The Militant - June 24, 2002 -- Trotsky’s 1928 defense of Bolshevik’s course

Vol.66/No.25 June 24, 2002

Trotsky’s 1928 defense
of Bolshevik’s course
(Books of the Month column)

Printed below is an excerpt from The Third International after Lenin, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for June. The book contains Leon Trotsky’s 1928 article defending the Marxist course that had guided the Communist International in its early years. It was written as a criticism of the draft program of the Communist International presented by Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin to the international’s Sixth World Congress, held that year in Moscow.

The first draft of a program for the Comintern was submitted to the Fourth Congress in 1922 and the delegates voted to submit all drafts and documents to a Program Commission for further study. The Fifth Congress in 1924 called for further discussion of the program drafts within the Comintern’s affiliated parties. At the Sixth Congress, held July-September 1928, all the old drafts disappeared and a new one, written principally by Bukharin, was submitted in his and Stalin’s names.

In response to this development, Trotsky rapidly drafted this document and sent it to the Sixth Congress. Although Trotsky’s work was suppressed in the Soviet Union, excerpts were translated and distributed to a small number of delegates attending the gathering. Among these were two members of the congress’s Program Commission, James P. Cannon from the United States, and Maurice Spector from Canada. These two communist leaders subsequently smuggled the document out of the Soviet Union. Passing it hand to hand, they were able to win over a nucleus of supporters in North America. These working-class cadres were soon expelled from the Communist Party and formed the Communist League of America, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. The story of these events is recounted in Cannon’s History of American Trotskyism, published by Pathfinder. The document was serialized in the Militant beginning with its first issue in November 1928. Copyright © 1957, 1970, 1996 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

*****
BY LEON TROTSKY
The most important question on the agenda of the Sixth Congress is the adoption of a program. The nature of the latter may for a long time determine and fix the physiognomy of the International. The importance of a program does not lie so much in the manner in which it formulates general theoretical conceptions (in the last analysis, this boils down to a question of "codification," i.e., a concise exposition of the truths and generalizations which have been firmly and decisively acquired); it is to a much greater degree a question of drawing up the balance of the world economic and political experiences of the last period, particularly of the revolutionary struggles of the last five years--so rich in events and mistakes. For the next few years, the fate of the Communist International--in the literal sense of the word--depends upon the manner in which these events, mistakes, and controversies are interpreted and judged in the program.

1. General structure of the program
In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country. This also holds entirely for the party that wields the state power within the boundaries of the USSR. On August 4, 1914,¹ the death knell sounded for national programs for all time. The revolutionary party of the proletariat can base itself only upon an international program corresponding to the character of the present epoch, the epoch of the highest development and collapse of capitalism. An international communist program is in no case the sum total of national programs or an amalgam of their common features. The international program must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts. In the present epoch, to a much larger extent than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa. Herein lies the basic and primary difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of national socialism.

Basing ourselves upon these considerations, we wrote in January of this year: "We must begin work to draft a program of the Comintern (Bukharin’s program is a bad program of a national section of the Comintern and not a program of a world communist party)." (Pravda, January 15, 1928.)*

We have kept insisting upon these considerations since 1923-24 when the question of the United States of America arose in its full scope as a problem of world and, in the most direct sense of the term, of European politics.

In recommending the new draft, Pravda wrote that a communist program "differs radically from the program of the international social democracy not only in the substance of its central postulates but also in the characteristic internationalism of its structure." (Pravda, May 29, 1928.)

In this somewhat cloudy formulation is obviously expressed the idea which we stated above and which was formerly stubbornly rejected. One can only welcome the break with the first draft program presented by Bukharin, which did not even provoke a serious exchange of opinion; nor, for that matter, did it offer any grounds for one. Whereas the first draft gave a bald schematic description of the development of one abstract country towards socialism, the new draft seeks, unfortunately, and, as we shall see, without consistency or success, to take world economy as a whole as the basis for determining the fate of its individual parts.

Linking up countries and continents that stand on different levels of development into a system of mutual dependence and antagonism, leveling out the various stages of their development and at the same time immediately enhancing the differences between them, and ruthlessly counterposing one country to another, world economy has become a mighty reality which holds sway over the economic life of individual countries and continents. This basic fact alone invests the idea of a world communist party with a supreme reality. Bringing world economy as a whole to the highest phase of development generally attainable on the basis of private property, imperialism, as the draft states quite correctly in its introduction, "aggravates to an extreme tension the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces of world economy and the national state barriers."

Without grasping the meaning of this proposition, which was vividly revealed to mankind for the first time during the last imperialist war, we cannot take a single step towards the solution of the major problems of world politics and revolutionary struggle.

We could only welcome the radical shift of the very axis of the program in the new draft were it not for the fact that the effort to reconcile this, the only correct position, with tendencies of a directly contrary character has resulted in turning the draft into an arena of the cruelest contradictions, which entirely nullify the principled significance of the new manner of approaching the question in its fundamental aspects.

*Problems of the International Opposition," in Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29) (New York: Pathfinder, 1981), p. 45.

¹August 14, 1914, is generally considered in revolutionary circles to mark the date of the collapse of the Second International. On that date the social democratic fraction in the German Reichstag voted the war credits demanded by the kaiser and the chancellor, signifying by this action not only support of the capitalist fatherland in the war but also the establishment of Burgfrieden (civil peace). The same day witnessed the identical action of the socialist group in the French Chamber of Deputies, who established the Union Sacrée (holy union) with their ruling class. The Belgian, Austro-Hungarian, British, and in part, the Italian, Bulgarian, and Russian social democratic parties followed the same course. The International Socialist Bureau, unable, of course, to adjudicate the dispute which was being decided on the battlefields, ceased to exist, to all intents and purposes, during the war.

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