The Truncated Canon: How a Publishing Decision in 1942 Sowed Eighty Years of Campism
Postscript: Three Positions, One Vote, and the Road Not Taken
The Trotskyist left’s campist degeneration didn’t begin with a political betrayal. It began with a table of contents.
On February 24, 1980, Gus Fagan sat at his desk in Oxford and began to write. Two months had passed since Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan. The International Marxist Group was tearing itself apart over the question: what should Trotskyists say about a workers’ state that invades a country? Fagan, writing under the pen name “Sykes,” was trying to hold the orthodox position together. Defend the workers’ state. Oppose the invasion. Demand withdrawal. He needed Trotsky.
He reached for his copy of In Defense of Marxism, the book every Trotskyist cadre had studied since the 1940s. He found the passage he needed: Trotsky writing in December 1939 that the Red Army “finds itself at the given stage in the same camp as the Finnish poor peasants and workers.” He built his argument on that sentence. The document he produced that day, fourteen pages titled “Afghanistan and the Defence of the Soviet Union,” would circulate through the IMG and inform a generation’s understanding of how revolutionaries should respond when Moscow sends in the troops.
He had the wrong Trotsky. No: worse than that. He had half the right Trotsky. The other half had been buried since 1942.
Fagan’s document is a specimen of a misreading that had been structurally embedded in the Trotskyist movement for nearly four decades. Not through conspiracy, not through deliberate falsification, but through something more mundane and more consequential: an editorial decision. The 1942 edition of In Defense of Marxism, assembled by James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party as a factional weapon after the Shachtman split, created a truncated canon that trained generations of revolutionaries to defend the workers’ state while suppressing Trotsky’s simultaneous insistence that national self-determination was itself a revolutionary weapon against the bureaucracy. That truncation is the germ from which campism grew. The 1944 debate over the Red Army in Eastern Europe was its first test. Afghanistan in 1979 was its major flowering. Ukraine is where the movement has finally begun to recover what was lost.
The date on Fagan’s document: February 24, 1980. The date of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: February 24, 2022. The coincidence is accidental. The connection is not.
I. What Trotsky Actually Said
The misreading depends on treating Trotsky’s position on Finland as a fixed point. It was not. It was a position in motion, revised in light of evidence, corrected when the facts demanded it. That revision is the method. Ignoring it is the betrayal.
December 1939: The Conditional Formulation
In “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party,” written in the heat of the Winter War, Trotsky’s primary target was Max Shachtman and James Burnham. They had concluded that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the invasion of Finland proved the USSR was no longer a workers’ state. Trotsky disagreed. He argued that the social character of a state was determined by its property relations, not by the moral quality of its leadership or its diplomatic manoeuvres. The nationalised and planned economy established by the October Revolution remained a historic conquest of the working class, however parasitically the Stalinist bureaucracy squatted upon it.
Within that polemic, Trotsky made a specific argument about what happens when the Red Army occupies territory. It is forced, by the logic of its own social base, to expropriate the local bourgeoisie and establish Soviet property forms: what he called “structural assimilation.” This led him to write the sentence that Fagan would seize upon four decades later: the Red Army “finds itself at the given stage in the same camp as the Finnish poor peasants and workers.”
That phrase “at the given stage” is doing critical work. It signals a conditional, conjunctural assessment. Trotsky is describing a dynamic he anticipates: if the occupation triggers a civil war on Finnish territory, the Red Army will find itself on the side of the working class and poor peasantry against the Finnish bourgeoisie. This is a prediction about a developing situation, not a retrospective endorsement of the invasion that created it.
April 1940: The Correction
Four months later, the Moscow Peace Treaty had been signed. The evidence was in. Trotsky sat down to write the “Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events,” and what he produced was a devastating corrective to any reading that treated December 1939 as his final word.
The Red Army, Trotsky concluded, had “strangled the movement of the Finnish masses by its bureaucratic methods.” The Kremlin “wants only to occupy strategic points.” The Kuusinen puppet government, which Stalin had established as a Finnish “People’s Republic,” was a cynical fraud: created as a revolutionary prop, liquidated the moment a deal with Helsinki became convenient. The military advantages gained were outweighed by the “abjectness and cynicism” of the Kremlin’s methods, which alienated the world proletariat and served only the Bonapartist interests of the bureaucracy.
This is not a minor qualification. It is a fundamental reassessment. In December, Trotsky anticipated that the Red Army’s presence might catalyse independent working-class action. By April, he concluded that the bureaucracy had prevented this from happening: not accidentally, but structurally. The Kremlin did not want revolution in Finland. It wanted territory. It was afraid of the Finnish masses, not allied with them.
Read together, the December and April texts demonstrate the dialectical method in action: a hypothesis tested against reality, revised when the evidence contradicts it. The campist misreading freezes the December formulation and pretends the April correction does not exist.
The Suppressed Other Half: Ukraine, 1939
But the December-April gap is only half the story. In the very same months he was writing about Finland, Trotsky produced two texts that would have inoculated the movement against campism entirely, had anyone been allowed to read them.
In “The Problem of the Ukraine” (April 1939) and “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads” (July 1939), Trotsky demanded a “united, free and independent workers’ and peasants’ Soviet Ukraine.” This was not a concession to bourgeois nationalism. It was the opposite: a revolutionary strategy designed to cut across the influence of fascist agents and reactionary nationalists by demonstrating that the Fourth International, unlike the Kremlin, genuinely supported the aspirations of oppressed nations. “Great Russian chauvinism,” Trotsky insisted, was the enemy of socialist internationalism. The right of self-determination applied even against a workers’ state: not as a retreat from the defence of the revolution’s gains, but as the precondition for that defence.
These texts establish something the campists have never reckoned with. Defending the social base of the workers’ state and defending national self-determination are not opposing principles. They are complementary. A Trotsky who defends the USSR against imperialism and demands Ukrainian independence from Moscow cannot be conscripted into a “Workers’ Camp” logic that subordinates nations to the military requirements of the bureaucracy.
But these texts were not in In Defense of Marxism. They never would be.
II. The Truncated Canon
The 1942 Edition: A Factional Instrument Becomes Sacred Text
In Defense of Marxism was first published in 1942 by Pioneer Publishers, the SWP’s publishing house in New York. Edited under the direction of James P. Cannon by John G. Wright, the volume appeared nearly two years after Trotsky’s assassination and the April 1940 split that saw Shachtman’s minority depart. Its purpose was specific and factional: to consolidate the majority, to provide a definitive refutation of “bureaucratic collectivism” and “state capitalism,” and to establish that the minority’s abandonment of the USSR’s defence flowed from their abandonment of the Marxist method itself.
The volume contained thirty-five entries: articles, letters, and documents from September 1939 to August 1940. The introduction framed the struggle not as a legitimate debate over the changing nature of the USSR but as a “petty-bourgeois” capitulation to the pressures of bourgeois public opinion. The selection of texts built a logical progression: terminological doubt about the workers’ state leads to the abandonment of dialectics leads to the abandonment of the party leads to renegacy.
The “Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events” was included. This matters: Trotsky’s April 1940 correction was technically available in the same volume Fagan consulted in 1980. But it was neutralised by context. Read within a book whose entire editorial architecture presents the 1939-40 struggle as “defend the USSR vs. capitulate to imperialism,” the “Balance Sheet” becomes just another confirmation of the orthodox position. The specific content, that the Red Army strangled the masses, that the Kremlin wanted only territory, gets absorbed into the larger narrative rather than being allowed to challenge it.
The Ukraine writings were excluded entirely. “The Problem of the Ukraine” and “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads” do not appear in the 1942 edition, nor in any subsequent edition: not the 1970 Pathfinder edition, not the 1973 Pathfinder edition, not the New Park edition published by Healy’s tendency in 1966 and 1975. No Trotskyist publishing house, of any tendency, ever included these texts in In Defense of Marxism.
“The Problem of the Ukraine” remained out of book form for thirty-five years, until Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39 appeared in 1974. For an English-speaking Trotskyist between 1942 and 1974, the article was effectively inaccessible unless you happened to possess bound volumes of Socialist Appeal from May 1939.
The Dual-Track System
The consequence was a division between the Trotskyism that was taught and the Trotskyism that existed. The SWP’s 1973 “Guides to Marxist Education” assigned In Defense of Marxism as required reading on the Russian question. The Writings volumes were treated as reference material for specialists. A party member in 1975 could complete every official educational course on the USSR without encountering Trotsky’s argument for Ukrainian independence. The entire conceptual framework that would have inoculated the movement against campism was buried in archives while “unconditional defence” was drilled into every recruit’s political education.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a publishing decision with political consequences. Cannon needed a volume that would win a specific factional argument. He got one. The problem is that the factional instrument became the permanent canon, and the canon was missing half of Trotsky’s method.
The Cannon Factor
Cannon’s own position on Finland is revealing. Where Trotsky was willing to call Stalin’s expansionism a “bureaucratic adventure” and to revise his assessment when the evidence demanded it, Cannon preferred a more binary formulation: the workers’ state against world imperialism, full stop. The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, Cannon’s companion text to IDOM, frames the 1939-40 debate as primarily organisational, about discipline and the class composition of the party, rather than about the substantive political question of how to handle the workers’ state’s military adventures. The 1942 edition reflects Cannon’s preference. Texts about party discipline and unconditional defence are prioritised. Texts about national liberation and the limits of bureaucratic expansion are excluded.
Cannon was not falsifying Trotsky. He was curating him. The distinction matters, because it means the truncation was not a single act of bad faith but a structural feature of the movement’s institutional life: repeated across every edition, every tendency, every decade, until the restricted canon became invisible because it was all anyone had ever read.
III. The 1944-46 Dress Rehearsal
The Red Army’s advance into Eastern Europe in 1944-45 provided the first major test of the truncated canon, and the results were exactly what you would predict.
The International Secretariat viewed the Red Army’s presence as possessing an “objectively revolutionary logic.” The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India and Ceylon adopted resolutions giving “unconditional support,” arguing the Red Army’s entry would “release latent forces” and create a “pre-revolutionary situation.” This was not crude Stalinism. It was recognisably Trotskyist reasoning: the destruction of the old bourgeois state apparatus would create conditions favourable to working-class self-activity, and the bureaucracy would find itself overwhelmed by forces it had inadvertently unleashed. The same “structural assimilation” logic from Trotsky’s December 1939 formulation, extended without the April 1940 corrective.
The problem was that it was wrong.
The British section of the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Communist Party under Jock Haston and Ted Grant, saw what the IS leadership refused to see. The Red Army was not releasing latent revolutionary forces. It was suppressing them: installing Stalinist apparatuses, liquidating independent working-class organisations, using the Red Army as a counter-revolutionary police force in Poland and Czechoslovakia. As early as February 1946, the RCP demanded the Red Army’s withdrawal. The IS initially opposed this. Then, in June 1946, the International Executive Committee reversed its line and came out in favour of withdrawal.
The Healy detail is worth pausing on. Gerry Healy had held the pro-Red Army position not because he had thought it through but because he was, in Bob Pitt’s phrase, “parroting the orthodox formulae” of the IS. When the IEC reversed, Healy reversed overnight. Not political development: bureaucratic obedience dressed up as theoretical consistency. This is what happens when cadre are trained on a truncated canon that provides positions to hold rather than methods to apply. It prefigures, with painful precision, the organisational culture that would allow the Barnes SWP to enforce its Afghanistan line three decades later.
The IEC’s June 1946 reversal conceded that the RCP was right. But the lesson was never institutionalised. In Defense of Marxism remained unchanged. The “objectively revolutionary logic” argument was not formally repudiated as a methodological error. The same reasoning would resurface, unchanged, thirty-three years later: in December 1979, when Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan.
IV. The Fagan Document and the Afghanistan Crystallisation
The Specimen
Fagan’s “Afghanistan and the Defence of the Soviet Union” attempts to navigate a genuine difficulty. The PDPA’s 1978 coup had produced real reforms: land redistribution, women’s literacy programmes, the beginnings of secular education. The mujahedin resistance, funded by the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, was reactionary in both programme and social base. For a Trotskyist committed to defending the gains of even a bureaucratically deformed revolution, the temptation to see the Soviet intervention as a defence of progressive content was real.
The document proceeds from the “general to the particular,” establishing principles of workers’ state defence before applying them to Afghanistan. It cites Trotsky on Finland. Specifically, Fagan writes that for Trotsky, “the issue was not whether or not one supported the Red Army in Finland but whether or not one supported the camp of the workers and peasants, in which, at that moment, the Red Army also found itself.”
That formulation does real work. It takes Trotsky’s conditional argument about what happens if a civil war dynamic develops and converts it into a retrospective endorsement of the Red Army’s presence. Trotsky said: if the Red Army finds itself alongside Finnish workers, revolutionaries must participate on that side. Fagan reads this as: Trotsky supported the Red Army because it found itself in the workers’ camp. The difference is everything. And the “Balance Sheet,” sitting in the same volume, available to be read, establishing that the Red Army strangled the very masses it was supposed to be alongside: Fagan does not cite it.
Not because he was dishonest. Because the editorial framing of In Defense of Marxism made his choice feel natural. The volume presents the December formulation as the definitive position. The “Balance Sheet” reads as a coda, not a correction. And the Ukraine writings, which would have provided the methodological counterweight, the insistence that self-determination is the revolutionary tool against the bureaucracy, were absent from every book on Fagan’s shelf.
Afghanistan’s social reality made the Finland template absurd even on its own terms. Finland in 1939 had an organised labour movement, trade unions, a Communist Party with genuine popular support. In 1979, Afghanistan had perhaps 150,000 industrial workers in a population of 16.7 million. The PDPA was composed of military officers and the Kabul petty bourgeoisie. It had no organic connection to the Afghan peasantry, whose hostility to its reforms was not false consciousness but a rational response to the destruction of traditional social structures by force. The mujahedin were reactionary, yes. But they were also genuinely popular in the countryside, which the PDPA was not. The Finland template, already a misreading of Trotsky, was being applied to a situation where even its internal logic collapsed.
The Barnes Reversal: A Scene from the SWP
The US SWP under Jack Barnes applied identical reasoning: the Red Army defends progressive reforms, therefore opposing the invasion is a concession to imperialism. The cadre, pre-conditioned by decades of IDOM-based education, accepted Barnes on this and other disputed questions. Those who resisted were purged. Members aligned with Mandel were expelled.
But the European sections moved the other way. Tariq Ali personally persuaded the FI’s European leaderships to adopt the “Troops Out” position. John M., who attended the IEC where the reversal was debated, recalls: “Everybody there acknowledged that Tariq Ali was right all along.” The FI’s official position demanded Soviet withdrawal.
What happened next, inside the SWP, is instructive. Eventually, Barnes reversed the party’s line at a conference. But the reason he gave was not that the analysis had changed, not that the European comrades had been right, not that the evidence from Afghanistan demanded a reassessment. Barnes told the conference that the facts had not changed, but that the Cuban regime had changed its policy to “Troops Out”: therefore the SWP had to follow. One after another, leading SWP members walked through this hoop.
Then Gerry Foley went to the podium. Foley told the conference the real reason: pressure from the leaderships of nearly all the European FI sections, and they were right. A stunned silence. Barnes rounded on him. Foley told John M. afterwards that from that moment, he knew there was no going back for him. Alain Krivine independently confirmed the account, and admired Foley’s courage for speaking his mind.
Both Foley and Krivine have since passed away. John M.’s testimony is now irreplaceable primary source material for what happened in that hall.
The Foley scene is the Afghanistan debate in miniature. The cadre comply because the leadership commands. The leadership changes course not because of analysis but because of external authority: Cuba, not Trotsky. And the one person who names the actual mechanism, who tells the truth about why the position changed, is finished. This is the organisational culture produced by decades of truncated education: positions derived from authority, not from analysis. They had studied In Defense of Marxism as catechism, not as method.
The Maitan Observation
There is a revealing coda. The Australian SWP refused to follow Barnes’s reversal and stuck to its original campist line on Afghanistan. Livio Maitan’s assessment, as relayed by John M., was characteristically precise: “Yes, a terrible policy; but now they are thinking for themselves, and are not taking orders from Barnes.” By the 1986 World Congress, the Australians, though still disagreeing with the majority, were “mortal political enemies” of the American SWP. They had arrived at intellectual independence through the wrong position. The Barnesites had arrived at the right position through intellectual servitude.
Maitan understood something the article’s argument depends on: campism and bureaucratic obedience are distinct pathologies, even when they produce the same policy conclusions. A group thinking for itself can be argued out of an error. A group taking orders can only be commanded out of one, and will be commanded into the next error just as easily. The truncated canon didn’t just produce wrong conclusions about Afghanistan. It produced cadre who couldn’t easily reason independently about the workers’ states question at all.
V. The Vaccine: Ukraine and the Recovery of Trotsky
The Template Stripped Bare
Contemporary campists apply the same structural logic to Ukraine in 2022. Russia opposes the United States; therefore opposing NATO expansion means opposing arms to Ukraine. The conflict is framed as a “proxy war” in which Ukrainian agency is invisible and Ukrainian self-determination is a Western talking point rather than a revolutionary principle.
But Russia in 2022 has no social base worth defending. No nationalised property. No planned economy. No progressive content of any kind. The campist position cannot even claim the analytical scaffolding that Fagan erected around Afghanistan. It is the misreading stripped of everything except the geopolitical reflex: whoever opposes Washington is, in some attenuated sense, on our side.
The Tariq Ali Contradiction
The most disorienting case is Ali himself. He was right on Afghanistan in 1980. He personally persuaded the European sections to adopt “Troops Out.” And he subsequently became one of the most prominent campist voices on Ukraine. John M. poses the question directly: how does someone who rejected campism when it came from the SWP, John Ross, and the Australian SWP arrive at the same campism forty years later?
The structural explanation, I think, is this. Ali’s 1980 correction was a political instinct: a correct one, but it wasn’t grounded in a recovery of Trotsky’s method on self-determination. He opposed the Soviet occupation without rebuilding the theoretical framework that would have inoculated him against the next iteration. In 1980, opposing the occupation meant opposing the Soviet bureaucracy: that felt natural for someone in the Trotskyist orbit. In 2022, opposing the invasion means, in campist optics, siding with NATO: that feels unnatural. The method would have resolved the contradiction. The instinct couldn’t.
The Return to the Primary Sources
The Fourth International’s 2022 resolution on Ukraine explicitly rejects campism and defends Ukrainian self-determination. Catherine Samary and other FI authors draw directly on Trotsky’s 1939 Ukraine writings. The texts that Cannon’s editorial choices buried for three decades are the texts the movement needs now.
Putin’s 2022 claim that Lenin “unnecessarily created” Ukraine is a direct continuation of the “Great Russian chauvinism” Trotsky fought in 1939. The argument Trotsky made, that national self-determination is the revolutionary response to bureaucratic chauvinism, that the working class of an oppressed nation has the right to determine its own destiny even when a nominally progressive power claims sovereignty, is the argument the Fourth International is making today. The movement didn’t need a new theory. It needed to read the texts that had always existed but were never assigned.
Conclusion
The arc runs from Cannon’s editorial table in New York in 1942, where a factional instrument was assembled that would become sacred text, through the International Secretariat’s misplaced optimism about the Red Army in 1945 and Grant and Haston’s ignored correction in 1946, through Fagan’s desk in Oxford on February 24, 1980, where a serious revolutionary reached for his copy of IDOM and found only the December Trotsky without absorbing the April Trotsky, through Barnes commanding the SWP to reverse on Afghanistan not because the analysis demanded it but because Castro demanded it and Gerry Foley standing up in the stunned silence to name the real reason and being destroyed for it, through forty years of campist degeneration that stripped away even the workers’ state justification until nothing remained but the geopolitical reflex, to the Fourth International’s 2022 resolution on Ukraine that finally recovers what was suppressed: the insistence that national self-determination is not a concession to imperialism but the precondition for any genuine defence of the revolution’s gains.
The canon was truncated. The method was distorted. The movement is recovering.
On February 24, 1980, Gus Fagan reached for In Defense of Marxism in Oxford and found only half of Trotsky. Forty-two years later, on the same date, the other half arrived: not in a new edition, but in the form of a nation fighting for its existence, demanding exactly the self-determination that had been buried in the archives since 1939.
Postscript: Three Positions, One Vote, and the Road Not Taken
The resolutions compared in this article were not debated at a full World Congress. They were discussed at the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the smaller executive bureau that met more frequently between Congresses, at its January 26-29, 1980 session, five weeks after Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan. The majority Declaration was adopted by a majority vote. The two minority positions were formally registered as dissenting texts.
The third resolution, the Draft Resolution demanding immediate Soviet withdrawal and grounding the demand in the Leninist principle of national self-determination, was supported by Gilbert Achcar. In 1981, the International Executive Committee, the larger body that stood above the United Secretariat in the FI’s structures, reversed the majority position and adopted the withdrawal line. Achcar’s position prevailed. The IEC came to the same conclusion that Tariq Ali had argued for in the European sections and that Gerry Foley had named from the podium of the SWP conference: the Soviet occupation had to end, and the demand for its end was not a concession to imperialism but a revolutionary obligation.
What happened subsequently to these two comrades is instructive, and in opposite directions.
Tariq Ali’s trajectory traces the arc the main article describes. He was right on Afghanistan. He personally persuaded the European sections to adopt “Troops Out.” And he has since moved toward a campist reading of Ukraine: the conflict as essentially a proxy war, Ukrainian agency subordinated to NATO’s strategic interests, the demand for Western arms supplies treated as an endorsement of imperialist strategy. The correct political instinct of 1980, rooted in opposition to Soviet bureaucratic expansionism, was not anchored in a recovered theoretical method. When the geopolitical optics shifted, when opposing the invasion meant, in campist logic, siding with NATO rather than opposing Moscow, the instinct was no longer available.
Achcar’s trajectory is more complex, and more honest about the difficulty. He defends Ukraine’s right to receive weapons for self-defence. He simultaneously criticises NATO’s geopolitical role and warns that large-scale arms flows risk turning the conflict into an inter-imperialist proxy war that deepens Ukrainian dependence on Western power. He distinguishes, in his own terms, between supporting Ukraine’s national-defensive struggle and uncritically endorsing NATO’s strategy. Critics on his left argue that endorsing arms supplies effectively aligns him with NATO regardless of stated intentions. His response is that the alternative, withholding solidarity from a nation fighting for its existence, is the greater betrayal.
This is a genuine tension, not a comfortable resolution. But it is recognisably continuous with the position Achcar held in January 1980: that national self-determination is the revolutionary principle, that the left must not subordinate the rights of an oppressed nation to the strategic requirements of a larger power, and that this commitment holds even when it produces uncomfortable convergences with forces the left otherwise opposes.
The comparison is worth making precisely because it refuses the campist simplification. Ali and Achcar were on the same side in 1980. They were not on the same side in 2022. The difference is not generational or biographical. It is methodological. One recovered an instinct without recovering a method. The other, whatever the difficulties, held to the method.
The United Secretariat debate of January 1980 is, among other things, a demonstration of what it looks like when revolutionaries argue seriously, in real time, about a question that hasn’t been settled in advance. Three distinct resolutions, each internally coherent, each drawing on the same tradition, each reaching different conclusions. None of them used Trotsky’s writings on Ukraine as living political tools.
That access is what the movement has now. The question is whether it will use it.
John M., cited in this article, attended the 1981 FI IEC where the Afghanistan position was reversed and the US SWP conference where Gerry Foley spoke. Both Foley and Krivine have since passed away; John’s testimony is primary source material.
The Fagan/Sykes document, “Afghanistan and the Defence of the Soviet Union” (February 24, 1980), is available in the Red Mole Rising archive.
An important and fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of the SWP.