On Kowalewski’s 1980s Rediscovery of Trotsky

Why Ukraine’s Right to Self-Determination Is Unconditional

TL;DR

A Polish Trotskyist who helped plan the Łódź active strike of December 1981 spent the next decade publishing in Fourth International journals, often under the pseudonym Arthur Wilkins, on the Ukrainian national question. His 1989 article in International Marxist Review mobilised Trotsky’s 1939 polemics against late-Soviet realities and identified a structural error: treating Ukrainian self-determination as subordinate to defending nationalised property forms. Today’s campist subordination of Ukrainian self-determination to anti-NATO calculation makes the same structural mistake with the polarity reversed. Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski had worked the answer out before the question became urgent. 

On 9 December 1981, after mass meetings in twelve of Łódź’s largest factories, Andrzej Słowik told a comrade what the workers had said. They wanted the active strike. They wanted workers’ guards in the enterprises. The first active strike was scheduled for 21 December: the working class of the Łódź region would take control of production and distribution, and self-defence militias would form in the workplaces. Słowik’s interlocutor was Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski, member of the Presidium of the Regional Executive Committee and author of the pamphlet O taktyce strajku czynnego that Trybuna Ludu had denounced as a scenario for the seizure of power by Solidarność. Kowalewski was in Paris when Jaruzelski declared the state of war on 13 December. He stayed.

Not flight. Accident of organisation: he had travelled at the invitation of French trade unionists, the state of war made return first impossible and then politically meaningless, and by the time the planning sessions in Paris settled into the routines of exile he had become the principal Trotskyist analyst of a revolution he had been preparing to extend.

He started publishing immediately. Le Monde, 7 January 1982. Labour Focus on Eastern Europe in the spring. Both under his own name. The Łódź article in Labour Focus names the experts who opposed the active strike, the National Commission member who had dismissed it in Lublin on 4 December as ‘an idea launched by leftists and Trotskyists’, the November survey showing 65 per cent of Łódź region members favouring active over passive strike. The work of someone who had been in the room.

The Fourth International publications carried a different byline. From at least April 1985, Kowalewski appears in International Viewpoint as Arthur Wilkins. The IV-73 issue, dated 8 April 1985, carries two Wilkins articles in succession: one on Jaruzelski’s anti-Ukrainian press campaign, the other on the political thought of Osyp Diakiv-Hornovy and Petro Poltava and the OUN’s 1943 turn toward what Hornovy called a society without exploitation. The same byline runs across Quatrième Internationale and Inprecor in the same period.

The pseudonym was not for Paris. It was for Łódź. Kowalewski helped edit the Polish-language Inprekor, which circulated clandestinely back into Poland through Solidarność’s underground network from 1981 to 1990. A traceable byline from Western Fourth International journals to Polish underground distribution carried risks his Polish comrades would have borne. Wilkins protected the channel.

The 1989 article

‘For the Independence of Soviet Ukraine’ arrived at the moment when the question it answered was about to be overtaken by events.

It opens with two long block quotations from Trotsky’s 1939 polemic ‘The Independence of Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads’. The passages on the Bonapartist bureaucracy throwing the masses back in the national sphere, on the constituent congress as the only democratic framework in which an oppressed people becomes free, on the sectarian who finds himself ‘siding with the police’ against Ukrainian independence, are Trotsky, not Kowalewski. He sets them out as the framework he then mobilises.

His own analytical voice begins immediately afterwards. The defence of the slogan of Ukrainian independence, he notes, was adopted by the World Congresses of the Fourth International in 1957 and 1979, and is ‘a task of enormous political importance today’. The slogan was on the books. It had been adopted twice. The argument from this point forward is not that the international lacked the position; it is that the position was not being mobilised.

Kowalewski names the cost. If the slogan does not become part of general propaganda and agitation, he writes, the socialist opposition in the USSR will ‘leave the field open to the bureaucracy’, which hopes to isolate the anti-bureaucratic struggles in the non-Russian republics from the workers in Great Russia. Published 1989. The thing it predicted was the post-1991 transition of the Soviet nomenklatura into a nationalist oligarchic class on exactly the terrain Kowalewski warned would be ceded.

The article’s most quietly devastating passage indicts his own tradition. The question of whether Trotsky’s framework for the post-revolutionary state could simply be reused for the anti-bureaucratic revolution, or whether ‘a totally new approach is necessary’, is, Kowalewski writes, a question of the first importance that ‘seems never to have been taken up by the Trotskyist movement’. Inside the Fourth International’s theoretical journal. In the period when the Soviet bureaucracy was beginning its transition to capitalism. From a Polish revolutionary writing for once under his own name, the question deserving his name attached to it.

The subordination error

What had not been taken up was the subordination question. Kowalewski did not name it that way; he ran the argument through Trotsky and through the Borotbist and Ukapist contributions to permanent revolution. The structural problem he was pointing at can be stated directly.

The defencist tradition that emerged in the late 1930s and consolidated after the Second World War subordinated the right of self-determination of nations oppressed by the Soviet bureaucracy to the defence of the property forms inherited from October 1917. The bureaucracy’s strangulation of Ukrainian national life was, on this reading, regrettable but secondary; the property forms were primary. Pierre Frank’s framework (a separate Red Mole piece will return to this) refused that subordination at the level of theory. The class character of a state is determined by the process that produced its institutions, not by the institutions in isolation. Bureaucratic decree from above does not create a transitional society; mass mobilisation from below does. The bureaucratic management of nationalised property over the heads of the working class, however necessary the property forms were to defend against capitalist restoration, did not itself constitute socialist progress and could not override the rights of the nations the bureaucracy oppressed.

Kowalewski mobilised the convergent insight in 1989 even though he ran the argument through Trotsky rather than Frank. The Soviet bureaucracy’s strangulation of Ukrainian national life could not be defended on property-form grounds. Trotsky’s 1939 polemic had said the same thing in different vocabulary. The sectarian who refused independence in the name of socialist unification was, in his words, siding with the police.

The same error, polarity reversed

The contemporary campist position recapitulates the structural error with the polarity reversed.

The Russian state today is not a workers’ state of any kind: capitalist restoration completed thirty years ago, and the oligarchic regime that emerged is what Kowalewski’s 1989 prediction said it would be. The campist subordination of Ukrainian self-determination to anti-NATO calculation does not rest on defending nationalised property. It rests on the proposition that opposing imperialism’s principal antagonist takes precedence over the right of an oppressed nation to determine its own fate.

Different content. Same structural mistake. Both treat the oppressed nation’s right as a variable that can be set aside for higher considerations. Whether the higher consideration is the property forms inherited from a workers’ state or the geopolitical positioning of an oligarchic capitalist one, the move is identical: self-determination becomes conditional, and the condition is set by considerations external to the oppressed nation itself.

This is the through-line that connects the SWP’s position on Ukraine to the CPB’s, even though their theoretical frameworks have been incompatible since 1948. It runs through the Stop the War Coalition’s refusal to call Russian imperialism by its name. It surfaces, in degraded form, in the rs21 retreat that Red Mole traced in February. The convergence finding is structural, not coincidental: incompatible theoretical frameworks producing near-identical practical politics on Ukraine because both make the same subordination move.

The Trotsky-Kowalewski line refuses both subordinations. Self-determination is the indispensable democratic framework in which an oppressed people becomes free to determine itself. Or, in the formulation Kowalewski drew from Trotsky and made his own: in order to draw together more closely and honestly, it is sometimes necessary first to separate.

The educational failure

Why was this not taken up? The article was in the international’s English-language theoretical journal. The slogan was at world congress level from 1957 and 1979. The Polish nucleus carrying the analysis included one of the most serious mass-revolutionary cadres of the post-war period.

The honest answer is partly conjunctural and partly structural. The conjunctural part: 1989 to 1991 moved faster than analysis. By the time the IMR issue was being read, the Soviet bureaucracy was completing its transition to capitalism, the property-form question was about to be decided by capitalist restoration rather than by political revolution, and the framework Kowalewski had spent the decade developing arrived as a description of a world that was disappearing in real time.

The structural part is harder. Cadres trained on the wider Trotskyist literature would have known the Congress positions. They would have known Trotsky 1939. The Frank framework was on many reading lists in French, but not globally. The convergent inheritance was available, but unevently distribured. What was missing was the active mobilisation of it against the actually existing campist drift, then - and also today when campism is on the march in the British SWP and the CPB, in Stop the War Coalition, eventually metastasising into the position that any Russian war is by definition anti-imperialist. The resources were in the archive. They were not in the active programme.

What remains open

Kowalewski is still around. In 2022 he wrote in International Viewpoint that the Russian invasion was an attempt to prevent the disappearance of a declining Russian imperialism. He has traced the unbroken chain of territorial expansion from the Grand Duchy of Moscow to the present. Ukrainian Revolutions, his 2022 monograph, runs the long arc from the 1648 Cossack revolution through Borotbism and the Ukapists to 2014 and the war.

The articles are read. The framework, as far as one can tell from the British left’s discussion, is not hegemonic.

What the 1989 piece settles is that the question was answered before it became urgent. What it does not settle is whether the international Trotskyist tradition is willing to recognise that the answer was always already in its possession. That second question remains open, and it is the harder one. Until it is taken up, the campist drift will continue to find theoretical cover in formulations the tradition has the resources to refuse.