The dialectic of such “support” was possible when the communist workers were organically connected to the social democratic workers. The tactic was used to burst open the slow road to socialism, transforming it into a fast road by means of the leaps in consciousness that develop in common struggles on the way to the final battle for power. In the material world, there is no gradual road to socialism. This concept is only an illusion used by the reformist leaders to reform the system and police it on behalf of the capitalists. But the “slow road” existed in the consciousness of the SD workers, and the task of the communists was to change this consciousness that was an obstacle in the fight for socialism. After the SD workers saw that their leaders were betraying them, it became possible for communists to recruit the left-moving social democratic workers, and convince the rest to form a united front from below in the battles of the working class to take power. Two critical ingredients made this tactic possible in Lenin’s day: 1) this was a period of mass struggles and revolutions throughout Europe, and 2) the SD workers really expected their leaders to implement socialism after they were elected, so the Communist Party and its workers were able to show these workers that the election of their leaders brought only mass betrayal.
At that time, the powerful objective conditions of crisis and revolution allowed the Communist workers to interact with the contradictory consciousness of the SD workers. The tactic of critical support used a dialectical interpenetration between the communists and the social democratic workers as a way to change the consciousness of the SD workers through common revolutionary practice. In other words, after their post-election expectations were shattered, the SD workers could break with their leaders and with the reformist road to socialism, and their consciousness would change and be open to communist consciousness. Through common mass struggles in the streets, that change of consciousness could occur very rapidly. The patient, quantitative interaction between communists and SD workers could be transformed into a qualitative leap in the consciousness of the social democratic workers. This, in turn, could bring a quantitative (and qualitative) leap in the battles for power: from the slow gradual struggles for reforms to the revolutionary leap that smashed the capitalist system – the Bolshevik revolution. This dialectical process was clearly illustrated by the events that culminated in the Russian Revolution.
Critical Support and the Left Opposition
As the above discussion illustrates, the tactic of critical support for reformist parties, as adopted by the Third International, was developed in an epoch of upheavals in the class struggle, during which there were many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situations. Later, the Left Opposition (LO) applied the same method even though the sections of the Left Opposition were not mass parties, and in most cases they were just propaganda groups. This could be clearly seen in France. The French section was small, and by all accounts a total mess, as it was occupied with stupid factional fights. Nonetheless, Trotsky advocated that the Communist Party (CP) and the Socialist Party (SP) must break with the people’s front, and that if this condition was met, the LO should give the CP and SP candidates critical support. The question may arise as to what justified Trotsky in calling for a propaganda group to give the CP and SP critical support. The organic connection between the Left Opposition workers and the workers from the CP and SP was not there. Yet it was necessary to develop this connection between the LO workers and the CP/SP workers in order to bring about a change in the consciousness of the CP and SP workers.
For Trotsky, the objective conditions were decisive. The French working class was in the middle of mass strikes which could have developed rapidly into a full revolutionary situation. Such powerful developments overrode the problems of the small size and immaturity of the French section. Trotsky hoped that the French section would grow very fast. This would have given the French section a chance to intersect with the CP and SP workers by giving critical support to the SP and CP, provided that they broke with the Radicals in the people’s front.
As events proved, Trotsky was too optimistic. The French section remained immature and small, and the reformist parties did not break from the popular front. But that is another story. The point is that this is an example of a case in which one decisive factor in the objective conditions – that is, the emerging revolutionary situation – can validate the use of the tactic of critical support even by a revolutionary organization that is much smaller than the mass parties of the Third International.
As a master dialectician, Trotsky looked at each situation with fresh eyes, studying its particular contradictory dynamic. For example, Trotsky argued that the SWP (US) should give critical support to candidates of the CP in the late 1930s. He argued for this position even though key ingredients from the method of the Third International regarding critical support were missing. The class struggle was intense, but with the New Deal in place, it was not evolving in a revolutionary direction. Also, the SWP was not a mass party. Still, Trotsky argued that critical support for CP candidates would promote direct contact between the members of the SWP and the CPers. Stalin’s pact with Hitler had intensified the contradictions within the CP, and it was necessary to mount a decisive intervention to win over the best members of the CP.
The Changed Situation After the Second World War
Because the LO, and its successor the 4th International, were small and composed mainly of propaganda sections, Trotsky argued against unprincipled electoral support via the formation of electoral blocs. Unfortunately, this practice infected the Trotskyist movement after he died.
In the post-second-world-war era, the objective conditions changed again. (Law number 1 of dialectics is that everything is in constant change.) Capitalism became relatively stable, and Social Democracy was elected in many countries, particularly in Western Europe, to put a muzzle on the aspirations of the workers again, again, and again. The dialectical dynamic between the workers and the leaders also changed significantly. In the 1920s and 1930s, the workers had expected that putting the Social Democrats in power would bring about socialism. They put pressure on the leaders through massive revolutionary upheavals (Germany, Spain, the 1926 general strike in England) or massive strikes (France), as they hoped for a socialist transformation.
After the war, there was a gradual transformation in consciousness. The Social Democratic workers replaced their expectation of socialism with support for mere reforms of capitalism. By the 1960s and 1970s, they did not elect the SP in order to implement socialism, but just to protect higher wages, pensions, etc., as well of course to defend the unions. As time progressed into the 1980s and 1990s, workers’ expectations kept diminishing. The SP and the labor parties manifested again and again that when they come to power, they do not defend reforms, but demolish them – and attack the unions as well. As desperation and cynicism crept into the workers’ movement, the workers started to support the SP and the labor parties merely as the lesser evil among various bourgeois formations.
So what is the proper role for the tactic of critical support after these new developments? The most important change was the following: in the 1920s and 1930s, the tactic of critical support was concrete; it played a part in a real living dynamic that if applied correctly could make a difference between a successful revolution and a failed one. In the post-war period, however, it transformed from the concrete to the abstract, that is, an exercise in futility. The degenerated Trotskyist organizations have remained, to a large extent, small to medium propaganda groups. They cannot test the effectiveness of the tactic of critical support for the SP or the Labor Party by using it in the context of a genuine organic connection with the working class. As a result, such support has, in many cases, degenerated into mere opportunism.
The program of a particular reformist party is not always the critical criterion for whether or not to give it critical support. Even if the program is not explicitly socialist, it is possible to give the reformist party critical support, but only if the workers are linked to it organically through their unions, and expect the reformist party in power to defend their unions and their gains. In other words, critical support is possible when the workers do not view the reformist party as a lesser evil but as their party that they can pressure through the class struggle to defend their unions and gains. Thus, the tactic can be used with such parties, but not in quiet times. Its proper use comes in times of struggle, when the leaders of the reformist party can be exposed as obstacles and destroyers of the workers’ struggles and the unions, and critical support can thus be used to break the masses from reformism and win them over to march forward in the struggle against capitalism.
But if you are a small party without connections to the masses, you cannot expose the leaders, since the great majority of workers do not read your paper and do not talk to you daily. Nor can you march with them in the struggles and show them that your program and method is the best one – thus creating (through intervention and interpenetration) the subjective conditions for a break with the reformist leaders. In short, the Trotskyist groups in the postwar period have not been able to test their method of critical support, and it has become an abstract method. Since an abstract method is devoid of life, it can slide into opportunism with ease.
Trotsky warned that participation in electoral politics by propaganda groups usually becomes opportunistic, most often in the form of electoral blocs in which different groups “fuse” their programs. In such blocs, the program of the reformists remains the same, but the degenerated Trotskyists always water down their own program.
The reason for this opportunism is that two key conditions supporting the use of critical support in Lenin’s day have vanished: 1) Most Trotskyist groups do not have a daily organic connection to the working class and its struggles, so their “support” does not mean anything in the material world; and 2) The character of the reformist parties has changed profoundly. Having managed to achieve power again, again, and again, the reformist parties have stopped pretending that they will deliver socialism, or even fight capitalism. So there is no longer much about them to expose. The workers are no longer supporting these parties because they have illusions that they will bring about socialism by doing so. Instead, in the boom era right after the second world war, the workers elected them to defend their economic interests under capitalism. In later years of economic decline, the workers elected reformist parties as the lesser evil, to administer the capitalist medicine in a less painful way.
Because postwar Trotskyists have not made use of dialectics to evaluate these changes, the tactics of the Third International have been completely forgotten, and have been replaced with exercises in opportunistic futility. Trotsky once said that you may not recognize the laws of the dialectic, but they always recognize you – and, one may add, when you ignore them, they govern your bad politics. Not recognizing the changes in the world that were transforming the reformist parties into pure bourgeois parties, the “orthodox” Trotskyists transformed Lenin’s method of critical support into abstract opportunism. In the concrete world, they succeeded only in creating an imaginary tiny red pimple on the reformist leaders’ ass – one that the reformist leaders did not even notice. Nor did the workers notice it, since many of them do not read the Trotskyist press.
A good example of this is Workers Power in England (at least until recently). They automatically gave the Labor Party critical support, regardless of the historical period and the concrete circumstances; that is, regardless of how the Labor Party, and its connection to the workers, had changed since Lenin’s day. To make this even more of a joke, they called this electoral support a “united front” between Workers Power and the workers in the Labor Party – a united front that the workers did not even know about, since most of them did not read Workers Power’s press! Their method with regard to critical support did not recognize contradictions and living transformation, and how such evolutionary processes transform the world, including the Labor Party. In the absence of even a basic dialectical approach, their method regarding critical support was dead and frozen. Workers Power did not take into account that Blair officially cut off the Labor Party’s relationship with the unions, announced that the Labor Party is purely a capitalist party, and dropped the word “socialism” from its program. This transformation made it easier for Blair to form a grand united front with the Republican Party and Bush to foment the slaughter of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of anti-terrorism and thinly veiled racism. Yet Workers Power still called for critical support for Labor, as if nothing had changed.
Once again, Trotsky’s adage applies. You may not recognize changes (that is, dialectics), but changes in the material world recognize you, and transform you into your opposite. Workers Power started as a left-wing split from the Cliffites. But their generally frozen and opportunistic politics toward the Labor Party were ultimately reflected in their movement to the right in all other aspects of politics. Their abstract “united front” with Labor become an abstract united front with the restorationist forces in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and so on and so forth.
The bottom line is as follows: We think that it definitely became clear during the 1990s that the Labor Party in England, as well as most social democratic parties, were no longer bourgeois workers’ parties, but had degenerated into purely bourgeois parties – often not even liberal ones. The fall of the degenerated/deformed workers’ states, and the feeling of exhaustion and defeat within the masses, allowed the Labor Party and the SPs to complete this transformation. In short, we think that the Labor Party in England, at least, has become the equivalent of the Democratic Party, or at best, of its left wing. The workers vote for Labor because it is the lesser evil among bourgeois parties.
In discussions with comrades and groups about this, we have been told that the reason why the British Labor Party and the European Social Democratic parties are still workers/bourgeois parties is because they still maintain an “organic” connection with the workers. We never get a clear answer, however, about the nature of this supposed organic connection, and how it is different from the “organic” connection between workers in the US and the Democrat Party.
For us, an organic connection exists when the workers in the factories believe that a labor or social democratic party, once in power, will bring about socialism, or at least defend all the unions and the working class’s gains. But the British Labor Party, in its current position of power, is successfully destroying all the unions’ gains, and the workers still elect them to power in the hope that Labor will not attack them as viciously as the Conservative Party. Don’t the records of Blair and Brown speak for themselves? Is the fact that some of the unions’ dues income goes to Labor Party politicians a good reason to give them critical support? This is nothing more than the kind of “organic” connection that union workers in the US have to the Democratic Party. A big chunk of the members’ dues goes to the Democratic Party instead of going to build a fighting Labor Party or to prepare the membership for labor actions like strikes. The union bureaucracy actively campaigns for the Democratic Party. Many workers still believe that “liberal” Democrats are friends of labor, and will enact laws and measures to defend the workers. So what is the difference between the Democratic Party in the US and the Labor Party of Blair and Brown? We don’t see that there is any difference between them in terms of their supposed “organic” connections with the working class.
When Obama ran as a candidate he had a huge segment of the working class supporting him. The union bureaucracy held huge rallies for him and spent millions of dollars for his campaign and that of other Democratic Party candidates. The great majority of the working class, particularly oppressed black and Latino workers, believed that Obama was their “organic” candidate, that he would end the recession and create jobs and prosperity for the working class. The Republicans even called him a “socialist.” But for us, he was just another imperialist candidate, prepared to increase the slaughter of people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Behind his demagogy and lies stood a politician who used soft words to cover up his real intentions: attacking the historic gains of the working class and the oppressed throughout the world. We knew it, but the workers didn’t. So why did we not give him critical support in order to expose him once he achieved power? Because the Democratic Party is a capitalist party, and is the mortal enemy of the working class. It never did and never will mobilize to workers to fight capitalism.
We believe that it is time to change routine habits from the past, when Trotskyists automatically gave the British Labor Party and its equivalents critical support. It is time to grasp the historical evolution of most such social democratic formations, and the implications of that evolution. The workers no longer vote for them because of any socialist or class struggle expectations. Because there is no revolutionary alternative, they vote for the bourgeois party that will cut off their finger, with the hope that it will not cut off the rest of their hands. In this concrete situation, the tactic of critical support is no longer appropriate.