Thanks to a reader who pointed out this letter by Leon Trotsky:
Dear Comrade Perera,
The question about the possible military intervention of the Red Army in India (not to speak about Ceylon) has been launched absolutely artificially by some of the American comrades. The possibility is not excluded, but it is not this question that is now on the order of the day. From the principled point of view I don’t see here any new question in comparison with the Chinese or Spanish experience. The Red Army is not an independent political factor but a military instrument of the Bonapartist bureaucracy of the USSR. The military intervention would be only the continuation of the political intervention and the political intervention of Stalin’s Comintern is developing in India as elsewhere every day. But our task is not to speculate about the possibilities of a future military intervention—rather it is to learn how to fight against the present political intervention. Every fight demands a correct appreciation of all the factors involved.
The first thing is not to forget that the direct enemy of the Indian workers and peasants is not the Red Army but British imperialism. Some comrades, who in the last period have replaced Marxist policy by anti-Stalinist policy, forget the political realities in India and imitate the Stalinists of yesterday who proclaimed—before the Stalin-Hitler pact of course—that the main enemy in India is … Japan.
The Stalinists in India directly support the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois national parties and do all they can to subjugate the workers and peasants through these parties. What we must do is create an absolutely independent proletarian party with a clear class programme.
The general historic role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and their Comintern is counter-revolutionary. But through their military and other interests they can be forced to support progressive movements. (Even Ludendorff [Erich Ludendorff (1867-1937) was a member of the aristocratic Prussian officer corps and the commander of the German army during the last years of the First World War. He was also an early supporter of Hitler.] felt himself forced to give Lenin a train—a very progressive action—and Lenin accepted it.) We must keep our eyes open to discern the progressive acts of the Stalinists, support them independently, foresee in time the danger, the betrayals, warn the masses and gain their confidence. If our policy is firm and intransigent and realistic at the same time, we would succeed in compromising the Stalinists on the basis of the revolutionary experience. If the Red Army intervenes we will continue the same policy, adapting it to military conditions. We will teach the Indian workers to fraternize with the rank-and-file soldiers and denounce the repressive measures of their commanders and so on.
The main task in India is the overthrow of the British domination. This task imposes upon the proletariat the support of every oppositional and revolutionary action directed against imperialism.
This support must be inspired by a firm distrust of the national bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois agencies.
We must not confound our organization, our programme, our banner with theirs for a moment.
We must observe strictly the old rule: march separately, strike together.
We must keep a suspicious eye on the temporary ally as well as on the foe.
We must use the dissensions of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies in order to reinforce the self-confidence of the proletarian vanguard.
If we follow seriously these good old rules, the intervention of the Red Army would not take us unawares.
With warmest greetings to yourself and to the Ceylon comrades, and with best wishes for your trip,
Yours comradely, L. Trotsky
Letter to an Indian comrade (dated 24th November, 1939), Internal Bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party, December 1939
Having promised a reply to Duncan about what I think about Ukraine a few weeks ago, I thought it would be easiest to repost a comment I just made in an ephemeral WhatsApp group. I would class myself as "trying to recover the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition"; I first joined the IS in 1973, was in Thornett's Workers Socialist League and then helped to found the Spartacist League in Britain, leaving the ICL in 1996. For varying reasons I disagree with much of the old ICL's approach and much of the new ICL's. I also disagree with those who back Russia in the current NATO-Russia war.
@~Duncan C It is a proxy war for NATO, where NATO (and Ukraine) is a split issue in the U.S. bourgeoisie.
The Democrats, the intelligence agencies and the neo-cons (who voted Harris last time) are in a bloc with the Euro-hawks (Macron, Starmer, Merz, Poland, the Baltics) to continue Biden's 100% war.
Vance and Miller -- the MAGA core -- want a deal with Putin, because they want to drag Russia out of its alliance with China.
In each of the hawk countries there are right-nationalist, fascist-backed "doves" who could do business with Putin. Vance goes to speak to the AfD and offers them joint control of Eastern Europe.
But all the doves and Vance are hawks against China. They are debating two fronts versus one, or two wars versus one.
The imperialist tectonic plates are shifting and cracking under the impact of China's rise.
Ukraine's military is centred around Neo-Nazi Azov (vastly strengthened). Its military leadership is riddled with neo-Nazis. But its press minders (the CIA and MI6) have told the Banderaites to hide the swastika flags. The NYT and the FT and the Guardian and Le Monde obligingly forget what they once knew.
The OUN in the Second World War was not trying to figure out how to be honest "third campists"; they welcomed the Nazis with garlands and fell out with over who should run the show, while enthusiastically slaughtering Jews and Poles. Bandera nationalists then fought an anti-communist civil war in Ukraine armed and directed by Britain and the U.S. into the fifties. Banderaites do not change their spots because the real four-star generals above them are German, or American or British.
Yes: Russia is run by Great-Russian nationalists with a hefty admixture of fascist or royalist or mystic far-rightists. Russia is not some poor relation: it is a country challenging for a place at the imperialist top table, and is likely to win a strengthened position in this war.
Like Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, Russia is determined not to take the road, dictated to it by Western imperialism, of "national humiliation": that does not make it a latterday Vietnam. It makes it a latterday Japan: an imperialist, big-power competitor, fighting over "redivision" of the world, as Lenin described it.
NATO versus Russia, with a Ukrainian land army fighting for NATO (which directs, arms, finances, plans and provides the ISR) -- this a war of two reactionary imperialist camps, at the end of which Ukraine will be a semi-colony of one side or the other.
The working class is dying by the hundred thousand on both sides -- this is Verdun and the Somme all over again.
The "Fourth International" campaigns for more and more missiles, drones, fighter jets and artillery to be provided as part of facing up to the Russian imperialist threat to Ukraine ... and therefore end up as an auxiliary of the Euro-NATO rearmament drive. The national questions at stake in Ukraine have long been eclipsed by a general war that now extends into new fronts in the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Russian heartland.
Supporting French or British imperialism against Russian imperialism is the "FI"'s Fourth of August.
A proxy war is directed by the power it is fought for. That is what the word means; strip that out and 'proxy' is noise with a grievance attached. So follow the map to the end. If the government that actually sits in Washington wants Ukraine to concede, wants the deal, wants the minerals and the capped army signed over, then whose proxy is the soldier in the trench? Not the White House's. The White House is at the table with Moscow, carving him up. The proxy-master our contributor is left holding is the faction that lost the election. The war, on his own account, is being fought on behalf of the people out of office. A proxy war for Kamala Harris.
Sit with the part that matters. The cruder campist, the one who still thinks NATO is a monolith shovelling arms eastward, at least tells a story that hangs together. This contributor is too good a reader of Washington for that. He can see the split. Seeing it is exactly what wrecks the slogan, because the moment you concede that the sitting American government is converging with Russia, the proxy thesis has nowhere to stand except on the shoulders of the party that is not governing. The sharper the reading of the American ruling class, the more absurd the conclusion it is bent to serve.
Does this statement not contradict itself? The premise here is that it cannot be a proxy war because NATO does not proxy for the US state, whilst paradoxically acknowledging that there is a split in the US ruling class on this issue.
Both cannot be true! Either a war can only be a proxy for the state as a monolith, which negates NATO being a proxy for the US state due to the association of the monolithic state with its President’s (and his clique’s) view, or the ruling class has a split on this issue and the proxy is for the side of that split that favours war in Ukraine.
Either the US state is a monolith or it isn’t. And consequently, you can either assert that a proxy war can ONLY be directed by monolithic state, or it CAN be directed by a split within a ruling class. But not both - thats a contradiction. The comment holds both in superposition.
There's no dual power in the USA: it's possible, but it's not the case and we're nowhere close. The state isn't divided. The state has a clear and unitary policy.
The US ruling class isn't a monolith, but the divisions have not led to the pro-Ukraine section of the ruling class sending mililtary aid. Kamala Harris is not doing fund drives for missiles.
But a split in the ruling class is not a split in the state: the class can quarrel to its heart's content, and until the quarrel throws up a rival apparatus arming its own front, the policy stays whatever the faction holding the keys decides.
This is an interesting question, as to the operational independence of the various aspects of the US state apparatus, e.g. the CIA vs the executive. Its my (admittedly under-researched) impression that there is some operational independence, and the US state doesn't entirely operate as a monolith. Would appreciate some literature on this.
Under Trump, the administration has not sought new congressional approval for fresh US funding for Ukraine, for example. The CIA absolutely has relative independence: it might be able to change coffee suppliers, but it would be unusual for it to independently deliver more support than the Trump administration intended in defiance of policy. There is no suggestion that is happening,
And we should never forget Canada's role as the British Empire's bolthole for the OUN, right down to Chrystia Freeland today. Remember the standing ovation in Ottowa for the war-criminal?
I’m not sure that the article’s description of Trotsky and the FI’s position on the Soviet-Finnish War are correct. It’s feels misleading to emphasise only the aspect of opposition to the invasion rather than the characterisation of the conflict as a whole in the context of the lead up to the Second World War. In particular there doesn’t appear to be any assessment of Trotsky’s positions as set out, for example, in ‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition
For example what do we make of Trotsky’s observation that:
“The Soviet-Finnish war is apparently beginning to be supplemented by a civil war in which the Red Army finds itself at the given stage in the same camp as the Finnish petty peasants and the workers, while the Finnish army enjoys the support of the owning classes, the conservative labor bureaucracy and the Anglo-Saxon imperialists. The hopes which the Red Army awakens among the Finnish poor will, unless international revolution intervenes, prove to be an illusion; the collaboration of the Red Army with the poor will be only temporary; the Kremlin will soon turn its weapons against the Finnish workers and peasants. We know all this now and we say it openly as a warning. But in this “concrete” civil war that is taking place on Finnish territory, what “concrete” position must the “concrete” partisans of the Fourth International take? If they fought in Spain in the Republican camp in spite of the fact that the Stalinists were strangling the socialist revolution, all the more must they participate in Finland in that camp where the Stalinists are compelled to support the expropriation of the capitalists”
or,
“It is necessary to add that the stretching of the concept of “imperialism” lacks even the attraction of novelty. At present not only the “democrats” but also the bourgeoisie of the democratic countries describe Soviet policy as imperialist. The aim of the bourgeoisie is transparent – to erase the social contradictions between capitalistic and Soviet expansion, to hide the problem of property, and in this way to help genuine imperialism. What is the aim of Shachtman and the others? They don’t know themselves. Their terminological novelty objectively leads them away from the Marxian terminology of the Fourth International and brings them close to the terminology of the “democrats.” This circumstance, alas, again testifies to the opposition’s extreme sensitivity to the pressure of petty-bourgeois public opinion”.
For the sake of clarity my point is not to argue from quotation but rather to suggest that the FI majority’s position on this question was more nuanced/ambiguous than the summary would suggest. Am I missing the point here?
Iain, you're raising valuable points, and I will expand the article to clarify them. Your first point confuses Trotsky's apparent hypothesis for reality. Trotsky says that a Red Army invasion supporting a progressive civil war should be supported. His assessment was based on uncertain sources, hence his 'apparently'. But he was mistaken. The Red Army did not arrive to support a revolutionary civil war: it arrived to crush the Finnish workers. Finland was neutral and posed no threat to anyone. So, Trotsky's assessment was mistaken and led to a mistaken judgment: Trotsky in the balance sheet explicitly subordinates Finnish self-determination to the revolutionary civil war of its working class, and defends the workers' state's right to trample it.
On imperialism, I hope I am clear: Trotsky did not use the term, and he was pushing back against the capitalists' cheek in describing it as Imperialism, and defending the meaning of imperialism then used by Marxists: the one outlined by Hilferding and popularised by Lenin. By the end of the 1940s, those early Marxist theories of imperialism were broken. Lenin’s account gives a central place to the export of capital from mature to backward economies. From the 1930s onward, foreign direct investment became less significant, especially as capital increasingly moved between advanced economies rather than overwhelmingly from core to periphery. It made no sense to refer to the USSR or the USA as imperialist in the sense that Marxists at that time understood it. I am using it in a more generic sense, as a policy of modern imperial domination.
Thanks to a reader who pointed out this letter by Leon Trotsky:
Dear Comrade Perera,
The question about the possible military intervention of the Red Army in India (not to speak about Ceylon) has been launched absolutely artificially by some of the American comrades. The possibility is not excluded, but it is not this question that is now on the order of the day. From the principled point of view I don’t see here any new question in comparison with the Chinese or Spanish experience. The Red Army is not an independent political factor but a military instrument of the Bonapartist bureaucracy of the USSR. The military intervention would be only the continuation of the political intervention and the political intervention of Stalin’s Comintern is developing in India as elsewhere every day. But our task is not to speculate about the possibilities of a future military intervention—rather it is to learn how to fight against the present political intervention. Every fight demands a correct appreciation of all the factors involved.
The first thing is not to forget that the direct enemy of the Indian workers and peasants is not the Red Army but British imperialism. Some comrades, who in the last period have replaced Marxist policy by anti-Stalinist policy, forget the political realities in India and imitate the Stalinists of yesterday who proclaimed—before the Stalin-Hitler pact of course—that the main enemy in India is … Japan.
The Stalinists in India directly support the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois national parties and do all they can to subjugate the workers and peasants through these parties. What we must do is create an absolutely independent proletarian party with a clear class programme.
The general historic role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and their Comintern is counter-revolutionary. But through their military and other interests they can be forced to support progressive movements. (Even Ludendorff [Erich Ludendorff (1867-1937) was a member of the aristocratic Prussian officer corps and the commander of the German army during the last years of the First World War. He was also an early supporter of Hitler.] felt himself forced to give Lenin a train—a very progressive action—and Lenin accepted it.) We must keep our eyes open to discern the progressive acts of the Stalinists, support them independently, foresee in time the danger, the betrayals, warn the masses and gain their confidence. If our policy is firm and intransigent and realistic at the same time, we would succeed in compromising the Stalinists on the basis of the revolutionary experience. If the Red Army intervenes we will continue the same policy, adapting it to military conditions. We will teach the Indian workers to fraternize with the rank-and-file soldiers and denounce the repressive measures of their commanders and so on.
The main task in India is the overthrow of the British domination. This task imposes upon the proletariat the support of every oppositional and revolutionary action directed against imperialism.
This support must be inspired by a firm distrust of the national bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois agencies.
We must not confound our organization, our programme, our banner with theirs for a moment.
We must observe strictly the old rule: march separately, strike together.
We must keep a suspicious eye on the temporary ally as well as on the foe.
We must use the dissensions of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies in order to reinforce the self-confidence of the proletarian vanguard.
If we follow seriously these good old rules, the intervention of the Red Army would not take us unawares.
With warmest greetings to yourself and to the Ceylon comrades, and with best wishes for your trip,
Yours comradely, L. Trotsky
Letter to an Indian comrade (dated 24th November, 1939), Internal Bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party, December 1939
Having promised a reply to Duncan about what I think about Ukraine a few weeks ago, I thought it would be easiest to repost a comment I just made in an ephemeral WhatsApp group. I would class myself as "trying to recover the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition"; I first joined the IS in 1973, was in Thornett's Workers Socialist League and then helped to found the Spartacist League in Britain, leaving the ICL in 1996. For varying reasons I disagree with much of the old ICL's approach and much of the new ICL's. I also disagree with those who back Russia in the current NATO-Russia war.
@~Duncan C It is a proxy war for NATO, where NATO (and Ukraine) is a split issue in the U.S. bourgeoisie.
The Democrats, the intelligence agencies and the neo-cons (who voted Harris last time) are in a bloc with the Euro-hawks (Macron, Starmer, Merz, Poland, the Baltics) to continue Biden's 100% war.
Vance and Miller -- the MAGA core -- want a deal with Putin, because they want to drag Russia out of its alliance with China.
In each of the hawk countries there are right-nationalist, fascist-backed "doves" who could do business with Putin. Vance goes to speak to the AfD and offers them joint control of Eastern Europe.
But all the doves and Vance are hawks against China. They are debating two fronts versus one, or two wars versus one.
The imperialist tectonic plates are shifting and cracking under the impact of China's rise.
Ukraine's military is centred around Neo-Nazi Azov (vastly strengthened). Its military leadership is riddled with neo-Nazis. But its press minders (the CIA and MI6) have told the Banderaites to hide the swastika flags. The NYT and the FT and the Guardian and Le Monde obligingly forget what they once knew.
The OUN in the Second World War was not trying to figure out how to be honest "third campists"; they welcomed the Nazis with garlands and fell out with over who should run the show, while enthusiastically slaughtering Jews and Poles. Bandera nationalists then fought an anti-communist civil war in Ukraine armed and directed by Britain and the U.S. into the fifties. Banderaites do not change their spots because the real four-star generals above them are German, or American or British.
Yes: Russia is run by Great-Russian nationalists with a hefty admixture of fascist or royalist or mystic far-rightists. Russia is not some poor relation: it is a country challenging for a place at the imperialist top table, and is likely to win a strengthened position in this war.
Like Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, Russia is determined not to take the road, dictated to it by Western imperialism, of "national humiliation": that does not make it a latterday Vietnam. It makes it a latterday Japan: an imperialist, big-power competitor, fighting over "redivision" of the world, as Lenin described it.
NATO versus Russia, with a Ukrainian land army fighting for NATO (which directs, arms, finances, plans and provides the ISR) -- this a war of two reactionary imperialist camps, at the end of which Ukraine will be a semi-colony of one side or the other.
The working class is dying by the hundred thousand on both sides -- this is Verdun and the Somme all over again.
The "Fourth International" campaigns for more and more missiles, drones, fighter jets and artillery to be provided as part of facing up to the Russian imperialist threat to Ukraine ... and therefore end up as an auxiliary of the Euro-NATO rearmament drive. The national questions at stake in Ukraine have long been eclipsed by a general war that now extends into new fronts in the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Russian heartland.
Supporting French or British imperialism against Russian imperialism is the "FI"'s Fourth of August.
A proxy war is directed by the power it is fought for. That is what the word means; strip that out and 'proxy' is noise with a grievance attached. So follow the map to the end. If the government that actually sits in Washington wants Ukraine to concede, wants the deal, wants the minerals and the capped army signed over, then whose proxy is the soldier in the trench? Not the White House's. The White House is at the table with Moscow, carving him up. The proxy-master our contributor is left holding is the faction that lost the election. The war, on his own account, is being fought on behalf of the people out of office. A proxy war for Kamala Harris.
Sit with the part that matters. The cruder campist, the one who still thinks NATO is a monolith shovelling arms eastward, at least tells a story that hangs together. This contributor is too good a reader of Washington for that. He can see the split. Seeing it is exactly what wrecks the slogan, because the moment you concede that the sitting American government is converging with Russia, the proxy thesis has nowhere to stand except on the shoulders of the party that is not governing. The sharper the reading of the American ruling class, the more absurd the conclusion it is bent to serve.
Does this statement not contradict itself? The premise here is that it cannot be a proxy war because NATO does not proxy for the US state, whilst paradoxically acknowledging that there is a split in the US ruling class on this issue.
Both cannot be true! Either a war can only be a proxy for the state as a monolith, which negates NATO being a proxy for the US state due to the association of the monolithic state with its President’s (and his clique’s) view, or the ruling class has a split on this issue and the proxy is for the side of that split that favours war in Ukraine.
Either the US state is a monolith or it isn’t. And consequently, you can either assert that a proxy war can ONLY be directed by monolithic state, or it CAN be directed by a split within a ruling class. But not both - thats a contradiction. The comment holds both in superposition.
There's no dual power in the USA: it's possible, but it's not the case and we're nowhere close. The state isn't divided. The state has a clear and unitary policy.
The US ruling class isn't a monolith, but the divisions have not led to the pro-Ukraine section of the ruling class sending mililtary aid. Kamala Harris is not doing fund drives for missiles.
But a split in the ruling class is not a split in the state: the class can quarrel to its heart's content, and until the quarrel throws up a rival apparatus arming its own front, the policy stays whatever the faction holding the keys decides.
This is an interesting question, as to the operational independence of the various aspects of the US state apparatus, e.g. the CIA vs the executive. Its my (admittedly under-researched) impression that there is some operational independence, and the US state doesn't entirely operate as a monolith. Would appreciate some literature on this.
Under Trump, the administration has not sought new congressional approval for fresh US funding for Ukraine, for example. The CIA absolutely has relative independence: it might be able to change coffee suppliers, but it would be unusual for it to independently deliver more support than the Trump administration intended in defiance of policy. There is no suggestion that is happening,
And we should never forget Canada's role as the British Empire's bolthole for the OUN, right down to Chrystia Freeland today. Remember the standing ovation in Ottowa for the war-criminal?
The people in Ottawa had no idea about that person's history. That's exactly why it was a scandal: https://redmole.substack.com/p/nazi-infested-unless-its-russia-the
I’m not sure that the article’s description of Trotsky and the FI’s position on the Soviet-Finnish War are correct. It’s feels misleading to emphasise only the aspect of opposition to the invasion rather than the characterisation of the conflict as a whole in the context of the lead up to the Second World War. In particular there doesn’t appear to be any assessment of Trotsky’s positions as set out, for example, in ‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition
in the Socialist Workers Party’ from December 1939 https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/09-pbopp.htm.
For example what do we make of Trotsky’s observation that:
“The Soviet-Finnish war is apparently beginning to be supplemented by a civil war in which the Red Army finds itself at the given stage in the same camp as the Finnish petty peasants and the workers, while the Finnish army enjoys the support of the owning classes, the conservative labor bureaucracy and the Anglo-Saxon imperialists. The hopes which the Red Army awakens among the Finnish poor will, unless international revolution intervenes, prove to be an illusion; the collaboration of the Red Army with the poor will be only temporary; the Kremlin will soon turn its weapons against the Finnish workers and peasants. We know all this now and we say it openly as a warning. But in this “concrete” civil war that is taking place on Finnish territory, what “concrete” position must the “concrete” partisans of the Fourth International take? If they fought in Spain in the Republican camp in spite of the fact that the Stalinists were strangling the socialist revolution, all the more must they participate in Finland in that camp where the Stalinists are compelled to support the expropriation of the capitalists”
or,
“It is necessary to add that the stretching of the concept of “imperialism” lacks even the attraction of novelty. At present not only the “democrats” but also the bourgeoisie of the democratic countries describe Soviet policy as imperialist. The aim of the bourgeoisie is transparent – to erase the social contradictions between capitalistic and Soviet expansion, to hide the problem of property, and in this way to help genuine imperialism. What is the aim of Shachtman and the others? They don’t know themselves. Their terminological novelty objectively leads them away from the Marxian terminology of the Fourth International and brings them close to the terminology of the “democrats.” This circumstance, alas, again testifies to the opposition’s extreme sensitivity to the pressure of petty-bourgeois public opinion”.
For the sake of clarity my point is not to argue from quotation but rather to suggest that the FI majority’s position on this question was more nuanced/ambiguous than the summary would suggest. Am I missing the point here?
Iain, you're raising valuable points, and I will expand the article to clarify them. Your first point confuses Trotsky's apparent hypothesis for reality. Trotsky says that a Red Army invasion supporting a progressive civil war should be supported. His assessment was based on uncertain sources, hence his 'apparently'. But he was mistaken. The Red Army did not arrive to support a revolutionary civil war: it arrived to crush the Finnish workers. Finland was neutral and posed no threat to anyone. So, Trotsky's assessment was mistaken and led to a mistaken judgment: Trotsky in the balance sheet explicitly subordinates Finnish self-determination to the revolutionary civil war of its working class, and defends the workers' state's right to trample it.
On imperialism, I hope I am clear: Trotsky did not use the term, and he was pushing back against the capitalists' cheek in describing it as Imperialism, and defending the meaning of imperialism then used by Marxists: the one outlined by Hilferding and popularised by Lenin. By the end of the 1940s, those early Marxist theories of imperialism were broken. Lenin’s account gives a central place to the export of capital from mature to backward economies. From the 1930s onward, foreign direct investment became less significant, especially as capital increasingly moved between advanced economies rather than overwhelmingly from core to periphery. It made no sense to refer to the USSR or the USA as imperialist in the sense that Marxists at that time understood it. I am using it in a more generic sense, as a policy of modern imperial domination.