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what makes scientific socialism scientific?
The text below is from a speech given by Nat Weinstein at the Explorations in the History of American Trotskyism conference in New York City, Sept. 31, 2000. Weinstein was originally asked to speak on the contributions of Tom and Karolyn Kerry, leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in that party's best years, who both died at the beginning of the 1980s. As the author explains below, his assigned topic was later changed.
First, I want to thank the Tamiment Library and Comrade Paul LeBlanc for having invited me to participate in this conference.
Second, I want to explain why, as much as I respect Tom and Karolyn Kerry, I am not going to talk about them. It's for the simple reason that since this is a conference on the history of American Trotskyism, I know that Tom and Karolyn would much rather that I spend my time here outlining the fundamental principles of revolutionary Marxism as developed by Leon Trotsky.
And third, that explains why I asked Paul to change the subject of my talk to "What Makes Scientific Socialism Scientific."
So as not to keep you in suspense, I will tell you what some of you may already know but may no longer still believe: What makes scientific socialism scientific is Marx's and Engels' discovery that the working class had been fashioned by the blind working of history to lead the human race toward the revolutionary reconstitution of society. And that this reconstitution could only be constructed on the foundations of a world socialist society.
Now, it's because a great majority of those in the world who call themselves "socialists" have all but completely abandoned this and other of the fundamental truths of revolutionary Marxism that I am going to focus on what scientific socialism is. This approach will also help those who may have come here mainly to find out what Trotskyism is all about.
In the first place, the loss of confidence in the Marxist thesis of the revolutionary character of the working class was in no way the result of what many apologists for capitalism and its labor and socialist lieutenants claim to have been the failure of socialism or of the working class, or both.
Rather, it was a direct consequence of the counter-revolutionary blows dealt to the world working class and its socialist destiny primarily by the Social Democracy, the Stalinists, and other reformists in the fateful years of the 1930s and '40s, especially, and since.
The betrayal by these reformists of the many objectively revolutionary opportunities in that period gave world imperialism the opportunity to extricate itself from the deepest economic, social, and political crisis in the history of capitalism.
Those betrayals gave world capitalist imperialism time to find a temporary solution through the introduction of Keynesian economics-a scheme based on gradually freeing the world monetary system from the dictatorship of gold. It resulted in the granting of an over half-century-long extension of world capitalism's lease on life.
These factors - reformist betrayal and the unprecedented extension of economic and political equilibrium in the strongholds of world imperialism for more than half a century-explain why belief in the fundamental thesis of revolutionary Marxism, which goes by the name of Trotskyism today, is at its lowest point since the publication of "The Communist Manifesto" in 1848.
And that central thesis, I repeat, is that the working class, and only the working class, has the capacity to lead the entire human race out of capitalist barbarism.
The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels outlined the first thorough, coherent, and succinct description of capitalist globalization. The following two sentences from the "Manifesto" could have been written yesterday: "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. [Causing] it to nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere...."
In other words, the destructive consequences of capitalist globalization were described in 1847-48 by the founders of scientific socialism-not as a fantastic prophecy, but as a factual description of a work in progress.
The following is another short quote from the first page of the "Communist Manifesto," titled "Bourgeois and Proletarians." It puts forward the deadly choice now threatening the very existence of the human race-that is, either "Socialism or Barbarism."
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” [Emphasis added.]
But scientific socialism is not dogma. Like all scientific disciplines, it must stand up to the test of experience in a universe in which the only thing permanent is change.
Moreover, human knowledge certainly does not begin or end with Marx and Engels. These two giants, like all who came before and after them, are links in the chain of human understanding of the world and how it works, as well as of scientific socialism.
There have been many individuals who have contributed significantly to the continuum of scientific socialism since the death of its founders. However, time will only allow me to focus on the two outstanding historic contributions to this continuity by Leon Trotsky.
Permanent Revolution
In 1906, Trotsky drew the lessons of the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. He called his theory "Permanent Revolution" after a phrase first introduced by Marx and Engels in an address to the Communist league immediately after the defeat of the French and German revolutions of 1848-49.
In this address, drawing the lessons of these defeats, Marx and Engels coined the phrase, "the revolution in permanence." It was based on their conclusion that the bourgeoisie had exhausted its capacity for leading the democratic revolution against the remaining power of the old feudal aristocracy. But only because they feared the workers more!
The founders of scientific socialism also drew the lesson that in the struggle for the democratic and socialist revolutions the working class must maintain its strict independence from its treacherous former allies against the feudal aristocracy-the capitalists and the sectors of the middle class under the influence of the capitalists.
Trotsky saw the betrayal of the democratic revolution against the Tsarist regime by the Russian bourgeoisie in 1905 as confirmation of Marx's and Engels' conclusion that the bourgeoisie and their petty bourgeois political representatives were no longer capable of leading the democratic revolution. In fact, by 1848 they had become the most formidable obstacles to that revolution.
Trotsky codified the Marxist thesis that, in the epoch of imperialism, capitalism had long since made its peace with the landed aristocracy and that-because the feudal form of landed property had been largely assimilated by the capitalist class and incorporated into the bourgeois form of property ownership-the main antagonism between landlords and capitalists had been abolished.
Consequently, Trotsky concluded that only the working class in alliance with the poor and landless peasants can lead the national and democratic revolution against imperialism-but only in the course of the workers' struggle to overthrow capitalism and "reconstitute society" on the basis of socialist property forms.
In other words, the peasant demand for land could only be satisfied by the armed power of the working class holding landlords and capitalists in a stranglehold as the armed peasants expropriated and divided the land among themselves.
It should also be noted, in passing, that after the October 1917 Socialist Revolution, Trotsky applied the logic of Permanent Revolution to the struggle against Stalinism's Great Russian nationalist, bureaucratic dictatorship.
The Transitional Program
The other of Leon Trotsky's most important contributions, the Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, also flowed from Marx's concept of the revolution in permanence. The Transitional Program, moreover, was not something he conjured out of thin air but was a codification of the lessons of the Russian October Revolution, led primarily by Lenin and Trotsky.
Thus, the Transitional Program, along with Permanent Revolution, were the logically consistent extensions of the fundamental principles of the "Communist Manifesto" of the mid-19th century to the problems of socialist revolution in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The "Communist Manifesto," the Permanent Revolution, and the Transitional Program are all rooted in the scientific socialist conception of the objectively revolutionary character of the working class.
Workers' power to change society
But what about the working class in the year 2000? Has it been deprived of its power to change the world as it had done so many times in the past? Has the trend toward an ever smaller number of workers involved in the production of an ever larger mass of commodities in the basic industries eroded its power to shut the economy down?
Has the working class lost its power to impose its will on the capitalist class and ultimately, its power to overthrow it? The answer to these questions is, as you would expect a Trotskyist to say, no! This is why:
First, while the heavy battalions of working-class power are still today centered in the basic production, transportation, and communication industries-and while the proportion of workers employed in these basic industries is smaller today than 50 or 100 years ago-still the most technologically advanced productive forces in the world cannot run by themselves when its work force says no!
Second, the total strength of the working class today is greater than ever before in history since all those who work for a living constitute a much larger majority of the population than ever before. And by the same token, the capitalists have been reduced to an even tinier minority of the world's 6 billion souls than ever before.
Third, the raw economic power of the working class is multiplied by an order of magnitude when workers consciously act as a class, in the interests of the class as a whole.
Fourth, this power is further enhanced when the entire world working class operates according to the principle of proletarian internationalism. This refers to the principle of elementary class solidarity that an injury to the workers in any country is an injury to all workers everywhere.
Fifth, its power is further magnified when the workers follow the Marxist dictum that "labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself so long as labor with a black skin is branded." That elementary working-class principle applies with full force to the super-exploited and oppressed millions of women, Blacks, Latinos, and other super-exploited or demonized sectors of capitalist society.
And sixth, all previous class-based social systems have been based on one or another form of private ownership of the means of production. But the workers have been molded by the socialized system of capitalist productive relations into a class that can only own the means of production collectively. Thus, the proletariat has been fashioned by the unconscious logic of the capitalist mode of production to be the grave-digger of private ownership of the means of production and its owning class.
However, it is quite obvious that what workers and all other human beings are objectively capable of is one thing but knowing how to do it and organizing to do it is another. Therefore, those who want to change the course of the human race from its current trajectory toward capitalist barbarism confront a subjective problem-not an objective one.
Trotsky expressed this idea most clearly in the Transitional Program's opening sentence:
"The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."
Trotsky went on in this historic document to explain in detail that the objective economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition. It is only the subjective problem of leadership that has yet to be solved.
The world party of socialist revolution
As many of those present at this conference may know, the Transitional Program summarizes the historic theoretical and programmatic foundation of the Fourth International (FI). At the time of its founding, in 1938, Trotsky projected the construction of the FI as the mass party of the world socialist revolution, on the basis of the dialectical methodology of the Transitional Program.
Unfortunately, the events described above have adversely affected the human material standing at the head of our world movement. The Transitional Program has been abandoned by those who are currently in charge of the Fourth International.
They have also discarded a document that, although containing several serious errors, was presented as a reaffirmation of many of the basic elements of the Communist Manifesto and the Transitional Program.
The document, written by a long-time leader of the FI, the late Ernest Mandel, is entitled "Socialism or Barbarism on the Eve of the 21st Century: the Programmatic Manifesto of the Fourth International." It was adopted by the 13th World Congress of the Fourth International, held in Italy in 1991.
The 15th World Congress of the Fourth International is scheduled to take place next year. My party, Socialist Action, remains committed to its founding principles, laid down by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. We are also committed to the historic goal of building the Fourth International into a mass party of world socialist revolution.
This means viewing the main task of revolutionary Marxists today as the building of Leninist combat parties in every country of the world and orienting them to strive for leadership of all the social, economic, and political movements of the world working class and its natural allies.
I will end with a short quote from the concluding sentences in the Transitional Program:
"The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership. The advanced workers, united in the struggle of the proletariat and of all the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offer a spotless banner.
"Workers-men and women-of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!"
