Extracts from Barnes' speech

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Reprinted

MANY OF you had the opportunity to read several weeks ago in Intercontinental Press an article entitled, 'Power, the Character and Path of the Revolution, and Unity of the Left' , by Shafik Jorge Handal, the general secretary of the Communist Party of El Salvador. Handal is one of the leaders of the FMLN, one of the leaders of the revolution in El Salvador...

He's come to the conclusion that Cuba was not a peculiar exception. He says that for almost two decades that was his view, and he implies that was the view of other Communists - that Cuba was peculiar. He says it's not clear exactly how it was peculiar. What was peculiar •was they took power!

He's now come to different conclusion... Building a leadership deeply involved in the mass struggles, organising the workers, and determined to recognise that there is no peaceful road to power and there is no road to power that depends on any wing of the bourgeoisie... but only the working people organised by a revolutionary party which leads politically and militarily, leading the popular masses themselves, can take power...

The perspectives [of the Cuban and Salvadoran Communist Party leaderships] of the fusion of the forces that are struggling Tor this goal,, to build new vanguard parties, is the source, in our opinion, of a new world movement...

It's important to understand that literally eighty per cent - 1 can't prove this; maybe it's 70, maybe it's 90 - 80% of those on a world scale who call themselves Trotskyists, consider themselves Trotskyists... sincerely... are hopeless, irreformable sectarians.

What is done in the-name of Trotsky and Trotskyism is horrendous... Let me give you a couple ot examples.

A substantial Trotskyist organisation in Britain, the Workers' Revolutionary Party, which has certain peculiarities that I won't go into... [said that] in 1982 Castro heads a bonapartist regime based on capitalist state foundations:

Another British group - these are the people who put out a paper called Socialist Organiser -[say that]... Fidel Castro leads a Stalinist bureaucracy that rules Cuba against the workers and peasants. The beginning of the decline of the Socialist Workers' Party of the United States began with their attempt to describe this as a workers' and farmers' government and this was continued by describing Nicaragua as such...

... We are not Trotskyjsts; we are not that... any more than Trotsky ever said he was. We are communists. Our roots go back as a proletarian political current, back to the Manifesto itself and back to the Comintern, and that's the convergence that's taking place on a world scale.

Blurring ... In defending himself [against the Stalinists! Trotsky had to explain the revolutionary character of his ideas before 1917. In so doing a process begins of blurring, what revolutionary continuity is... Then at the end of the ['20s] ... battling the horrible disaster in China, which the Comintern dominated by Stalin and Bukharin led to, Trotsky in explaining the permanent revolution and its necessary character, said this:

"We are sure that the third Chinese revolution... will not have a democratic period, not even such a six-month period as the October revolution had between November 1917 and July 1918. The Chinese revolution will be compelled from the very outset to effect the most decisive shakeup and the abolition of bourgeois property from the city to the village"

well, of course, this was not to be Trotsky's view later. Of course, from Forum magazine (USA)

the idea that the abolition of bourgeois property from the city to the countryside in China was immediately possible when the workers and peasants took power is unthinkable. Of course they had a period like from November 1917 to July 1918, which extended much longer than they actually expected it to.

In attempting to fight the opportunist direction that Stalin had taken, Trotsky bent the stick to He also, as part of this counter attack, insisted on the weakness of Lenin's basic idea on the working class and the peasantry vis-a-vis governmental power. He says the weak point of Lenin's conception was the internally contradictory idea of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, the political bloc of two classes whose interests only partially coincide...

It may have been in Trotsky's view Lenin's weak point, but Lenin was completely aware of this point; he considered it exactly the transitional algebraic thing needed for this transition.

Trotsky then goes on and says Lenin had been influenced by historical experience and had acknowledged this idea, this formula, to be without value.

It's the only thing that I can remember Trotsky ever writing which I believe was factually false. I have yet to find anyone showing anywhere, anything that Lenin wrote where he ever said this...

Why Trotsky believed this to be the case I have no way of knowing...

Each time a party fuses with other forces, it itself changes and advances. That's its road forward.

The Fourth International has a historic role to play in this process... because there are now revolutionaries worthy of the name outside of ourselves, on a world scale, playing a mighty historical role:

We should never forget that we must show ourselves worthy of the name. It's okay to recog nise their existence; that's good, because without it we can't do anything. But unless we ourselves, prove what we are capable of, we cannot advance. We must prove this, we must consciously... move to carry it out, toward a goal of fusion, discussion, collaboration, and carry out parallel processes in the United States that are being raised by the real revolutionaries in the centre of the world revolution.

... We will get much, much more by reducing the permanent revolution, by pointing out, in my opinion, that it is not correct and not useful as a general term for our programme; we will rediscover Trotsky, more richly and more aptly, as the continuation of the battle which decides the victory of the Russian revolution.

Another point. Communism will be the common name, will be the name of the parties that are going to be formed, will be, for the same reason it was with the Communist Manifesto, for the same reason the Bolsheviks changed 'their name, for the same reason that the Cubans chose the name, that will be the name. It will be a common heritage, which the great revolutionists will fit into and which everyone coming from every point of view will find them and their value. Trotskyism, that term itself, I predict, none of us will call ourselves before this decade's out...

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Trotskyism and the Socialist Workers Party