the 6th Congress of the PRC, with the presentation of five congressional motions, had, if nothing else, the merit of forcing each of the different “areas” of the party to make their positions more clear, to show their “political passport.” This was particularly the case with the question of questions that was at the center of this congress. That of government. And in light of what is written, one can see that beyond the wide difference in positions, the fundamental discriminating line between revolutionary Marxism and opportunism of various kinds sees the Progetto Comunista motion on one side and the other four on the other. This is true even for the leftmost of these, namely the one presented by the comrades of FalceMartello, which clearly expressed positions so opportunist and contrary to the foundations of Leninism-Trotskyism as to leave even us, who have never underestimated the enormous distance between consistent Trotskyism and FM’s centrist pseudo-Marxism, somewhat surprised. Symptomatic all of this, it seems to us, of an obvious shift to the right that is affecting FM’s national and international organization.

It is in the polemic against our positions on the autonomous class pole and consistent positions on government that the revisionist opportunism of FM’s leadership has manifested itself in the clearest way. The starting point was our vindication of the traditional position of the consistently Marxist wing of the workers’ movement, expressed magnificently over a hundred years ago, against the governmentists of her time, by Rosa Luxemburg in her phrase:

The role of Social-Democracy, in bourgeois society, is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society. (Rosa Luxemburg, A question of tactics, 1899)

The leaders of FalceMartello, thereby expressing their distance from the fundamental basis of revolutionary Marxism, have tried to question this position, arguing absurdly from the Leninist tactic of “workers’ government.” This has happened on several occasions and, to the best of our knowledge, in every one of our presentations where FM comrades were present and spoke, which signals that it has been chosen as a “line” argument against our document. The clearest summary of this position is now expressed in Comrade Bellotti’s article published in FM No. 180 and titled “Left PRC. The reasons for a division” (and also available on the FalceMartello site). In that article — which is meant to be a reply to Comrade Francesco Ricci’s response to an earlier article by Bellotti in controversy with us — with an abundance of heavy sarcasm (which is always or almost always a symptom of the difficulty of positive critical argumentation) Comrade Bellotti tries to prove the unprovable, that after the experience of the Russian Revolution, which fully confirmed, in fact, the position of Rosa Luxemburg (which was that of the whole of the revolutionary left of the Second International), Lenin’s Third International elaborated, given the development of a revolutionary situation, a different position in relation to the concept of “workers’ government” elaborated in particular at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).

To try to support, on the basis of the texts, this absurdity Comrade Bellotti performs an old, incorrect operation. He truncates the texts artificially (i.e., not for legitimate reasons of space and synthesis), falsifying their true meaning. It therefore seems to us necessary to restore the truth by pointing out the basic points of the Communist International’s theses on workers’ government that Bellotti omits:

The most basic program of a workers’ government must consist in arming the proletariat, disarming the counterrevolutionary bourgeois organizations, establishing control over production, dropping the decisive burden of taxes on the rich, and breaking down the resistance of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie.

The text then continues with a paragraph quoted by Comrade Bellotti, but with a significant zigzag between what he quotes and what he omits:

Such a workers’ government is possible only if it arises out of the struggle of the masses [quoted], if it is based on workers’ bodies fit for struggle and created by the broadest sectors of the masses in struggle [cut]. However, even a workers’ government arising through a parliamentary realignment, that is, a government of parliamentary origin, can open the way for an uprising of the revolutionary workers’ movement [quoted though in a version, this one, different from all the versions we have been able to consult, including the one published by the French Trotskyists in 1934, all of whom conclude the sentence with the formula “it can provide the occasion for reviving the revolutionary workers’ movement”]. But it goes without saying that the emergence of a real workers’ government and the maintenance of a government that makes a revolutionary policy will necessarily lead to the fiercest struggle and, eventually, to civil war against the bourgeoisie [cut].

What, then, is the attitude of the communists? Here is what the text states:

In some circumstances Communists must declare themselves willing to form a government with non-Communist working-class parties and organizations. But they can only do so in the face of precise guarantees that these workers’ governments will conduct a real struggle against the bourgeoisie in the sense indicated above … Despite its great advantages, the workers’ government watchword also has its dangers, like all united-front tactics: to parry these dangers they must not lose sight of the fact that while every bourgeois government is at the same time capitalist, it is not equally true that every workers’ government must be a proletarian government, that is, a revolutionary instrument of the proletariat. The Communist International must envisage the following possible variants: 1) a liberal workers’ government …; 2) a social-democratic workers’ government …; 3) a peasants’ and workers’ government; 4) a workers’ government with the participation of communists; 5) a true proletarian government, which in its purest form can only be personified by the Communist Party. The first two types of workers’ governments are not revolutionary workers’ governments but governments, in disguise, of coalition between the bourgeoisie and counterrevolutionary workers’ leaders … Communists will not have to participate in such governments. On the contrary, they will have to relentlessly expose before the masses the true character of these false “workers’ governments” … Communists will have to explain to the working class at all costs that its liberation can only be secured by the dictatorship of the proletariat. The other two types of workers’ government in which communists can participate are not yet the dictatorship of the proletariat, they do not yet constitute a necessary form of transition to the dictatorship, but they can constitute a starting point for the conquest of that dictatorship. The complete dictatorship of the proletariat can only be achieved by a workers’ government composed of communists. (Communist International, Theses on Comintern Tactics, 1922)

In the light of the text in its entirety (a text not coincidentally published by us in No. 8 of Progetto Comunista in September 2004), it is not possible — for anyone who does not wish to be politically totally blind and deaf — not to see that there is no contradiction between the policy of the Communist International and that envisaged by Rosa Luxemburg. The support or alliance that the Communist International envisages is with respect to a real workers’ government, that is, a revolutionary instrument of the proletariat based at least on a program such as the one above, a possible step toward the dictatorship of the proletariat, and thus a symptom and an actor in the destruction (“the ruins”) of the bourgeois state.

What has the Zapatero government to do with a real workers’ government, when — far from establishing workers’ control over production (let alone arming the proletariat) — it privatizes across the board, beginning with the shipyards in Northern Spain, resulting in a violent workers’ revolt against the government? And Comrade Bellotti, in his article, has the political courage to ask, with his usual sarcasm of low seriousness, what Marxists should have said in the face of this most degenerate example of social-democratic government. We would have tried, and would try, to “unmask it implacably before the masses,” as the text of the Communist International points out to us — that is, exactly the opposite of what Comrade Bellotti proposes, as a consistent revisionist, and the opposite of what the Spanish comrades of FalceMartello did.

The polemic on the workers’ government, with the indicated distortion of Leninist positions, is inserted as an attempt at theoretical argumentation with respect to the frontal polemic on our programmatic proposal of an “autonomous anti-capitalist class pole.”

Bellotti writes:

But an anti-capitalist pole is quite a different thing: it means thinking that you can get Mussi or Epifani to subscribe to an anti-capitalist, class-based program. Ah, but this is a tactic to expose these bureaucrats in front of the workers! Our Progetto comrades will then explain. In short, the practical application of your tactic is as follows. The PRC must say “Epifani, Mussi, you must be anti-capitalists!” At their predictable refusal (assuming they respond), we will go to the DS and CGIL members and say, “See? Your leaders are opportunists and don’t want a real alternative, come with us to the “autonomous class pole.” Too bad that this nonsense has been repeated for more than a century by all pseudo-revolutionary sects at all latitudes and has not scratched the reformists’ hegemony over the workers’ movement one iota.

Now again, things are presented in jest (which is offensive not so much to us as to readers, and thus primarily FM supporters, who are treated as incapable of understanding serious theoretical confrontation) and without dialecticization. However, unburdened by this, we confess our solidarity with the accused “sectarians” of more than a century of the workers’ movement.

Why, then, who are these progenitors of ours? They are, besides Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky the Bolsheviks and Trotskyists of the original Fourth International. Indeed, let us see how Trotsky addresses this question in the chapter “Workers’ and Farmers’ Government” of the seminal Transitional Program on which the Fourth International was founded in 1938:

From April to September 1917, the Bolsheviks demanded that the SRs and Mensheviks break with the liberal bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands. … the demand of the Bolsheviks, addressed to the Mensheviks and the SRs: “Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power into your own hands!” had for the masses tremendous educational significance. The obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and SRs to take power … definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks. … The chief accusation which the Fourth International advances against the traditional organizations of the proletariat is the fact that they do not wish to tear themselves away from the political semi-corpse of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions the demand, systematically addressed to the old leadership: “Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power!” is an extremely important weapon for exposing the treacherous character of the parties and organizations of the Second, Third and Amsterdam Internationals. … Of all parties and organizations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name, we demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers’ and farmers’ government. On this road we promise them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the program of the “workers’ and farmers’ government.” Of all parties and organizations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name, we demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers’ and farmers’ government. On this road we promise them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the program of the “workers’ and farmers’ government.” Is the creation of such a government by the traditional workers’ organizations possible? Past experience shows … that this is, to say the least, highly improbable. … However, there is no need to indulge in guesswork. The agitation around the slogan of a workers’-farmers’ government preserves under all conditions a tremendous educational value. (The Transitional Program)

As clear as that. What Bellotti calls the “stupidities” of the “pseudo-revolutionary sects at all latitudes” and that they would not “scratch the hegemony of the reformists one iota” is simply the method by which the hegemony of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution was realized.

In light of all this, the meaning of the old disagreements over the nature of the DS majority and, more importantly, the one that led FalceMartello to present at the party’s fifth congress a central amendment to our theses, which proposed to drown out the reference to the Leninist conception (actually already Engels’s regarding the symptoms of future British Labourism) of reformist parties as “bourgeois workers’ parties,” becomes fully clear. The reality is that FM’s theory and political method are absolutely opposed to the “sectaries of more than a century of the history of the workers’ movement,” i.e., to the Marxist left of the Second International with Rosa Luxemburg (and Lenin and Trotsky), to the Bolsheviks and the original Communist International of Lenin (and Trotsky), and to the original Fourth International of Trotsky.

On the central question of government, FM would have hailed and supported (“critically,” of course) that homogeneous socialist government, born out of a developing revolution, which included equally the two major parties, the reformist and the centrist, of the class; i.e., that Scheidemann government in 1918-1919 Germany, whose social-democratic leaders made the “sectarian” Luxemburg pay for her intransigent opposition by having her head smashed in by their reactionary scherani.

Here is the political reality of FM, that of an anti-Leninist and anti-Trotskyist (and therefore anti-Marxist) sect based on increasingly rightwing and semi-reformist centrist positions, and whose self-centered sectarianism is exactly the cover of an opportunist nature.

If today the focus of the PRC congress is the battle against the Bertinottian majority’s choice of open class collaboration, the denunciation of the opportunism of left critics, reformist or semi-reformist, all of whom are in one way or another governmentalists, is a central part of the battle for the construction of a revolutionary Marxist alternative, in the PRC and in the workers’ movement in general.

Naturally, we are well aware that the vast majority of FM supporters act in this party with the will to oppose reformism not as a distant opportunism opposed to revolutionary Marxism, but as a genuine revolutionary alternative. But, evidently, this is not possible from FM’s positions.

It is time, therefore, for anyone who really wants to struggle to build a Marxist and revolutionary alternative in the PRC to break with FM’s anti-Leninist and anti-Trotskyist opportunism and join the battle of Progetto Comunista in a common and united action, because it is based, beyond possible differences of analysis and secondary tactics, on a precise, clear and coherent revolutionary program.

Franco Grisolia
December 2004