Communist
strategy and the party form
Mike
Macnair – Part 6
In the last article in this series we saw that ‘defeatism’
was intimately linked to Lenin’s struggle, from 1914 on, to force a split in
the Second International. Lenin argued for a clear split not only with the
“social-chauvinists” of the right and centre who had actually supported their
own belligerent governments, but also with the “social-pacifists” of the
centre.
Lenin’s split policy was not accepted by the majority of his
co-thinkers - let alone the wider anti-war left in the workers’ movement -
until after October 1917. It reached its decisive moment in the 1920 adoption
by the Comintern of the ‘Twenty-one conditions’, which were designed to force
the split with the centre.
It would be tedious to list the processes of split since
then which have left us with - at least! - 57 varieties of left group in
Britain, leave aside the international variations.
The Eurocommunist Fernando Claudin in his From Comintern
to Cominform (1975) argued that the split in the Second International was
“a model of sectarianism and bureaucratic method”, to which the modern splintered
working class movement can be traced back. Claudin’s argument has been widely
adopted. Many liberal and social democratic critics of communism and some
leftists would place the source further back - at the 1903 split between
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; they rely on Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s contemporary
critiques of Lenin. The anarchists would take it a stage further: the 1871
split in the First International, they would say, showed Marx’s sectarianism
and ‘authoritarian methods’ at work.
The seductive quality of these arguments consists in two
facts. First, 1871, 1903 and the split consummated in 1921 have commonly
been used as ‘arguments’ by bureaucratic and sectarian splitters. Second, in
all three cases the arguments are fundamentally false but contain a partial
truth.
In 1871 a split which was really about political strategy
was confusingly presented as a split about Bakunin’s secret dictatorial
conspiracy; but Bakunin’s secret dictatorial conspiracy was real.1 Bakunin’s hypocrisy (and his very
confused ideas) obscure the fact that he and his followers identified a real
problem about the forms of authority in the workers’ movement.
Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s critiques of Lenin would have been
perfectly legitimate if the 1903 split in the Russian Social Democratic
Labour Party had been about implementing the top-down, conspiratorial party
model of Lenin’s What is to be done?, but (as Lenin pointed out in his
1904 response to Luxemburg) it was not.2 However, against the interpretation placed on 1903 in Zinoviev’s
History of the Bolshevik Party and, as a result, by James P Cannon and
by the later ‘orthodox Trotskyists’ and the Maoists, Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s
critiques had considerable validity.
The split in the Second International was justified, but the
reasoning given for it at the time was at least partly unsound, and this
unsound reasoning has indeed promoted the division of the left into
micro-groups.
Lenin’s original argument for a split with the
social-chauvinist leaders was quite simply that they had betrayed the decisions
of the international and the interests of the working class and were scabs. The
explanation he gave was that “This collapse has been mainly caused by the
actual prevalence in it of petty bourgeois opportunism, the bourgeois nature
and the danger of which have long been indicated by the finest representatives
of the revolutionary proletariat of all countries.” Further, “The so-called
centre of the German and other social democratic parties has in actual fact faint-heartedly
capitulated to the opportunists. It must be the task of the future
international resolutely and irrevocably to rid itself of this bourgeois trend
in socialism.”3
The Lenin-Zinoviev 1915 pamphlet Socialism and war goes
on to argue for the split on a class basis - class unity and class independence
requires separation from the right:
“In the past epoch, before the war, although opportunism was
often regarded as a ‘deviationist’, ‘extremist’ part of the Social Democratic
Party, it was nevertheless regarded as a legitimate part. The war has shown
that this cannot be so in future. Opportunism has ‘matured’, is now playing to
the full its role as emissary of the bourgeois in the working class movement.
Unity with the opportunists has become sheer hypocrisy, an example of which we
see in the German Social Democratic Party. On all important occasions (for
example, the voting on August 4), the opportunists come forward with an
ultimatum, which they carry out with the aid of their numerous connections with
the bourgeoisie, of their majority on the executives of the trade unions, etc. Unity
with the opportunists actually means today subordinating the working
class to ‘its’ national bourgeoisie, alliance with it for the purpose of
oppressing other nations and of fighting for great-power privileges; it means splitting
the revolutionary proletariat in all countries.
“Hard as the struggle may be, in individual cases, against
the opportunists who predominate in many organisations, peculiar as the process
of purging the workers’ parties of opportunists may be in individual countries,
this process is inevitable and fruitful. Reformist socialism is dying;
regenerated socialism ‘will be revolutionary, uncompromising and
insurrectionary’, to use the apt expression of the French socialist, Paul
Golay.”4
In Socialism and war, and more fully in Imperialism,
the highest stage of capitalism, the class argument is extended to connect
opportunism to imperialism and the ability to ‘buy off’ a section of the
working class: “Opportunism and social-chauvinism have the same economic basis:
the interests of a tiny stratum of privileged workers and of the petty
bourgeoisie who are defending their privileged position, their ‘right’ to
crumbs of the profits ‘their’ national bourgeoisie obtain from robbing other
nations, from the advantages of their position as the ruling nation, etc.”5
This argument seeks a strategic split in two senses. On the
one hand, the strategy of the regenerated movement is to be ‘revolutionary’ and
not ‘reformist’. On the other, it is a strategic break from the Second
International’s strategy of unity, discussed in the second article in this
series. It is, indeed, the exact opposite. By splitting from the right, the
left, which represents the working class, is to purge the workers’ parties
of opportunists, to purify itself and ‘regenerate’ socialism as
“revolutionary”. Splitting becomes in itself a strategy to purify the
movement.
These arguments are fundamentally false but contain true
elements.
To begin at the theoretical level, the theory of the
imperialist labour aristocracy is false. In the first place, workers’ level of
class consciousness does not map inversely onto their relative material
advantages. To take a single British example out of many possible ones, in the
late 19th century skilled miners and railway workers were on the right wing of
the movement; by the early 20th they were on its left. The theory of the
imperialist labour aristocracy is also completely impotent to explain reformism
and the labour bureaucracy in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, which
has been an all too obvious problem since the 1930s. The theory therefore
wholly lacks predictive power.
Bukharin in Imperialism and world economy has a
better understanding: that is, that the relative advantages of a nation-state
in the world hierarchy will allow the state to gain the loyalty of at
least a large section of its working class. But this understanding can be
extended to the case of colonies and semi-colonies. Left nationalism, which is
the main equivalent in the colonial world of “social-chauvinism”, seeks to
improve the position of the poor (including the working class) by improving the
relative standing of its nation-state in the world hierarchy; and there
can be relative advantages in this hierarchy not only, for example, between
Britain and Argentina, but also between Britain and France, or between Brazil
and Argentina.
Once this point is grasped, it is clear that the strategy of
split will not purify the workers’ movement, and that the idea that the
workers’ movement can be purified from “reformism”/“social-chauvinism” by
separation of the “revolutionaries”/“internationalists” is illusory. Working
class support for one’s own capitalist nation-state is produced by dynamics
inherent in the capitalist nation-state system and world market and there is no
grouping within the working class which is presumptively free of it.
The Bolsheviks, in fact, themselves demonstrated in 1917 the
falsity of the policy of purifying the movement through splits. Firstly. when
Lenin returned to Russia, the All-Russia Central Committee, including Kamenev
and Stalin, was engaged in discussing with the Mensheviks unity on the basis of
critical support for the Provisional government. Secondly, in October, two
central Bolshevik leaders, Zinoviev and Kamenev, broke ranks to denounce the
planned insurrection in the bourgeois press. The Bolsheviks’ separation from
the Mensheviks had proved to be no guarantee against reformism.
The need for ‘purging’ the movement of opportunists and
“accidental elements” was to be a central demand of the ‘Twenty-one
conditions’. The periodic purge was also to be one of the central weapons the
Bolshevik leadership promoted against corruption and bureaucratic degeneration
once the party had taken power. In this character it was - to put it mildly -
wholly ineffective. Individual bureaucrats and corrupt elements might be
purged, but the overall effect of the purges was to increase the power of the
party bureaucracy as such over the rank and file, and therefore reduce
and, indeed, rapidly eliminate, the ability of the proletariat as a class to
fight for its class interests through the Communist Party.
‘Leninist’ sectarians believe that splitting
organisationally from the right and repeated purges will make a pure
revolutionary organisation. The political collapse of such sectarians into the
most abject opportunism has been a repeated feature of the history of
Trotskyism and Maoism. The process is going on before our eyes in the British
Socialist Workers Party.
Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s arguments for a split in Socialism
and war nonetheless contain a side comment which goes to the heart of the
matter, quoted above: “On all important occasions (for example, the voting on
August 4), the opportunists come forward with an ultimatum, which they carry
out with the aid of their numerous connections with the bourgeoisie, of their
majority on the executives of the trade unions, etc.”
The loyalty of the right wing of the movement to the
capitalist state is rewarded with state - and capitalist - intervention on the
side of the right in the debates and decision-making of the workers’ movement.
In World War I this took the form of the open use of state censorship against
critics of the war. More usually, it takes more subtle forms: financial
support, media attention and disinformation operations of the intelligence
apparat, provocations, etc against the left (the smear campaign against George
Galloway is a recent example, albeit one to which Galloway’s political errors
made him unusually vulnerable).
As a result, the right is characterised by persistent use of
ultimatums, splits and party, union, etc bureaucratic censorship against the
left. In the German SPD this had begun well before the war, with the censorship
of Engels’s 1895 preface to The civil war in France, and the suppression
of the first edition of Kautsky’s The road to power. In more recent
times, the Social Democratic Party’s 1981 split from Labour was only the most
extreme example of a routine practice of the Labour and trade union right.
The right represents itself as the democratic
representative of more backward elements of the working class - ordinary
working class monarchists, for example - so that it claims that, even
when it is in a minority in the movement, it is nonetheless entitled to a
majority in its leadership or to control of what the movement says. The same
argument can be found in Neil Kinnock’s claims to represent the voiceless
masses against the left in the 1980s Labour Party and John Rees’s similar
claims against the CPGB at the Respect founding conference. They are the
continuity of the practice of the right wing in the SPD.
The right is linked to the state and willing to use
ultimatums, censorship and splits to prevent the party standing in open
opposition to the state. It insists that the only possible unity is if it has a
veto on what is said and done. The unity of the workers’ movement on the
right’s terms is necessarily subordination of the interests of the working
class to those of the state.
Marxists, who wish to oppose the present state rather than
to manage it loyally, can then only be in partial unity with the
loyalist wing of the workers’ movement. We can bloc with them on particular
issues. We can and will take membership in parties and organisations they
control - and violate their constitutional rules and discipline - in order to
fight their politics. But we have to organise ourselves independently of
them. That means that we need our own press, finances, leadership committees,
conferences, branches and other organisations.
It does not matter whether these are formally within parties
the right controls, formally outside them, or part inside or part outside. This
is tactics. The problem is not to purify the movement, which is illusory, but
to negate the politics of class collaborationism by fighting against it.
In the concrete conditions of 1914-21 this did indeed mean
an organisational split with most of the centre as well as with the right.
After the split, the centre promptly proved the point. Parts of the centre
regrouped in what the communists satirically called the ‘Two and a Half
International’; by 1923 this had reunified with the Second International. It
proved to be unable to fight the right in the international, but, indeed,
collapsed into its politics. Fetishising unity at all costs had proved - as
Marx and Engels had warned in 1875 - to negate the ability to fight for class
independence.
The course of events in 1917-21 overlaid upon the original
ground for a split (purifying the class movement) a new ground: the idea of a
party of a new type - that is, a party in the image of the Bolsheviks. This
idea was codified in the 1920 Second Congress ‘Theses on the role of the
Communist Party in the proletarian revolution’ and in the 1921 Third Congress
theses, ‘The organisational structure of the communist parties, the methods and
content of their work’.6
There are three critical elements in the new organisational
concept. The first is that the party is to be a party of the ‘vanguard’: the
advanced minority of the working class. It is not to lay claim to being
directly the party of the mass of the working class (unlike, for example, the
British Labour Party). The second, related, point is that it is to be an activist
party, a party which organises the political work of its members. The 1921
theses contain, in this respect, some valuable pragmatic advice about the
practical means of organising and building a party.
The third is that it is to be ‘strictly centralised’. There
is to be no question of broad autonomy of branches, fractions, etc; everything
is to be under the control of the central committee. Indeed, the 1921 theses
incorporate (inexplicitly) the ban on factions recently adopted by the Russian
Communist Party (thesis 6: “incompatible with the principles of democratic
centralism adopted by the Communist International are antagonisms or power
struggles within the party”). They give individual delegates of the central
committee the right to veto local decisions (thesis 48: “The representatives
and delegates of the central leadership are entitled to attend all meetings and
sessions with a consultative voice and the right of veto”).
There is no doubt that these were intended to be strategic
choices. They are grounded on the one hand by the positive balance sheet of the
Russian Bolshevik Party, which by 1920-21 was clearly winning the civil war. On
the other hand is the defeats suffered by the left in the German revolution of
1919, by the Hungarian revolution of 1919, and by the Italian revolutionary
movement of autumn 1920, which the Comintern leadership attributed to the lack
of a ‘party of a Bolshevik type’.
The ‘new party concept’ is intensely contradictory. On the
one hand, it is a genuine advance in the theorisation of actual
membership-based political parties. Membership-based political parties, as
opposed to loose coalition political trends, were an innovation of the later
19th century, and when Marx and Engels said that “the communists do not form a
separate party opposed to the other parties of the working class” (Communist
manifesto) and made similar statements about “parties” it was this sort of
broad trend that they meant. The Second International had built
membership-based parties, but had not theorised what they were. In this aspect
‘anti-Leninism’ is characterised by simple political unrealism and ends in
practice either in total inability to organise, or in reproducing the worst
aspects of ‘Leninism’.
On the other hand, it is also a theorisation of what the
Bolsheviks had done to their party in 1918-21, both in militarising it and in
setting it up as a minority dictatorship, a state authority against the
working class. In this aspect the ‘new party concept’ or, as it came to be
called after Lenin’s death, ‘Leninism’, was a theory of the dictatorship of the
bureaucracy, and one which was to animate endless bureaucratic sects.
This contradiction can be seen present in each of the three
strands of the new party concept identified earlier.
That a party is part only of the society is logically
necessary. That the organised membership of a political party, however large,
is a minority, is a simple fact about political parties in capitalist society -
even very large ones like the Labour Party, etc. That in the case of a workers’
party this minority is in some sense the ‘vanguard’ is an idea which cannot be
abandoned without abandoning the idea that the party should promote its
distinct political programme. If we are not ‘more advanced’ in the sense of
having a better understanding of the strategic line of march than non-members,
then our organising is a waste of time and money and a fraud on the voters; and
this is as true of the Labour Party, etc as it is of left groups.
If the job of the party is to represent the voiceless masses
rather than to promote a distinct set of political ideas, it collapses into an
organ of the state without political ideas: the character of the major
capitalist parties in the two-party systems of much of the modern political
world. The result is that the unorganised masses are denied the genuine
political choices which they could make when they vote, etc. This result
is inherently anti-democratic.
The danger, however, is that this reasoning can be taken to
rule out the possibility that the party is wrong and non-party elements right.
In this case the claim that the party is the advanced party becomes in
principle untestable. If this view is taken, moreover, it logically follows
that the leadership is taken to be the ‘advanced part’ of the party and as such
is in principle right against the ‘backward elements’ of the ranks. Since the
possibility that the ‘backward elements’ are right is ruled out, the claim that
the leaders are ‘more advanced’ is untestable, and is a matter of pure faith.
The necessary consequence is that ‘more advanced leading
cadre’ are, in effect, justified by faith alone, as with the Calvinist Elect.
Like the dodgy end of the Calvinist Elect, nothing is forbidden to them: among
the Trotskyist organisations the ‘vanguard role’ has been used to justify
violence in the workers’ movement (Cannon, the Lambertists, the Healyites, the
Loraites), taking money from questionable sources (the Lambertists, the
Healyites), and sexual exploitation of female members (the Healyites, the
Spartacists). This is merely a pale shadow of the personal corruption and
violence of the Stalinist bureaucracies.
The idea of the party of activists is in itself no more than
a recognition that political activity is work - and that, like other forms of
work, it benefits from (a) commitment and (b) an organised division of labour.
It also has a ‘civic republican’ aspect to it. That is, it is counterposed to
the liberal and market political-science view of parties, which sees party
leaderships as firms offering political brands to the voter-consumer or
member-consumer. The party member is to be an active citizen of his or her
party. The passive consumer-member is not to have a vote.
Though the Comintern texts address directly only the
shortcomings of the social democracy, in this aspect they have grasped a
fundamental feature of the capitalist political order in parliamentary regimes:
ie, that what is given with one hand through universal suffrage is taken away
with another through the constitution of the party system. (It is also taken
away by monarchism/presidentialism, judicial review, militarised police,
mercenary armies, etc; but these are long stops relative to the immediate role
of the capitalist party system in disenfranchising the masses.)
The other, negative, side of the ‘party of activists’ idea
is given by its combination with the ‘actuality of the revolution’: the idea
that the trouble with the Second International was its ‘passive propagandism’,
and that the tasks of the workers’ movement have gone beyond propaganda, etc,
to agitation intended to lead to the immediate struggle for power. Taken
together with the idea of a developed division of labour, this idea leads all
too easily into the creation of a division of labour between ‘grunts’ at the
base, who are to run round like blue-arsed flies from one agitational
initiative to the next, and thinkers in the leadership. Self-education of the
militants at the base - and, for that matter, the patient, long-term work of
trade union activity, cooperatives, and so on - is damned as ‘propagandism’.
The paradoxical effect is to reinstate the
liberal-market bourgeois party form. The members, though active, are active in doing
what the leaders tell them, and cease to be really active citizens of their
party. The leaders become a firm selling a brand: Socialist Workers Party,
Workers Power, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty ... Dissent - especially dissent
about fundamentals - becomes the enemy of ‘activism’ and the ‘activists’
themselves resent the dissenters who are ‘stopping them getting on with the
job’. In this framework, serious disagreement inevitably leads to a split.
Centralism has two senses. The first is the absence of legal
constitutional rights of the state’s or organisation’s components (cantons,
provinces, branches, etc) to sovereignty in ‘their patch’. I stress legal
constitutional rights, first because in their absence the centre may still not practically
be able to enforce its will in the localities - see, for example, the SWP’s
difficulty in turning its local branches round Respect.
Second, because in the absence of legal constitutional
rights of the components we do not have federalism. Britain before the rise of
the Labour Party was deeply politically committed to the autonomy of
local government, but that did not make this country federal. Having federalism
thus implies having a constitutional court to decide whether the centre has
invaded the components’ rights. Federalism is, in other words, a form of
dictatorship of the lawyers. That is why the US capitalist class at the time of
the creation of the US constitution preferred federalism to democratic
republicanism. In this sense, the Comintern’s centralism was right.
The second sense of centralism is the sense Engels points to
in his critique of the Erfurt programme. He denounces the French form of the
state as “the empire established in 1799 without the emperor”: the existence of
a centralised, hierarchical, bureaucratic apparatus in which local officials
are appointed from and responsible to the centre, rather than locally elected.7 It was this Bonapartist sort of
centralism which the Bolsheviks created in their party in 1918-21 and exported
in the 1921 theses.
The Bolsheviks in 1921 represented this centralism as
the historic character of their faction-party since 1903. This representation
was ‘codified’ in Zinoviev’s 1924 History of the Bolshevik Party, but it
was an unambiguous falsification of their history. Trotsky wrote in 1931 that
“Whoever is acquainted with the history of the Bolshevik Party knows what a
broad autonomy the local organisations always enjoyed: they issued their own
papers, in which they openly and sharply, whenever they found it necessary,
criticised the actions of the central committee. Had the central committee, in
the case of principled differences, attempted to disperse the local organisations
... before the party had had an opportunity to express itself - such a central
committee would have made itself impossible.”8 This view has been confirmed by
detailed modern historical research into Bolshevik practice down to 1918.
It is reasonably clear why the Bolsheviks did it. They thought
it was a necessity of civil war. That was also why they exported it: the
parties of the Comintern needed to be parties fit for civil war. In fact, the
idea that civil war implies Bonapartist centralism can readily be falsified by
the experiences of the English civil war, the French revolutionary war before
1799, and the American revolution and civil war.
In reality, it was required in Russia by the combination of
the failure of the German workers’ movement to come to the aid of the Russian
revolution, and the Bolshevik adoption of the Narodniks’ distributivist land
programme. This left the Bolsheviks effectively isolated in a peasant-dominated
country. The only way to resist the whites was to base themselves on the
peasants, which they duly did.
Representing the peasants forced them to create the sort of
state that peasant revolutionary movements normally tend to create, which is an
absolutist one. The recreation of Chinese dynasties, the peasants’ support for
late feudal absolutism in 17th century Sweden, France, etc and French
Bonapartism itself are examples. The Bolsheviks built up a Bonapartist state
round the party: and to do so, they had to change the party into “the
empire without the emperor”.
It is unsurprising to find that the fate of parties of this
type is to be unable to be a political instrument of the working class.
In peasant-dominated countries, they can take power, but create only a road
back to capitalism by a long and bloody detour: Russia itself, Yugoslavia,
China, Albania, Vietnam ... In fully capitalist countries, they can have one of
three fates.
l They can evolve back into Kautskyian
parties - the clearest cases are the French and Italian Communist Parties. Such
parties officially prohibit factions, but have them de facto, and are
officially Bonapartist-centralist, but in practice allow a lot of leeway to the
branches and fractions. They can actually be useful for the workers’ movement
and the development of class consciousness even if they have coalitionist
politics which they cannot carry into practice (all of them between the 1950s
and the 1970s) and even if they are small (like the old CPGB).
l They can turn into small
bureaucratic-centralist sects (most of the Trotskyist and Maoist groups and
some ‘official communist’ ones).
l Or they can collapse altogether.
Adopting and exporting Bonapartist centralism was just plain
wrong. When it was completed by the 1921 ban on factions, it left no legal
means by which the working class could get its party back: as became apparent
in the fate of the oppositions of the 1920s. It tended to emphasise the
negative rather than the positive sides of the ‘vanguard party’ and the ‘party
of activists’.
At present the mass workers’ parties wherever they exist are
so dominated by the class-collaborationist, coalitionist right as to be little
more than left-capitalist parties. The larger small parties of the left (the
surviving ‘official’ CPs, Rifondazione, the proto-Linkspartei) are also
dominated by the coalitionist policy. To their left is a wilderness of
bureaucratic-centralist sects.
The working class urgently needs new political parties, and
a new international, which stand for the working class pursuing its independent
interests. What sort of party? It is impossible to get out of where we
are now without being willing to read the texts and the lessons of the early
Comintern, but to do so critically. To accept the Comintern texts at
face value produces bureaucratic-centralism and splittism. To take them at face
value and reject them out of hand produces either complete inability to act
(the anarchists, movementists, left and council communists, etc) or collapse
back into the policy of unity with the right on the right’s terms (the Labour
left, etc).
The ‘party of a new type’ was both a real advance on
the party theory of the Second International and simultaneously part of
the process of bureaucratisation of the Russian CP and hence of the parties of
the Comintern. It is necessary to disentangle these elements and fight for a
democratic centralism which is not a synonym for bureaucratic centralism.
The split in the Second International was not a sectarian
error on the part of the communists. It was required by the unwillingness of
the coalitionist right to act democratically. Marxists have to organise in a
way which is not dependent on unity with the right. We have to accept
that the split in the Second International will not be reversed (unless
Marxists altogether abandon our politics and accept the corrupt world of
Blairism, etc).
But splitting does not purge the movement of
opportunism. It is a defensive necessity, not a means of offence. They way to
fight opportunism is not to seek purity by separation or fear contamination
with the touch of pitch: that road leads only to organisational sectarianism,
coupled with political collapse into opportunism.
Rather we also have to fight for forms of partial
unity with the right, so as both to achieve the maximum class unity round
particular goals that can be achieved and to bring our politics into
confrontation with the right’s politics. That was for the Comintern, and
remains today, the task of the policy of the united class front.
1. See Hal Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol
4, special note B.
2. ‘(Reply by N Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg) One step forward,
two steps back’, www.marxists.org.uk/archive/lenin/works/1904/sep/15a.htm.
3. ‘The tasks of revolutionary social democracy in the
European war’ (August-September 1914). www.marxists.org.uk/archive/lenin/works/1914/aug/x01.htm.
4. ibid section 14.
5. Socialism and war chapter 1, section 13,
www.marxists.de/war/lenin-war/ch1.htm.
6. www.marxists.org.uk/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch03a.htm,
and www.marxists.org.uk/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/party-theses.htm.
7. www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm,
contained in ‘Political demands’.
8. L Trotsky Writings 1930-31 p155, ‘The crisis in
the German left opposition’.
First published in Weekly Worker – April 2006