LETTER TO 'THE WEEKLY WORKER'
(Issue 732)

Ultra-Leftism

Phil Kent’s report on the Campaign for a Marxist Party, Weekly Worker, July 10 2008 highlights the negative influence played by Hillel Ticktin in any project aiming at revolutionary unity.

In attempting to appeal to ultra-leftist sentiments in his audience, Ticktin argues that ‘Stalinists’ should not be welcomed in any attempt to build a mass Marxist party because the ‘socialism in one country’ that they adhere to is not Marxist.

This is not only a shibboleth brought forward by Ticktin to exclude those who he regards as disagreeable. The truth is that the ultra-left have never understood the tactical imperative of socialism in one country as flowing from the strategy of world revolution, which unfolds unevenly to one degree or another.

In other words, when it comes to the world revolution, ultra-leftists separate tactics from strategy, failing to see how one serves the other. The origins of this mistake, passed down to later generations, was Trotsky’s failure to grasp the dialectical relationship between socialism in one country and world revolution.

It was Lenin who was, to my knowledge, the first Russian Marxist to raise the possibility of socialism in one country as part of world revolution. However, the important thing is not to defend this idea because it comes from a leading intellectual authority: rather, in my view, the idea should be defended because it was the most realistic.

Just imagine Trotskyists preaching in blockaded Cuba that socialism in one country was impossible. This would be grist to the mill of imperialism, as would be the case if revolutionaries preached the same idea in relation to the democratic revolution in Venezuela, which will be overthrown by the old pro-imperialist elite if it fails to take steps towards socialism. What is stopping the right wing of the Venezuelan democratic revolution from arguing the same defeatist point as Trotsky did from the left in regard to the Soviet Union?

Much of the left needs to break from the Trotskyist myth that supporting socialism in one country makes you opposed to world revolution. Science is not about blindly upholding intellectual authorities because we cannot think for ourselves, but trying our best to ascertain the truth through honest debate. The final judge being the correct evaluation of experience.

Ticktin’s opposition to socialism in one country as a tactical imperative would retrospectively mean not only excluding Stalinists from the Marxist camp, but Lenin and Bukharin as well. It would in fact represent, from the standpoint of method, a victory of ultra-leftism over dialectics, or dogmatic ‘Marxism’ over real life.

Tony Clark 19^th July 2008.