[Marxism] THE AGE (Melbourne, Australia): Nuclear no nightmare, says unionism's new face

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Dave Riley has sent us a hell of a bizarre post on the supposed propensity
of Trotskyism to breed right wingers, something he attributes to "that when
you're a Trot in the 20th century at least you were always outside the main
battalions of the working class, being, in the main, an isolated
propagandist current who was always right despite that isolation."

It sounds good until you stop and ask yourself: just what "main battalions
of the working class" could Dave Riley have been thinking of in the
imperialist countries? Certainly not the ones in the United States. Since
the late 1940's as there's been no actual independent *class*  movement that
these battalions would have been part of, and therefore no battalions, main
or otherwise. 

True, I guess it could be argued that since the battalions didn't exist
therefore the Trotskyists were isolated from them, but then that would
hardly become a distinguishing mark of the Trotskyists that explains their
specific evolution, as it would be an "isolation" shared by everyone else in
society.

But what Riley describes is really the experience of the 1930's. That was a
very long time ago, very, very few who were active then are alive now. 

Moreover, insofar as there has been political motion in the advanced
capitalist countries the post-WWII period Trotskyist groups have not been
isolated from it. That wasn't the status of the U.S. SWP in the 1960's and
1970's, nor of the British IMG, nor the French LCR, etc. And it's certainly
not been the trajectory of what is now the DSP in Australia,  unless I've
been very badly misinformed.

But there are any number of other equally or even more outlandish assertions
in Riley's post. 

"One of the major attributes of Trotskyism is that it can serve as the last
hesitation to communism. and I think it fulfilled that role for a few from
the '40s at least."

Silly me. And here I thought that Trotsky's greatest contribution was
precisely his effort to preserve genuine communism, genuine Marxism, against
Stalinism. But the way Riley's post reads, you'd think Stalinism was genuine
communism. 

This impression is partly re-enforced, partly contradicted, in the next
sentences: "It gives you an alternative view of the Soviet Union et al so
that you don't have to accept Stalinism -- or other nasties (and you get to
pick what you embrace as kosher). Also consider the erstwhile "New York
Intellectuals"  who embraced Trotsky in the '30s. I think this gets played
out in state capitalist theory such that these comrades can be extremely
hostile to already existing socialist experiments and quite prone to
adapting to bourgeois commie baiting."

What mealy-mouthed equivocation! Under the rubric of "already existing
socialist experiments," the difference between a revolutionary government
and a counterrevolutionary capitalist restorationist petty-bourgeois
bureaucratic usurpationist one is completely obliterated. As to being "quite
prone to adapting to bourgeois commie bating," is, frankly, the kind of
stupid slander I've been hearing for decades from Stalinists.

By coincidence, I just happened to stray across "Rock Follies" on the
Internet, a British TV miniseries made 30 years ago that made quite an
impression on me when I first saw it decades ago. And I was watching an
episode right before reading this post. And in it, one of the characters, an
American woman record and music executive, says something like that the 60's
are over in the United States, everyone is into getting money.

I think this suggests a much more obvious analysis of the drift to the right
by (some) radicals from that generation. Whatever it was that drove the
radicalization of the 1960's receded, and imperialist privilege re-enforced
by the destabilized bourgeois political ideological hegemony came into full
sway. 

That pressure remains to this day. There is no need for outlandish theories
to explain why some radicals become ultra-right wingers. And as for others
becoming labor bureaucrats, that's a rather time-honored phenomenon.

Joaquin