LENINISM, TROTSKYISM & SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION TODAY
(Published in IS Canada's Internal Bulletin, Jan. 9, 1996. Document is a statement of the Political Reorientation Faction and was written by David Camfield)
I. From the Russian Revolution to Today
Revolutionary socialist politics develops when socialists are
able to learn from the struggles of the exploited and oppressed.
Marx learned from the Paris Commune of 1871 that the working
class must shatter the capitalist state and create new forms of
socialist democracy in order to take power. The Russian
Revolution made this clear again, as Lenin reminded the world in
STATE AND REVOLUTION. The success of the Russian Revolution and
the failure of the revolutionary upheavals in Europe between 1918
and 1923 proved that the working class cannot take power without
an experienced mass party of the revolutionary vanguard to lead
it.
At the close of the 20th century, the lessons of the
Russian Revolution remain the necessary -- but not sufficient --
foundation of socialism from below. These lessons formed the
basis of the programme of the Communist International (Comintern)
between 1919 and 1923. From them Trotsky generalized his theory
of permanent revolution and developed a critique of Stalinism.
The tiny and isolated Trotskyist movement sought to preserve
these politics ("Bolshevik-Leninism") in the "Midnight of the
Century", the years of Stalinism, fascism and imperialist war
between the late 1920s and 1945. It succeeded -- but at the cost
of hardening into dogmatism and inflexibility.
After the Second World War a new current (in Britain, the
Socialist Review group around Tony Cliff, later called
International Socialism; in the U.S. the Independent Socialist
Clubs around Hal Draper) emerged. By criticizing orthodox
Trotskyism from the standpoint of the self-emancipation of the
working class and a commitment to developing Marxism to explain
the postwar world it made important theoretical contributions
(the analysis of state capitalism, permanent arms economy and
deflected permanent revolution; insights about class struggle in
advanced capitalist countries during the postwar boom; the
concept of socialism from below). This current kept classical
Marxism alive as a small but dynamic force in the struggles of
the upturn of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It survived the
downturn that began in the mid-1970s.[1]
Serious problems in the Canadian I.S. and, more
generally, the I.S. Tendency, have made it clear that this
"reoriented Trotskyism" (Alex Callinicos's term in TROTSKYISM)
needs to be critically evaluated, much as it began to reevaluate
the Trotskyist movement and the early Comintern. To begin, we
need to go back to the roots of Western European and North
American Leninism.
II. Bolshevism Exported
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks formed the
Comintern and attempted to export their politics to the millions
of workers (and others) who rallied to the powerful call for
"Soviet Power" and world revolution. Many of the men and women
drawn to the Comintern were the cream of the working class
movement, self-educated socialist worker-intellectuals and
experienced militants. Politically, they were a varied lot:
"centrists" whose revolutionary aspirations had not been freed
from the gradualist parliamentarism of the Second International,
revolutionary purists who suffered from ultra-leftism,
sectarianism and abstract propagandism, and syndicalists who
believed in organizing revolutionary industrial unions.
The Bolsheviks' aim was to build new mass revolutionary
parties by winning leftward-moving workers to the Comintern while
separating them from non-revolutionary labour leaders pulled in
behind their radicalizing rank and file. At first the Bolsheviks
thought that the West was on the brink of revolution. With the
failure of the German and Hungarian Revolutions in 1918-19, it
became clear to the Bolsheviks that the Western Communist Parties
(C.P.s) had to do more than call for soviet power and prepare for
insurrection. They set about winning the new parties away from
ultra-left attitudes to unions, parliamentary elections and
alliances with the peasantry. At the same time they battled
centrism. But both ultra-leftism and centrism persisted. Ultra-
left directives from Russian Comintern leaders led to the
disastrous "March Action" putsch in Germany in 1921. The 3rd
Comintern Congress later that year recognized that revolution was
not imminent in Europe (although the Comintern leadership still
had an overly optimistic evaluation of where the working classes
in the Western bourgeois democracies were at). It proposed the
united front policy to win majority support for the C.P.s among
workers, but covered up responsibility for the German disaster. A
comprehensive transformation of the C.P.s into "parties of a new
type" was demanded. As a Canadian Communist argued, the
revolutionary party must be "a party of action... a party of the
workers, and with them in their daily struggles against
capitalist oppression" (in Angus, 103).
As Tony Cliff argues in one of his best books, the third
volume of LENIN (3 vol. ed.), the Bolsheviks failed to "graft
Bolshevism" onto the C.P.s outside of Russia before the Comintern
leadership succumbed to Stalinism in late 1923. Mass vanguard
parties were built in Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, Italy, Norway and France (although centrists led
the latter two parties until 1923). However, strong, independent-
thinking revolutionary leaderships could not easily be developed
in the time available. Incompetent Comintern intervention in
foreign C.P.s made this task even more difficult. Even in the
most important Western section of the Comintern, the German C.P.
(K.P.D.), after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg a leadership up to
the task of leading the struggle for power was not formed. Paul
Levi, around whom such a leadership might have developed, was
expelled after he criticized the "March Action" in public. The
revolutionary situation in Germany in October 1923 tested the
K.P.D. and Comintern leaderships and found both lacking.
In many countries revolutionary mass parties were not
built. While the K.P.D. fell to under 150 000 after the "March
Action" but built itself up to over 218 000 by late 1922, the
Communist Party of Great Britain was not formed until 1920, and
had but 3000 real members (while claiming 10 000). In the U.S., a
united, above-ground C.P. only emerged at the end of 1921, with
some 10 000 members. Likewise in Canada: the C.P. formed in May
1921 had 4800 members, "the great majority" (Angus 80) of whom
belonged to semi-autonomous Finnish and Ukrainian "language
federations". These three parties were formed after the height of
the post-war radicalization, which peaked in 1919 in Britain,
Canada and the U.S. Although their "rooted" worker members gave
these C.P.s an influence larger than their small size suggests,
they only became the leading force in small pockets of the
working classes in their respective countries (e.g. in Canada
among Cape Breton and B.C. miners).
The 1921 Comintern Congress drew up a detailed
organizational scheme ("The Organizational Structure of the
Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of Their Work:
Theses") that has become the model of a democratic centralist
vanguard party for most socialists. But at the 1922 Congress,
Lenin said it was "almost exclusively Russian: it is wholly
derived from a study of Russian developments. This is the good
side of the resolution, but it is also the bad side... if by rare
chance a foreigner could understand it, he could not possibly
carry it out" (in HARRY WICKS, 25).
Harry Wicks, worker militant and founding member of
British Communist and Trotskyist movements, had this to say about
the 1922 reorganization of the C.P.G.B. along the lines laid down
by the Comintern (agitational newspaper, small neighbourhood or
factory groups replacing branches etc.): "The first casualty...
was the political discussion among the membership. Despite the
declared desire for monthly aggregate meetings, the demands of
the group meetings on members' time meant less and less
opportunity for the exchange and clash of opinions. The
membership felt the loss of political life that the old style
branch meetings gave them. Were these growing pains or the
conservative clinging to past forms of organization? Two points
are clear from this period. The party became much more dynamic,
and its press... was soon revealed in its new role, that of
agitating and leading on the day-to-day issues" (24-25). It is
fair to say that the impact of the changes was mixed.
Comintern leaders only partially understood the specific
difficulties involved in building revolutionary parties in
advanced capitalist countries where bourgeois democracy existed
and working class reformism was much stronger than in Tsarist
Russia (even if labour bureaucracies were weak by today's
standards). Italian C.P. leader Antonio Gramsci made an effort to
come to terms with the differences between Russia and the West in
his PRISON NOTEBOOKS. But he did not work out an adequate
explanation of these issues, despite insights about workers'
consciousness, the greater importance of popular consent in
maintaining bourgeois rule in the West as compared with Russia,
and the role of a revolutionary party in the process through
which the working class becomes conscious of its interests and
forges a revolutionary bloc with other social forces (peasants
etc.). There is still no adequate Marxist theory of how workers'
experience in advanced capitalism generally produces a fragmented
non-revolutionary consciousness that fits with reformism.
III. The Trotskyist experience: marginalized Leninism
The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the U.S.S.R. and the
Stalinization of the Comintern produced resignations, expulsions
and splits in C.P.s around the world during the 1920s. The
International Left Opposition (from 1930, International Communist
League) formed by Trotsky opposed Stalinism and its politics of
"socialism in one country" from the perspective of the Marxism of
the 1919-1923 Comintern. Although it was the only coherent anti-
Stalinist revolutionary socialist current, it was extremely
marginal. The "Fourth International (World Party of the Socialist
Revolution)" founded prematurely by Trotsky in 1938 had a
membership of only a few thousand. Its largest section, the
American Socialist Workers Party (American S.W.P.), then numbered
1520. Many of the sections were tiny internalized grouplets. Few
had more than handfuls of worker militants. In most countries,
most workers who considered themselves revolutionaries were in
the Stalinist C.P.s, despite massive losses of those who had
joined in the 1920s. Although there are a few positive and rather
more negative lessons to be learned from the Stalinist C.P.s in
the 1930s, the C.P.s ceased to be revolutionary parties in any
sense after the Popular Front line of alliance with the
"progressive bourgeoisie" against fascism was adopted in 1935.
Many then grew substantially, recruiting from the working and
middle classes.
The strength of the Trotskyist movement lay in Trotsky's
political analyses (of the Russian, Chinese and Spanish
Revolutions, the struggle against fascism in Germany, permanent
revolution etc.). But it also had major political weaknesses.
Trotsky's analysis of the U.S.S.R. as a "degenerated workers'
state" was one. Others, set out in the Transitional Programme in
1938, included the belief that capitalism was in its "death
agony" and that "The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to
the crisis of revolutionary leadership." The first claim was not
based on any serious Marxist economic analysis. The second would
only have been true if revolutionary situations existed
everywhere but workers were being misled by non-revolutionary
leaderships (as in Spain 1936-37). In 1938, this was a fantasy.
It gave Trotskyism:
a fixed model of society in which the working classes
were continually straining at the leash, or about to
strain at the leash, held back only by the betrayals of
their perfidious leadership... from it derived one of the
characteristic traits of post-war Trotskyism: a
systematic blindness to the actual consciousness and
concerns of the working class" (Molyneux 180).
To this model was added the belief that tiny Trotskyist
groups were "revolutionary parties" because they and they alone
possessed the programme for revolutionary leadership. Only in Sri
Lanka and Bolivia in the 1950s did Trotskyists come anywhere
close to forming mass revolutionary parties.[2] But in 1946
American S.W.P. leader James Cannon wrote that "The revolutionary
vanguard party destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary
movement in the U.S. does not have to be created. It already
exists, and its name is the Socialist Workers' Party." At the
time, the American S.W.P. had only 1470 members.
This kind of ridiculous self-importance and failure to
understand the real tasks for groups with few if any roots among
workers generated sectifying pressures to which many orthodox
Trotskyist groups succumbed.[3] The material basis for this was
isolation from the struggles of workers and the oppressed. But
sectification also had a theoretical source inherited from the
pre-Stalinist Comintern.
The problem lay in a confusion between revolutionary
socialist groups as they actually existed and the mass vanguard
party required to lead a socialist revolution. According to the
Comintern theses on party organization discussed earlier, "At
every stage of the revolutionary class struggle... the Communist
Party must be the vanguard, the most advanced section of the
proletariat" (234). This equation of party with vanguard led many
a Trotskyist group to consider itself a vanguard party. But what
if the group in question was not in fact the vanguard, a
substantial layer of revolutionary workers? Only a few groups
both realized that their organizations were not and drew the
appropriate conclusion. Three years after Cannon proclaimed the
American S.W.P. the party of the American Revolution, the
Workers' Party (the other significant Trotskyist group in the
U.S.) changed its name to Independent Socialist League in
recognition of the fact that it was a propaganda group, not a
party (the initiative came from Hal Draper).
IV. Critical Leninism
After the Second World War the fundamental issue became clear:
there was no working class vanguard. The task of Marxists after
the Russian Revolution had been to organize and expand an
existing vanguard, or elements of one, into a party. By the
1950s, the vanguard layers in North America and Europe had been
destroyed by repression, years of working class defeat, the
twists and turns through which the C.P.s degenerated into
bureaucratic reformist pawns of the Kremlin, and the
recomposition of the working class in postwar capitalism.
In the late 1960s, Duncan Hallas of the British I.S.
wrote:
Not only has the vanguard, in the real sense of a
considerable layer of organised revolutionary workers and
intellectuals, been destroyed. So too has the
environment, the tradition, that gave it influence... The
crux of the matter is how to develop the process, now
begun, of recreating it ("Towards..." 16).
Vanguard and revolutionary organization are not
identical. In most of the world today there is no vanguard. It is
absolutely vital to understand this and draw appropriate
conclusions about how socialists should orient and organize
themselves if a current of socialism from below is to flourish in
the 21st century.
Hallas also laid out other features of "critical
Leninism" that distinguish it from most of the Trotskyist
tradition -- including, sadly, many groups in the I.S. Tendency
today:
a party cannot possibly be created except on a thoroughly
democratic basis... in its internal life, vigorous
controversy is the rule and various tendencies and shades
of opinion are represented... Internal democracy is not
an optional extra. It is fundamental to the relationship
between party members and those amongst whom they work...
The self-education of militants is impossible in an
atmosphere of sterile orthodoxy. Self-reliance and
confidence in one's ideas are developed in the course of
that genuine debate that takes place in an atmosphere
where differences are freely and openly argued. The
"monolithic party" is a Stalinist concept. Uniformity and
democracy are mutually incompatible" (21).
This critical Leninism remains a very important contribution to
the tradition of socialism from below.
V. The I.S. experience
It is not enough to have a critical understanding of Leninism.
Socialists also have to understand what Leninist ideas about
revolutionary organization mean for their activity in the actual
situation in which they find themselves.
One of the greatest strengths of the Socialist Review/
International Socialism group in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s
(and the American I.S.C.) was that they realized that the
Leninist model of party-building was irrelevant for such a small
organization. S.R./I.S. realized that it would be foolish to set
itself the task of building a revolutionary party.[4] Its members
had a healthy sense of proportion. As the official Socialist
Workers Party (British S.W.P.) history puts it, "Indeed, one of
the things that distinguished I.S. from most other revolutionary
groupings at the time was an ability to look at itself with a
sense of humour, at times a self-deprecating one" (Birchall 8).
At first, S.R.'s few dozen members concentrated their
efforts on spreading their ideas within the Labour Party. Later
on they were active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Although S.R. had only a few unionists, they were active and the
group paid close attention to British working class issues as
well as international politics. This perspective was a
counterweight to the dangers of total isolation and "falling into
a complete fantasy world" (6) that afflict tiny Marxist groups.
In 1960 S.R. launched INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM as a quarterly
journal, and in 1961 began to publish a monthly paper aimed at
industrial workers. From 1961 S.R. also worked through a Labour
left paper. In 1965 I.S. (the name changed in 1962), by then over
200, began to withdraw from the Labour Party.
The events of 1968 pushed I.S. membership from 447 to
over 1000 (mostly students). After heated debates at two
conferences, I.S. reorganized itself along the kind of lines that
Hallas advocates, those of critical Leninism. Then followed a
"turn to the class". This eventually produced a group that peaked
in early 1974 at close to 4000 members (mostly workers) and a
paid sale of 35 000 copies of its weekly paper. Yet in Sept. 1976
its leadership still insisted that with 3000 members it, like the
300-strong American I.S., was "basically a propaganda
organisation striving to transform itself into an interventionist
organisation" even if it was "somewhat further along the road"
than the U.S. group. ("To Members of the NC of ISUS" 2). Critical
Leninism was still alive, despite the many mistakes and internal
debates of the early 1970s.
Almost twenty years later, there is little evidence of
critical Leninism in the leadership of the British S.W.P. or any
of the other groups in the I.S. Tendency (I.S.T.). How exactly
this came about is a question that remains to be answered. The
downturn that set in in the mid-1970s and the British S.W.P.'s
response to this difficult period are part of the explanation.
Like orthodox Trotskyism before it, the I.S.T. is losing sight of
its marginal position and real tasks. On the basis of the idea
that the 1990s are "the 1930s in slow motion", the current I.S.T.
perspective pushes the rapid transformation of propaganda groups
of a few hundred into agitational organizations. There is little
sense of proportion left. The gap between the analysis of the
period and the "party-building" perspectives on the one hand and
the reality of the world on the other produces sectifying
pressures.
At least one leading member of the Canadian I.S. has
stated publicly that the group is in transition from a propaganda
group to an agitational organization.[5] This is simply false,
and raises the question of how to understand different kinds of
socialist organizations and their appropriate tasks. Although
groups take many different forms, and what they should do differs
depending on the conditions in which they operate, it is helpful
to think of four basic kinds of socialist organization. However,
in looking at socialist groups in this way it is important not to
make the mistake of thinking that a group will automatically grow
through these various stages in a linear way.
Study circles learn and clarify basic Marxist ideas, with
little attention to non-members. Propaganda groups use Marxist
ideas to explain what is happening in the world and recruit
because they are able to do so. They may or may not also have
some capacity to agitate and intervene in struggle. Propaganda
involves explaining many ideas to relatively few people (e.g.
arguing why cutbacks are caused by capitalism, not misguided
politicians). Agitation involves spreading a few ideas to many
people (e.g. arguing to build a general strike called by union
leaders). Agitational organizations or parties are able to lead
mass struggles and recruit on that basis. Mass revolutionary
parties organize a significant portion of a working class
vanguard.
Between 1987 and 1993 the Canadian I.S. went from being a
fairly loose and passive organization with elements of both a
propaganda group and a study circle whose propaganda was usually
quite general to a more active propaganda group making more
concrete propaganda and capable of a little bit of agitation and
involvement in struggle. It had a healthy sense of how small it
was. Objectively, the I.S. today is a sectifying propaganda group
with little understanding of its tasks. Most I.S. members are
students and university-educated workers. Yet the I.S. tries to
organize as a miniature version of a group more than thirty-five
times its size, the British S.W.P., which is best described as a
hybrid propaganda group/agitational organization of over 9000
members (including many union activists) and a real capacity to
intervene. That is why the Political Reorientation Faction has
been formed.
VI. Looking forward
What can we learn from this history? Revolutionary socialists are
building on sand unless they have a reasonably accurate answer to
three questions: what is going on in the country in which they
are active, where are they located within that, and what are
their appropriate tasks? Getting one or more of these wrong will
sooner or later cause problems for an organization (the Canadian
I.S. is wrong on all three).
There are no short cuts to building stronger
revolutionary socialist groups. It is a fact that since the end
of the 1920s most revolutionary socialist organizations have been
small propaganda groups with weak implantation in the working
class. Yet the early Comintern, on which Trotskyist politics are
based, had very little to say about such groups. The Comintern in
Lenin's day seems to have assumed that C.P.s would be at least
agitational organizations able to lead a layer of vanguard
workers in struggle. Trotskyists have by and large failed to
understand the distinction between working class vanguard and
revolutionary organization. Nor did many see that by the 1950s
working class vanguards no longer existed in most countries and
that the task was to help recreate them in the mass struggles of
the future.
The Marxists who best understood all this were in the
British S.R./I.S. It survived and grew not only because of its
state capitalist analysis of Stalinism but because it put the
"working class at the centre of its analysis and activity, as
opposed to the parliamentary vanguard of the Tribune left [in the
Labour Party] and the revolutionary vanguard of the comic opera
bolsheviks [orthodox Trotskyists]" (Higgins, 8). It explicitly
recognized its size and tasks, did not pretend to be building a
Leninist party, and in an open-minded manner paid close attention
to the British working class as well as developments in world
politics. It developed a critical Leninism and after 1968 made a
transition from a largely student propaganda group to one rooted
in the working class with a real ability to intervene in
struggle.
In many countries, elements of a new vanguard, or
possibilities for creating them, emerged in the last
international upturn in struggle (c. 1965-1975). However, these
gains were eroded in the subsequent downturn. We should remember
that the biggest revolutionary socialist group built in English
Canada since the C.P. degenerated was the Revolutionary Workers'
League, a Fourth International affiliate which had between 350
and 500 members (largely students and ex-students) in the late
1970s. Quebec-based revolutionary Maoists were several thousand
strong (including many union activists) slightly later. These
groups were wrecked by the downturn, politics that at best only
partially rejected Stalinism, and by unrealistic perspectives for
building.
The development of a new layer of revolutionary workers
in North America and Europe will not happen without an upsurge of
class struggle greater than anything seen in this part of the
world for many years. Contrary to what Trotsky wrote in 1938, the
working class in the advanced capitalist countries and much of
the rest of the world today has a crisis of self-mobilization:
there are few or no networks of worker militants to organize
resistance, and weak political traditions in the working class.
Of course, revolutionary socialist leadership has a vital part to
play in addressing these problems. However, workers will have to
devise new forms of class organization on a rank-and-file, class
struggle, internationalist basis. Without a sharp increase in the
level of class struggle new vanguards cannot be even partially
recreated (although many workers will be radicalized by the
ongoing ruling class offensive). Without revolutionary politics,
workers are finding it difficult to successfully fight back in a
world economy where capital is highly mobile and economic
restructuring is wreaking havoc on their lives.
Today, socialists need to learn from the S.R./I.S.
example when considering the years ahead. While the period in
which we live is very different from the years in which S.R./I.S.
built, our situations do have real similarities. What we can take
from them is more than the politics of socialism from below plus
a commitment to learn from and analyze the working class as it
really is and not as we might wish it to be. It is also a
question of how to organize and build: there is no point in
pretending to organize along the lines of a Leninist party. It is
a dangerous mistake for small groups of socialists to believe
that if they adopt a highly centralized ("Leninist") form of
organization they can propel themselves into becoming genuine
agitational groups, with the necessary roots in a vanguard layer
of workers. To apply the methods of Leninist party-building to
small propaganda groups creates pressures that push such groups
towards becoming sects.
Although the working class needs to build parties along
the lines sketched out by critical Leninists, socialist groups of
a few hundred or even thousands of members are not parties. A
socialist group in Canada that could honestly call itself a party
would have to be an agitational organization of many thousands of
workers. We cannot predict exactly how the kind of parties that
we want to see will emerge. However, they can only be built if
larger groups of open-minded, honest and self-critical
revolutionary socialists merge with larger new forces: groups of
radicalizing workers and the oppressed that do not exist now but
which will emerge in future struggles.
It is a mistake for a small group of Marxists to say that
it is trying to build itself into a party. Instead it should
commit itself to making a serious contribution to the development
of such a party. The alternative to pretentious "party-building"
is not a loose group in which revolutionary socialism and
identity politics coexist[6] but the kind of organization the
Political Reorientation Faction argues for in its Declaration.
David C.
for the Political Reorientation Faction
NOTES
[1] Despite the many weaknesses of what is now the I.S.
Tendency, its politics shine in comparison to orthodox Trotskyism
(see Alex Callinicos, TROTSKYISM, 23-54). The largest orthodox
Trotskyist current, the United Secretariat of the Fourth
International (whose best known figure was the late Ernest
Mandel), is now divided between a disoriented majority that has
adapted heavily to non-Marxist politics and advocates regroupment
with non-revolutionaries, and a minority that clings to the
party-building approach of the 1970s. Most other orthodox
Trotskyists are stuck in the late 1930s.
[2] The Sri Lankan L.S.S.P. espoused Trotskyism verbally
but was in practice a left reformist party, while the Bolivian
P.O.R.'s support for a middle class radical nationalist
government prevented it from taking advantage of a revolutionary
situation.
[3] Although Marx used the term sect to refer to small
socialist groups in general, as opposed to "an independent
historical movement" (Marx to Bolte, 253) of the working class,
in this document the term is used to refer to a group so cut off
from reality that it can no longer contribute to advancing the
class struggle. A sect in this sense is not necessarily a cult
(e.g. the "Sparts") or sectarian in the sense of counterposing
its own narrow interests to those of the struggle. Today the
Canadian I.S. is not yet a sect, but it is pulled in this
direction by its "party-building" pretensions, the gap between
the real world and the leadership's analysis of the world and
perspectives, and its bureaucratic centralist internal regime.
[4] Before 1968, many members of S.R./I.S. actually
thought of a revolutionary party in terms that were closer to
those of the early Rosa Luxemburg than of Lenin. This is clear in
Cliff's essay "Trotsky on Substitutionism" and the first edition
of his ROSA LUXEMBURG.
[5] Abbie Bakan in a talk, "Leninism: Theory and
Practice," at the Toronto cadre school held Aug. 12, 1995.
[6] Such as the American group Solidarity.
SOURCES CITED
Ian Angus, CANADIAN BOLSHEVIKS (Vanguard, 1981).
Ian Birchall, `THE SMALLEST MASS PARTY IN THE WORLD': BUILDING
THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY, 1951-1979 (S.W.P., 1981).
Alex Callinicos, TROTSKYISM (Open University Press, 1990).
Central Committee ISGB, "To Members of the NC of ISUS."
(Unpublished letter, 1976).
Tony Cliff, "Trotsky on Substitutionism." (1960). Reprinted in
NEITHER WASHINGTON NOR MOSCOW (Bookmarks, 1982).
________, LENIN, vol. 3, REVOLUTION BESIEGED (Bookmarks, 1987).
Duncan Hallas, "Towards a Revolutionary Socialist Party."
Reprinted in PARTY AND CLASS (Pluto, 1972).
HARRY WICKS: A MEMORIAL (Socialist Platform, 1989).
Jim Higgins (ed.), A SOCIALIST REVIEW (International Socialism,
1965).
Karl Marx to Friedrich Bolte, Nov. 23 1871. In Marx and Engels,
SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE (Progress, 1975), 253-255.
John Molyneux, LEON TROTSKY'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION (Harvester,
1981).
"The Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, the
Methods and Content of Their Work: Theses." THESES,
RESOLUTIONS AND MANIFESTOS OF THE FIRST FOUR CONGRESSES
OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL (Pluto, 1983), 234-261.
