– Book of Proverbs 29:2 and 18 (written before 700 BCE
Socialist World Media, the online media platform for the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), recently published a fascinating article called “The Man Trotsky”.[1]
This was published on December 14, 2025. It was initially written by the State Capitalist Rae Spiegel (later known as Raya Dunayevskaya) when she was 22 years old. Spiegel served as Leon Trotsky’s personal secretary in Mexico. It was submitted to Max Shachtman for publication in the press of the newly formed Workers Party, but it was never printed.
The piece offers a rare, intimate look at Trotsky’s personality and his vision for a socialist future. The article is well worth a read despite her glorification of the GPU and FBI agent Joseph Hansen.
Given that the article offers fascinating insight into how Leon Trotsky worked, one wonders how he would have responded to the new WSWS Socialism AI platform. My feeling is that he would have welcomed it with open arms and would have had a field day on it. This was my initial reaction to it. I still need more time to develop a deeper understanding of it and its technology, but it appears to be a fantastic aid in the fight for Socialism in the 21st century.
Socialism AI is a specialised chatbot designed to provide workers, students, and activists with access to over 175 years of Marxist theory and nearly 30 years of WSWS historical analysis. It should be seen as a library for the mind, with a fantastic librarian at the helm.
Users can pose questions about historical events, political theory, and current labour struggles (e.g., how to oppose layoffs at specific companies) and receive responses grounded in scientific socialism. While being a little surprised that some features require a paid subscription to cover operational costs, I agree with the initiative to “democratize access” to revolutionary perspectives.
As David North points out, “The historical significance of Socialism AI is sharply revealed when examined in the objective context of its public launch, amid the deepening world capitalist crisis. The working class faces a highly complex economic, geopolitical and social reality, while the bourgeoisie has thoroughly dismantled traditional centres of study and discussion. Under these circumstances, a system that synthesises and connects the insights of Marxist theory with current developments is no mere novelty. It is a means of intellectual counter-attack, of recovering the historical memory of the working-class movement.”[2]
North’s point about recovering the memory of the working class is extremely valid. This has always been the attitude of the Marxist movement, but the development of Socialism AI takes it to a whole other level. This change in how the Marxist movement operates, while not as fundamental as the shift from the Newspaper form to the Internet, is pretty close to that fundamental change. While not a replacement for the World Socialist Website (WSWS), it should be seen as a complement to it.
It has not taken the Pseudo Left fraternity long to start attacking the WSWS’s use of AI for revolutionary purposes. On a forum run by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, titled “WSWS group to launch a ‘Socialism AI’,” the SPGB published several unopposed comments that broadly attacked the WSWS’s launch of Socialism AI and expressed hostility to both orthodox Marxism and AI in general.[3]
The WSWS recently published an attack by “Dmitri. The WSWS has issued an extensive reply to his short comments, saying “ Dmitri’s remarks, notwithstanding his use of technical jargon, exemplify the widespread lack of understanding of AI and hostility to the Marxist approach to technology within the milieu of middle-class radicalism.”[4]
Socialist AI is fit for purpose, and workers and students should embrace the concept behind Socialism AI and use it in their struggle for Socialism in the 21st Century.
‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive,‘
Walter Scott- Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601), Act 1, sc. 3, l 58
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1′ (1597), Act 5, sc. 4, l [148]
“Tell me anyway – Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”
— Leon Trotsky
“The New Left Party: Seize the Time” is the title of a pamphlet by Charlie Kimber and Tomáš Tengely-Evans, published by the Socialist Worker. This new left party is called Your party, but no matter how the writers from the SWP dress it up, it is nothing but a Labour Party mark 2 and a political trap for the working class that is moving significantly to the left.
The reality is that “Your Party” is a “pseudo-left” and reformist project that will ultimately lead to “betrayal and defeat” for the working class. One indicator among many of that political trap is that the orthodox Trotskyists from the World Socialist website (WSWS) were explicitly barred from attending Your Party’s founding conference, which it condemned as an act of “targeted political exclusion” and “bureaucratic censorship”.
The founding of the party signals the “dead-end pseudo-reformist politics” that seek to work within the existing capitalist system rather than overthrow it. It deserves its title as a “Labour Party Mark 2”.
The WSWS criticised Your Party’s “policy statement” as a collection of “sound bites committing the party to nothing”. It stresses that genuine socialism requires the “conscious revolutionary mobilisation of the working class to overthrow the capitalist state and establish workers’ power”, which Your Party avoids. The WSWS contends that Your Party’s leaders, including Corbyn and Sultana, will eventually “betray and defeat” the working class, similar to other “pseudo-left” figures like Bernie Sanders or Yanis Varoufakis.
Despite Kimber et al saying that the lessons from other attempts across Europe to form a series of new left parties must be learnt, the reality is that the SWP supported these attempts, dressing them up as socialist organisations that would lead a struggle against capitalism. They did nothing of the sort, and like Your Party, they are and were a political trap for the working class. The most recent of these traps is the SWP’s promotion of Zohran Mamdani. The SWP said of Mamdani’s campaign, “An insurgent vision that breaks with the status quo can be popular. That’s the lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York. And it’s a lesson that Your Party could learn here in Britain.”
As the WSWS writes, “The experience of the past decade is replete with examples of parties and individuals whose claims to represent a radical break with the political establishment were shipwrecked on the realities of capitalist rule. In Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) came to power in 2015, promising to end austerity, only to impose the most brutal social cuts at the dictates of the banks and the European Union. In Germany, Die Linke (Left Party) has participated in state governments that deport refugees and enforce austerity. In Britain, the Corbyn movement within the Labour Party capitulated to the right-wing establishment, paving the way for the return of open reaction. In class terms, these tendencies express not the interests of the working class but those of the upper-middle class—a privileged social layer seeking not a fundamental restructuring of society but a more comfortable position for themselves.”[1]
It has become pretty clear from the founding conference what type of organisation Your Party will be. What Pseudo Lefts were allowed into the hall were treated like dirt. As Laura Tiernan from the WSWS reports, “The SWP’s Samira Ali was physically removed from the conference venue by security guards who confirmed they were acting on the orders of Corbyn’s former chief of staff, Karie Murphy. The SWP’s Stand Up to Racism stall was dismantled. If this is how YP’s leadership treats loyal critics like the SWP, how would they respond in government to striking workers or to mass popular opposition to austerity and war?”
Mark Serwotka
The right-wing trajectory of Your Party was further expressed by a former ally of the Socialist Workers Party, Mark Serwotka. Serwotka is a leading member of Your Party. The SWP trumpeted Serwotka as a new breed of left-wing union leader leading a struggle against capitalism and Labourism.
Despite Serwotka’s reputation as a left-wing, militant union leader, the reality is a little different. Serwotka and the PCS leadership have been “stifling action” and have failed to mount a serious challenge to government austerity measures and pay restraints. Serwotka has been incorporated into the Establishment, and pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Alliance and Respect and the SWP give him a left cover and serve as a “safety valve” to contain working-class anger.
Serwotka writing in the Stalinist Morning Star wrote “We are not building a vanguard party — if we are not going to be the Labour party mark two, we’re not going to be the SWP or Socialist Party mark two either! We need to win the loyalty of millions, so we must emphasise a politics and campaigns that unite around people’s pressing material concerns, not the left’s factional, sectarian priorities. We cannot insist on ideological purity within our ranks — tolerance and acceptance of a variety of political views on the left is essential, including opinions about gender and sex, and a two-state solution.”[2]
The SWP and Trotskyism
While it is clear that the SWP has devoted considerable resources to the Your Party reformist bandwagon, it still maintains a Pseudo-Left usage of Marxists such as Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin. They use these Marxists as a “calling card” to recruit members, particularly students, while ensuring that this nominal association never conflicts with its reformist objectives and certainly never advocates for genuine revolutionary change.
The use of a quote from the US Trotskyist leader James P Cannon is another calling card. This one is a little bizarre because Cannon and his party were once Trotskyists, and that is not the SWP’s political heritage. The SWP quote Cannon saying “that in every faction fight there is a reason—and then a real reason. Using Google’s AI mode, I was unable to track down this quote. I just used an old-fashioned approach, and it comes up as this article- Factional Struggle and Party Leadership.[3]It is hoped that when The World Socialist Website launch its own Socialism AI, it will be easier to find quotes such as the one above.
The speciality of the SWP is airbrushing key historical figures, like Trotsky, from their events, such as the “Marxism” festivals, to avoid serious political discussion. Tony Cliff was the ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.
Your Party is a political trap, and the SWP is complicit in this trap. The urgent task is to resolve the crisis of working-class leadership and to build a genuine mass socialist party that unites workers worldwide and completes the epoch of world socialist revolution that began in 1917.
[1] The political and class issues in Mamdani’s victory in New York City-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/06/ygfl-n06.html
[2] A new left party is born — but can it break with old habits morningstaronline.co.uk/article/new-left-party-born-can-it-break-old-habits
(This is an AI-generated summary of the above lecture using Plaud Note)
This lecture by David North interrogates the trajectory of the United States amid an accelerating political and constitutional crisis, situating it within a global breakdown of capitalist democracy and the rise of oligarchic rule. Framing the decisive question “Where is America going?” in both objective (material forces, economic relations) and subjective (mass consciousness and response) terms, North adopts Trotsky’s historical method of posing strategic questions during periods of acute class conflict. He characterises the U.S. situation as “going to hell in a handbasket,” highlighting the rapid tempo of destabilisation, including Donald Trump’s denunciations of Democratic legislators as “treasonous” and calls for capital punishment after they urged the military to refuse illegal orders violating constitutional oaths. He notes the intersection of political leadership with U.S. intelligence agencies, underscoring the contested nature of civil-military relations and the legality of such relations.
Expanding beyond immediate developments, North argues that the apparent authoritarian reconfiguration of American governance after the 2024 election reflects a terminal crisis of global capitalism, driven by extreme inequality, financialization, fictitious capital, debt expansion, and erosion of the dollar’s credibility. He employs historical analogies (France before 1789, Chile 1973, U.S. slavery-era measures) to depict oligarchic aggression and spectacle—billionaire-dominated policymaking, symbolic restorations of reactionary iconography, and conspicuous consumption within state institutions—as symptoms of direct oligarchic rule. Internationally, he traces parallels with Britain under Keir Starmer and other governments, arguing that similar structural pressures produce convergent authoritarian trajectories.
The lecture critiques reliance on moral appeals absent a scientific socialist program centred on the working class, contending that war, militarisation, and genocide are ruling-class countermeasures to capitalist contradictions. North analyses the Marxist foundations of value and surplus value, rising constant-to-variable capital ratios, and the falling rate of profit; he contends that AI-driven automation intensifies these contradictions by displacing living labour—the source of surplus value—while delivering uneven, limited productivity gains. He rejects reliance on rival capitalist states (China and Russia), emphasising internationalist working-class unity (including between Russian and Ukrainian workers) against imperialism and national chauvinism.
North advances a strategic orientation built on transitional demands—expropriation of capitalists, factory committees, nationalisation under democratic control—and the necessity of a vanguard party to develop socialist consciousness. He underscores the degeneration of bourgeois leadership and the crisis of revolutionary leadership, asserting that U.S. mass sentiment trends left despite betrayals by the pseudo-left. In practice, he calls for organising rank-and-file committees, restoring Marxism’s authority through education on 20th-century revolutions and betrayals, and deploying new tools such as “Socialism AI”—an application trained on the WSWS archive and Marxist literature—to scale outreach, provide programmatic clarity, and assist in organising working-class struggles. The event concludes with a call to join the Socialist Equality Party and to build an internationally coordinated movement capable of resolving capitalism’s contradictions through conscious action.
It is with profound sadness that I hear about the death of Alan Gelfand, who truly was a fighter for socialism. I never met Alan, and I regretfully cannot call him my friend, but his struggle had a profound bearing on my own political development.
The conclusion of his struggle against the Socialist Workers Party (US) in 1983 coincided with the year I became involved in the Trotskyist movement. After a year as a supporter, I finally joined the WRP before the split, which was, in itself, a seminal moment for me. Although, as a teenager, I spent well over a thousand pounds on Marxist literature from the then Militant Tendency, they had nothing on the history of American Trotskyism. After the split, the then minority held classes on American Trotskyism.
I read James Cannon’s “The Struggle for a Proletarian Party” and many other works. I still have the books in my Library. Again, it was during the Split that I became familiar with the history of recent American Trotskyism, as embodied in the struggles of the Workers League. One thing that always struck me was the high level of camaraderie among the American comrades. They were on a different political and intellectual level and somewhat inspiring. Meeting Jean and Bill Brust was a thrill of a lifetime.
The first time I heard about the Security and the Fourth International (I had purchased a copy of How the GPU Murdered Trotsky but never read it, a bad habit that continues to this day) was when I read David North’s articles on the Death of Tom Henehan. Leon Trotsky and the development of Marxism, 1982, was published in the Young Socialists paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party. These articles were reprinted in the pages of the Young Socialist in 1984. I always read the YS paper as it contained far more interesting articles than the Newsline, which seemed more of a comic to me at the time. I learnt nothing about Trotskyism from it.
It was during the split that I learnt not only about the Security and the Fourth International investigation, but it was my first introduction to Gelfand’s struggle. During the division, a large number of internal documents were circulated by the minority. A large number of these documents pertained to security and the Fourth International. But it was only with the release in 1985 of the two books The Gelfand Case: A Legal History of the Exposure of U.S. Government Agents in the Leadership of the Socialist Workers Party – Volumes One and Two (1 and 2/ I and II), Paperback that I really began to fully understand the havoc caused by the murderous agents of the GPU.
Gelfand will always have a special place in my political heart. It is inspiring that he faced death with the same approach he had to life, as the great poet Dylan Thomas wrote.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Finally, as David North wrote, “In his final words to a comrade and close friend, Alan said: ‘It’s hard to say goodbye. But I have joy in my heart and a smile on my face, and confidence in the movement and in my comrades.” Alan Gelfand will never be forgotten. His place in this history of the Fourth International and the hearts of his comrades is secure.”[1]
Notes
Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html
Harold Robbins Archive-https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/wag_175/
Register of the Socialist Workers Party records-https://oac.cdlib.org/static_findaids/ark:/13030/tf1k40019v.html
[1] Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html
Fascism] affects white and black people alike … The fight against fascism is a common fight for both of us; we approach it from two different directions and perspectives. We are the immediate victims. If they come for us in the morning, they will go for you that night. So be with us that morning, and we will be with you that night.
James Baldwin
The progress of a class toward class consciousness, that is, the building of a revolutionary party which leads the proletariat, is a complex and contradictory process. The class itself is not homogeneous. Its different sections arrive at class consciousness by different paths and at other times. The bourgeoisie participates actively in this process. Within the working class, it creates its own institutions or utilises those already existing to oppose certain strata of workers to others. Within the proletariat, several parties are active at the same time. Therefore, for the greater part of its historical journey, it has remained politically divided. The problem of the united front, which arises during specific periods most sharply, originates therein. The historical interests of the proletariat find their expression in the Communist Party when its policies are correct. The task of the Communist Party consists of winning over the majority of the proletariat, and only thus is the socialist revolution made possible. The Communist Party cannot fulfil its mission except by preserving, entirely and unconditionally, its political and organisational independence apart from all other parties and organisations within and without the working class.
Leon Trotsky-Bureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)
Socialist Workers Party member Geoff Brown is the author of the new book A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League. The ANL was launched in November 1977 to counteract the growing threat from racists and fascists who were spurred on by sections of the ruling elite who saw the fascists as a battering ram against the increasing radicalisation of the working class.
As the 2010 statement by the Socialist Equality Party stated, “The global crisis plunged Britain into a period of intense class conflict, which brought it closer to revolution than at any time since the 1926 General Strike. As a major financial centre, it was especially vulnerable to the sweeping capital movements that occurred following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. The Wilson government was forced into a series of devaluations and major spending cuts. In 1969, it brought forward the White Paper, “In Place of Strife”, to enforce legal sanctions against strikes.
The orthodox Trotskyists in the Socialist Labour League (SLL) warned that the Labour left’s refusal to lead a struggle against Wilson was paving the way for the return of a Conservative government and the imposition of even more savage measures against the working class. In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet after delivering his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, which sought to whip up anti-immigrant sentiments. But Powell’s remarks were only the initial expression of a right-wing shift by the Tories, who, by 1970, had adopted a radical, free-market agenda. Based on the monetarist economic policies of Milton Friedman, they advocated an end to the “bailout” of inefficient companies, the curtailing of social provisions, and a legal offensive against wildcat strikes.[1]
It must be said from the outset that the formation of the ANL had nothing to do with Trotskyism or Leon Trotsky’s advocacy of the United Front. According to the SWP, the “ Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky conceived the idea of the united front, which unites groups that are very different, such as reformists and revolutionaries.”
What Trotsky wrote on the United Front is opposed to what the SWP did. He wrote, ‘In entering into agreements with other organisations, we naturally obligate ourselves to a certain discipline in action. But this discipline cannot be absolute in character. If the reformists begin to put the brakes on the struggle to the obvious detriment of the movement and act counter to the situation and the moods of the masses, we, as an independent organisation, always reserve the right to lead the struggle to its conclusion, and this without our temporary semi-allies. It is possible to see in this policy a rapprochement with the reformists only from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office, but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and allowing the latter to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle. Behind this seemingly revolutionary fear of ‘rapprochement’ there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle….
“On the question of the united front, we see the very same passive and irresolute tendency, but this time masked by verbal irreconcilability. At the very first glance, one is hit between the eyes by the following paradox: the rightist party elements with their centrist and pacifist tendencies, who … come simultaneously to the forefront as the most irreconcilable opponents of the united front. … In contrast, those elements who have … held in the most difficult hours the position of the Third International are today in favour of the tactic of the united front. As a matter of fact, the mask of pseudo-revolutionary intransigence is now being assumed by the partisans of the dilatory and passive tactic”[2]
The SWP said it had “no secret agendas. What we say is what we do. We were running it as a united front. We couldn’t do anything that would undermine the agreement; we had a basic agreement that we were focusing on the NF.” Alongside Stalinists and reformists, the SWP had the backing of other pseudo-left parties that broadly supported the ANL, with the political scoundrel Tariq Ali writing “Hats Off to the SWP”
However, the real purpose of the SWP’s ANL United Front was to develop a pseudo-reformist alliance, aimed at deflecting a revolutionary confrontation between the working class and the British ruling elite. While from the outside the ANL was seen as an adjunct to the SWP, it was, in reality, directed by the top leadership, with SWP’s party leader, Tony Cliff, pulling the strings. Cliff was the ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.”[3]
The SWP’s perversion of the United Front tactic was also reflected in its work within the trade unions. As Paul Holborow relates, “one of the most significant considerations regarding how the ANL was established so quickly and widely as a grassroots organisation is what the SWP or the International Socialists had done industrially, particularly since the first miners’ strike in 1972 and before. Crucially, we had 22 rank-and-file papers that were an essential part of our industrial strategy for developing a rank-and-file movement that could fight independently of the trade union bureaucracy.5 This enabled us to very quickly establish sizeable groups of manual and white collar workers in their places of work—firefighters, car workers, civil servants, bus workers, dockers, teachers, engineers, council workers and many others. Perhaps the most impressive example of this was when miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and I spoke at a 200-strong delegate conference, and the following Monday, 60,000 Yorkshire miners went to work with the yellow ANL sticker on their helmets.”[4]
The purpose of the Socialist Workers Party’s rank-and-file committees, then as now, while providing tame “left-wing” criticisms of the labour and trade union bureaucracy, was to work might and main to politically block any independent movement of the working class. One problem for the pseudo-left groups is that they themselves now make up a significant faction of the trade union leadership at national, regional, and branch levels. They have been responsible for numerous betrayals and are now calling on rank-and-file members to rebel against the same bureaucracy to which they belong.
The publication of Brown’s book this year coincides with the SWP’s resurrection of the United Front campaign. According to Holborow, “When John McDonnell said last summer that we need to build an ANL-type movement, I think he was entirely right in spirit, but the context today is so different from what it was 40 years ago. Then, there was a militant rank-and-file movement. Britain was in turmoil, and the opposition to the ruling class was much more extensive and articulate. We are building in a completely different time, in the era of neoliberalism and all the ravages that this has produced for the labour movement. This makes it in many ways more necessary than ever to have an ANL-type organisation, but also more complicated.”[5] In August, McDonnell had declared, “It’s time for an Anti-Nazi League-type cultural and political campaign to resist” because “we can no longer ignore the rise of far-right politics in our society.”
This is the same McDonnell who, despite being expelled from the Labour Party by its right wing, grovelled before Starmer and begged for re-admittance to this right-wing party of big business. He wrote 11 op-eds in The Guardian, capitulating to Starmer and his right-wing allies. The SWP and its pseudo-left allies have offered him a means to resurrect his “left” reputation.
As Tony Robson and Chris Marsden point out, “There is, however, a significant difference between the 1970s and the present day. Whereas in 1977, the SWP acted with the benediction of the Labour and trade union lefts, today it speaks as the officially designated representative of the Trades Union Congress. The SWP has, over the decades, integrated itself into the highest echelons of the trade union bureaucracy, assuming leading positions in several unions to complement the niche it has established within academia. It speaks today not merely as the bureaucracy’s apologist, but as its officially recognised spokesman on the left.”[6]
[1] The mass movement against the Heath government-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-uk/32.html
[2] Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2, New York and London, 1953, pp. 91–96, 127–128].
[3] Tony Cliff-Trotskyism after Trotsky-www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1999/trotism/ch03.htm
[4] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/
[5] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/
[6] The significance of the British Socialist Workers Party’s call for a new “left alternative”
Given that the average age for a United Kingdom postal worker is around fifty-five, it is a fair bet that the majority of postal workers have witnessed over four decades of betrayals by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).
A small number of postal workers in their late sixties or seventies, believe it or not, are still working. They would remember the first national postal strike in 1971[1]. I raise this matter because the most pressing question facing postal workers at the moment is the issue of leadership.
Over the last five decades, postal workers have witnessed betrayal after betrayal and have seen their pay and working conditions decimated. It is time to face the facts: the CWU is nothing more than a company union that is doing the current owner, Daniel Kretinsky’s, dirty work. There is no line it will not cross to impose Amazon-style working conditions that will turn Royal Mail into an Amazon-style company with all the implications that entails.[2]
Postal workers have not been taking these attacks by the company and the union lying down. They have met these attacks head-on with every weapon at their disposal. However, it is time to face the facts: the old way of struggle has not worked. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying not to strike, but what is the new perspective that postal workers must fight for?
Leadership is an art. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people”. Still, they are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own unrestrained creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid significant events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions; precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution.[3]
It is pretty clear that postal workers have been caught unawares by the unprecedented nature of the attacks on their pay and conditions. They have, in Trotsky’s words, witnessed a great historical shock. It is time to face reality square on and realise that the CWU is dead and is just waiting to be buried.
Postal workers have tolerated the CWU for a long time because they did not really have an alternative, but now they do. Firstly, they have the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). Its analysis has been second to none in terms of accuracy and perspective. It offers a new way forward for postal workers. The CWU bureaucracy knows it is in a fight to the finish, so much so that it has lashed out at the WSWS on several occasions.[4]
Postal workers need a new organisation. The way forward is the struggle to build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). Although it is small at the moment, it has the only socialist perspective to take on both the CWU bureaucracy and Royal Mail. While it must join and build this new organisation, the task facing postal workers is a political one. The philosopher Hegel was fond of saying, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, and this is true for postal workers today. To be blunt, postal workers do not have much time to build this leadership. Any delay in building the PWRFC will mean that, soon, there will be nothing left to defend.
Given that the average age for a United Kingdom postal worker is around fifty-five, it is a fair bet that the majority of postal workers have witnessed over four decades of betrayals by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).
A small number of postal workers in their late sixties or seventies, believe it or not, are still working. They would remember the first national postal strike in 1971[1]. I raise this matter because the most pressing question facing postal workers at the moment is the issue of leadership.
Over the last five decades, postal workers have witnessed betrayal after betrayal and have seen their pay and working conditions decimated. It is time to face the facts: the CWU is nothing more than a company union that is doing the current owner, Daniel Kretinsky’s, dirty work. There is no line it will not cross to impose Amazon-style working conditions that will turn Royal Mail into an Amazon-style company with all the implications that entails.[2]
Postal workers have not been taking these attacks by the company and the union lying down. They have met these attacks head-on with every weapon at their disposal. However, it is time to face the facts: the old way of struggle has not worked. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying not to strike, but what is the new perspective that postal workers must fight for?
Leadership is an art. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people”. Still, they are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own unrestrained creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid significant events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions; precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution.[3]
It is pretty clear that postal workers have been caught unawares by the unprecedented nature of the attacks on their pay and conditions. They have, in Trotsky’s words, witnessed a great historical shock. It is time to face reality square on and realise that the CWU is dead and is just waiting to be buried.
Postal workers have tolerated the CWU for a long time because they did not really have an alternative, but now they do. Firstly, they have the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). Its analysis has been second to none in terms of accuracy and perspective. It offers a new way forward for postal workers. The CWU bureaucracy knows it is in a fight to the finish, so much so that it has lashed out at the WSWS on several occasions.[4]
Postal workers need a new organisation. The way forward is the struggle to build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). Although it is small at the moment, it has the only socialist perspective to take on both the CWU bureaucracy and Royal Mail. While it must join and build this new organisation, the task facing postal workers is a political one. The philosopher Hegel was fond of saying, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, and this is true for postal workers today. To be blunt, postal workers do not have much time to build this leadership. Any delay in building the PWRFC will mean that, soon, there will be nothing left to defend.
“That, in a Europe blood-stained by more than four years of total war, crushed under the most hideous yoke of the imperialisms, whose prisons and concentration camps are gorged with the victims of the most savage and most systematic repression, our organization has been able to hold its European assembly, to work out and define its political line of struggle, of itself constitutes the most eloquent manifestation of its vitality, its internationalist spirit, and the revolutionary ardour by which it is animated.
Fourth International statement
“The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened,’ they have begun to get somewhat rotten.”
Leon Trotsky
Michel Pablo, a renegade from Trotskyism, died at the age of eighty-four in 1996. Pablo’s betrayal of his former political principles was aptly celebrated by the Greek ruling elite at the time. When he died, the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) government gave him a state funeral. As the proverb says, “By your friends shall ye be known”
Hall Greenland’s biography of Pablo is the first of its kind. Alex de Jong, writing for the Pabloite International Viewpoint, believes “He’s (Pablo) finally gotten the biography he deserves.”[1]De Jong is correct because this is a politically naive account and largely absolves Pablo of his treachery. Anyone expecting anything different from a member of the Green Party is going to be sadly disappointed.
However, Greenland’s book is not without some merit, tracing Pablo’s early political life. Pablo attended the founding conference of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International and took part alongside fellow Trotskyists in the anti-Nazi resistance in wartime France. The book describes how many Trotskyists during the war years were living on borrowed time; not only were they hunted by the Gestapo, but they were murdered in droves by the Stalinists.
Many writers, including Greenland, imply that despite some heroics, Trotskyists played “little or no part in the struggle to project a revolutionary defeatist line,”
But as the Marxist David North points out, “ outside the Fourth International, there was no other tendency in the workers’ movement that opposed the imperialist war! The Trotskyists were hounded and persecuted by a “popular front” of fascists, “democratic” imperialists and Stalinists precisely because they upheld the banner of revolutionary defeatism and proletarian internationalism.
He continues, “The French Trotskyists Marc Bourhis and Pierre Gueguen were executed by the Nazis on October 22, 1941. Their comrade Jules Joffre was shot in 1942. In October 1943, the secretary of the French section, Marcel Hic, was arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Buchenwald and then to Dora, where he was murdered. Dozens of other French Trotskyists were arrested and also perished in the Nazi death camps. Despite the repression, the Trotskyist PCI published, starting in August 1940, seventy-three clandestine issues of its newspaper, La Verité, whose circulation was 15,000 copies.”[2]
Despite describing how the Stalinists murdered Trotskyists at will Greenland follows in the footsteps of every Stalinist, Pabloite and related middle-class radical organizations, and the intellectually corrupt academic milieu of pseudo-leftists who in the words of North “continue to ignore, deprecate and deny the overwhelming evidence that the penetration of the US Socialist Workers Party SWP by GPU agents played a critical role in the assassination of Trotsky. The role of Sylvia Callen (a.k.a. Sylvia Franklin, Sylvia Caldwell, Sylvia Doxsee), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon, as a GPU spy has been conclusively established. The same is true for Robert Sheldon Harte.”[3]
There are many problems with this book. The main one being is Greenland’s complete lack of understanding of the origins and nature of Pablo’s opportunism and subsequent betrayals caused by this opportunism. It is impossible to go into any great detail of Pabloite opportunism. For anyone interested, David North’s The Heritage We Defend is the best starting point.
As North points out in his book, the origins of Pablo’s opportunism began over the debate over the class nature of Yugoslavia and the Eastern European buffer states had become transformed, under the pressure of alien class forces, into a political platform for sweeping opportunist revisions of the basic Trotskyist program and its historical perspective. Pablo was the living embodiment of Trotsky’s sayings, “Without correct theory, there cannot be correct politics or more precisely, ‘every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis.”
North writes, “ The theories advanced by Pablo of ‘generations of deformed workers’ states” and “war-revolution” articulated the pessimism and demoralisation of broad layers of the Fourth International beneath the impact of unfavourable objective conditions. The political conceptions which were to become known as Pabloism emerged as an adaptation to the restabilization of capitalism, on the one hand, and to the apparent strengthening of the Stalinist bureaucracy, on the other.
Refracted through the political prism of the Cold War, the objective situation appeared to be dominated by the global conflict between the imperialist forces, spearheaded by the United States, and the Soviet Union and those labour and national revolutionary movements dominated by Stalinism. The real underlying conflict between the world bourgeoisie and the international proletariat—of which the Cold War was only a partial and distorted manifestation—receded from the political consciousness of those within the Fourth International who were reacting impressionistically to world events.[4]
Pablo’s capitulation to hostile class forces was not a pretty one to watch and had disastrous consequences for the working class. After he rejected revolutionary politics, Pablo, up to his death, was a supporter of ecology movements and women’s liberation. Along with his other renegades from Trotskyism, Ernest Mandel Pablo, he advocated not the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but that workers should undertake a form of Self-Management to counteract capitalism’s attacks on them.
Pablo advocated ‘generalised self-management or direct democracy’. He utilised his friendship with the Algerian bourgeois nationalists to put this experiment into practice. As Peter Schwarz writes, “Pablo himself and other leading French Pabloites placed themselves unconditionally at the service of the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN), and took over organisational responsibilities, such as the printing of illegal newspapers, fake banknotes and counterfeit passports. They even set up a weapons factory in Morocco. After the victory of the FLN over the French colonial regime, Pablo entered into the service of the Algerian government. As special advisor to the head of state, Ben Bella, Pablo was responsible for the introduction in Algerian factories of the forms of “workers’ self-management” first initiated in post-war Yugoslavia.”[5]
In his book Self-management in the struggle for socialism, Pablo explains, “In the economic sphere, the purpose of the plan is to determine the general conditions under which the self-managed enterprises can act and coordinate their efforts for the ultimate interests of society as a whole. We use the term social rather than economic plan to stress the fact that the plan seeks the balanced overall evolution of the society towards socialism, and that this affects the determination of so-called economic aims; the real aim of the plan is to satisfy the real social needs of the working people and citizens, with decisions made democratically from the bottom up and vice-versa, in a process of interaction which is constantly readjusting the objectives sought, even while the plan is being executed.[6]
As the above quote shows, Pablo’s self-management plan would be introduced peacefully and with the full cooperation of the capitalists; at no stage did Pablo advocate, let alone attempt, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
Although Greenland’s book is the first and only biography of Pablo, it should not be the last. It is incumbent on the Trotskyist movement to write its biography of this renegade from Trotskyism to train and arm future revolutionaries as to the nature of Pablo’s opportunism and betrayals.
[1] The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo-internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8471
[2] The Fourth International in World War II-The Heritage we Defend-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/heritage/07.html
[3] The place of Security and the Fourth International in the history of the Trotskyist movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/14/dujg-a14.html
[4] The Nature of Pabloite Opportunism-The Heritage We Defend
[5] The politics of opportunism: the “radical left” in France-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/05/lft4-m22.html
[6] Self-management in the struggle for socialism-https://www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/1972/selfman/main.htm
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
Tom Paine
“The sensible way to proceed — I think this is how Marx and Engels proceeded — is to develop a methodological view: historical materialism or dialectical materialism, whatever you want to call it. Then, you approach any material with that framework in mind, but you have to be able to go where the material leads you. Engels warned that you cannot start forcing the historical material into a ready-made format. I took that approach with my book. Of course, I had read a great deal of secondary material, but I wanted to go where the historical archives and contemporary material would take me. I did not wish to influence my work, nor did I intend to engage in debates with other Marxists or currents, in order to determine where history would go. After you have done that, you can demarcate it and illuminate it by — in a relatively minor way — dealing with other currents and approaches. What makes something Marxist is that it is the application of that method. “
John Rees
John Rees’s Fiery Spirits offers a new perspective on the English Revolution. Fiery Spirits establishes Rees as the leading contemporary continuator of the Marxist tradition, initiated by Christopher Hill and Brian Manning in writing the history of the 17th-century English revolution.
The latest book complements both Rees’s PhD thesis and his The Leveller Revolution, as well as his most recent publication, Marxism and the English Revolution. Rees is a gifted historian, and his latest book is well-written and thoroughly researched. It neither downplays nor overplays the Fiery Spirits, presenting a relatively objective assessment of their role in the English Revolution.[1]
Like the great historian Christopher Hill, Rees is sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king, and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. The Fiery Spirits, who were some of the revolution’s ideologues, ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent to justify some theory that explained their actions.
Rees’s new perspective centres on a small group of highly influential MPs. These “fiery spirits” played a significant role in shaping the course of the English bourgeois revolution, which ultimately led to the establishment of an English republic. Through their radical parliamentarianism, combined with mass protest, these revolutionaries pushed the revolution forward to its conclusion.
Rees is careful not to elevate these Fiery Spirits above the role played by Oliver Cromwell, who was, after all, the leader of the English revolution. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky once wrote, “ Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is, in this sense, immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”[2]
One of the main tasks Rees had was to rescue these “Fiery Spirits” from what E.P. Thompson once wrote was the “condensation of history”. They have been buried under a large number of dead dogs, and it is to Rees’s credit that he has rescued them. Henry Marten, Peter Wentworth, Alexander Rigby, and others deserve their place in history, and this work traces the radicalism of these Fiery Spirits in some cases back to the reign of Elizabeth I.
Dominic Alexander makes an interesting point in his review of Rees’s book: He writes, “In one sense, this partial continuity is evidence of how deeply the causative factors of the English Revolution were ingrained in the nation’s history. The conflict was not, as many revisionist historians have tended to argue, a mere accidental product of contingent events and personalities. The Fiery Spirits is, however, not so much a riposte to that vein of argument as it is a response to a more interesting one about the autonomy of the political sphere in the unfolding of the Revolution. The long pre-history of the parliamentary opposition faction is one proof that even granting the relative independence of the political sphere, causation there also runs deep into the history of early modern England”.[3]
Rees’s book presents a relatively orthodox Marxist understanding of the English bourgeois revolution and its leading actors. It is therefore perhaps surprising how little Rees uses the work of Leon Trotsky; there is no direct quote of Trotsky in any of Rees’s latest books. For any Marxist, Trotsky should be the basic starting point for any analysis of revolutions and their actors.
Trotsky writes, “The English revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a profound revolution that shook the nation to its core, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. Initially, the royal power, resting on the privileged classes or the upper echelons of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are closely associated with it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London.” [4]For Rees, this “dual Power began in the very early part of the 17th century.
The hallmark of a good book is that even seasoned readers who have studied this period for ages can learn something new. Rees presents new material that highlights the extraordinary level of factionalism and revolt that preceded the outbreak of revolution. From an early period, the Fiery Spirits led this rebellion. As Alexander writes, “The connections between the activities of the radicals in the Commons and the popular movement became, as Rees shows, the key dynamic driving events in the years 1640-1. The fiery spirits were indeed a minority in the Commons. Still, the weight of popular support behind their moves, such as Henry Marten’s during the struggle over the attainder of the King’s chief advisor Earl Strafford, meant that, as in this instance, ‘the course of events proceeded on the path that Marten advocated, not that which Pym still trod’ (pp.163-4). Indeed, during this confrontation, which led to Strafford’s execution, Pym lost control of parliament. Popular mobilisations against Strafford made the difference; one MP wrote, ‘unless this Earl be sacrificed to public discontentment I see not what hopes we have of peace’ (p.165).[5]
The Great historian E. H Carr was fond of saying, “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” This maxim should be applied to Rees. The Fiery Spirits is, without doubt, a significant addition to our understanding of the English bourgeois revolution. It contains new detailed research and reinterprets significant episodes and stages of events. Rees recalibrates our understanding of the revolution from a historical materialist standpoint. However, to what extent you could describe Rees as a revisionist is open to conjecture.
When I asked AI this question, its reply was “while John Rees engages with historical revisionism to some extent, his primary framework is that of Marxist historiography, which is distinct from the broader category of revisionist historians who challenge traditional interpretations.” Not much help.
There is something Jesuitical about Rees’s ability to write history from a relatively orthodox Marxist perspective while retaining the political outlook of a pseudo-left. He appears to retain the ability to compartmentalise his mind and pursue a scientific Marxist approach to history, up to the point where his radical politics, to some extent, draw the line. He is perhaps aided by an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life, which enables him to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never bring him into direct conflict with his political organisation, Counterfire, on political questions.
Speaking of which, in a previous article, I wrote this: “Rees was a member of the SWP before leaving to found the Counterfire group in 2010, as a significant split from the SWP. Counterfire specialises in providing a platform for the remnants and detritus of pseudo-left politics. The group is thoroughly convinced of the power and longevity of capitalism and is hostile to the working class and genuine socialism. Counterfire and Rees’s occasional use of Marxist phrases, and even rarer references to the Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, are for the sole purpose of opposing the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and internationalist programme. Counterfire’s self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” are bitterly opposed to the orthodox Marxism represented by the World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Parties, and the International Committee of the Fourth International. “[6]
While I do not personally subscribe to Rees’s political outlook, I can nonetheless recommend this book as highly as his previous work. Rees is a historian well worth reading, and it should be interesting to see what he is working on next. As Ann Talbot wrote about Hill which equally applies to Rees “A historian that stands head and shoulders above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him closely.[7]
“But who then, at that time [during the Stalinist repression], protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists can claim this honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by receiving the blow of an axe, they fought Stalinism totally, and they were the only ones. At the time of the great purges, they could no longer shout out their revolt except in the frozen vastness to which they were dragged to be more easily exterminated.”
Leopold Trepper: The Great Game
One of my favourite bookshops is the Amnesty International in Hammersmith, London. It is neither pretentious nor ostentatious, just a straightforward second-hand bookshop. I like it because you occasionally find a gem of a book. One such book was Peter Weiss’s Trotsky in Exile. I usually steer well clear of books on Trotsky’s life because they are inadvertently written by writers who are politically hostile to Trotsky and generally not worth reading, let alone reviewing. However, this play or book is different.
“Trotsky in Exile” is a play by German playwright and artist Peter Weiss, first performed in 1968. The play is a fictionalised account of the last years of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s life. Trotsky was residing in exile in Mexico and under constant threat from Stalin’s assassins.
The play is structured as a series of dialogues between Trotsky and various figures from his past and present, mostly revolutionaries, including his wife, Natalia Sedova, his son, Lev Sedov, and his former comrades in the Bolshevik Party. Through these conversations, Weiss explores Trotsky’s revolutionary ideology and his views on the Soviet Union under Stalin. The more Weiss read, the more he became a strong opponent of Stalinism. In 1967, this led him to meet one of Trotsky’s most important biographers, Isaac Deutscher.
Weiss’s portrayal of Trotsky as a complex and conflicted figure is an honest one. Outside of Trotsky’s writings on the impact of exile and political isolation on his family, this is one of the few books that examines his personal life in detail. While being faithful to Trotsky’s politics, Weiss employs Brechtian theatre devices, such as music and dance, to create a sense of distance and alienation. This style serves to underscore the play’s political and ideological themes, highlighting how history and ideology shape individual lives and experiences.
Peter Weiss (1916-1982 is arguably one of Germany’s most important artistic figures. He was an extraordinarily talented artist. He worked as a painter, novelist, filmmaker, and dramatist throughout his life. Weiss was comfortable in German literary and artistic circles. He was fond of Bertolt Brecht, seeing The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1930.
In the 1960s, Weiss had a friendship with the German-born, Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. In a letter to his long-time friend Hesse in 1961, Weiss writes, “I am very preoccupied with the art which first comes about when reason, rational thinking is switched off. I have been unable myself to resolve this conflict: sometimes it seems to me that the most essential lies in the dark and the subconscious, then however it occurs to me that one can only work today in an extremely conscious way, as if the spirit of the times demands that the writer does not lose his way in regions of half-darkness.”
Unlike most of his generation of artists, Weiss was deeply interested in the seminal experiences of the twentieth century – the crimes of fascism, the October Revolution, and its subsequent betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
It is hardly surprising, given the political hostility to Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in general, that a play that is broadly sympathetic to Trotsky and his revolutionary life has hardly been performed, let alone written about. With 2016 marking the 100th anniversary of Weiss’s birth, no attempt was made to stage “Trotsky in Exile”.
As Stefan Steinberg writes, “To my knowledge, the play is unique in its attempt to portray Trotsky’s life and political struggle on stage. The work has its flaws and, on occasion, reveals the influence of Weiss’s discussions with Ernest Mandel, the leader of the Pabloite Unified Secretariat. What is striking about the play, however, is Weiss’s valiant effort to correct all manner of Stalinist falsifications, to restore Trotsky to his rightful place in history as a leader of the Russian Revolution alongside Lenin and as the principal Marxist opponent of the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union.
Of great interest also in Trotsky in Exile is Weiss’s recognition of the central role of culture in assessing the October Revolution and Trotsky’s historical significance. Weiss had studied Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and devotes a scene of his play to a discussion among Lenin, Trotsky and leaders of the Dadaist art movement. In Zurich in 1916, Lenin is known to have met political co-thinkers in the same café frequented by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and other leading lights of the Dada movement. With legitimate poetic licence, Weiss brings the remarkable figures together in a discussion about the prospects for art in a post-revolutionary Soviet Union. A later scene features Weiss’s old mentor Breton in discussion with Trotsky and Diego Rivera in Mexico.”[1]
In the 1960s, Weiss became increasingly politically radical. One form this radicalisation took was, as mentioned by Steinberg, was Weiss’s conversation with Ernest Mandel.[2] Weiss had no fundamental understanding of Mandel’s politics. Mandel broke from orthodox Trotskyism. As Max Brody points out
“Mandel sought to provide the economic justification for the rejection by Pabloism of the revolutionary role of the working class. He claimed capitalism had reached a new stage, in which the imperialist powers had resolved the inner contradictions that resulted in the barbarity of the early 20th century. He initially referred to this new period as “neo-capitalism. “To make the central point from the outset, Mandel’s embrace of Pabloism did not flow from an incorrect economic theory, but the reverse. His economic analysis was based on his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the harbinger of capitalism’s demise.[3]
Weiss’s inability to understand the differences between orthodox Trotskyism and the Pabloism of Ernest Mandel was behind his decision to include Joseph Hansen in his book. However, Weiss did not know that Hansen was heavily involved in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. However, once Hansen’s treachery was in the public domain, Weiss should have at least told his readership of Hansen’s role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
According to a document entitled The Role of Joseph Hansen “The initial stages of the (Security and the Fourth International)investigation uncovered recently declassified documents, which revealed the conspiracy that prepared Trotsky’s assassination and the fatal role played by agents who had managed to infiltrate all the major political centres of the Fourth International. The ICFI uncovered documents relating to the activities of agents such as Mark Zborowski, who became the principal assistant of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Zborowski played a key role in the murder of Sedov and other leading members of the Fourth International in Europe.
Another important Stalinist agent, who supplied the Kremlin with valuable information on Trotsky’s activities, was Sylvia Caldwell (née Callen), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon; however, the most significant information uncovered by the ICFI related to the activities of Joseph Hansen. Documents discovered in the US National Archives and others obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Hansen, immediately after the assassination of Trotsky, sought out and established a covert relationship with high-level US government agents. One such document, a letter from the American Consul in Mexico City to an official in the State Department, dated September 25, 1940, reported that Hansen “wishes to be put in touch with someone in your confidence located in New York to whom confidential information could be imparted with impunity.”[4]
Weiss’s radicalism and defence of Leon Trotsky against the slander of the Stalinists led to his investigation by the East German Stalinist police, following the publication and production of Trotsky in Exile. Weiss, in the eyes of the Stasi, had become a traitor.
The Stasi’s “Operational Information No. 551/69” of September 5, 1969, reported “that the enemy side is making massive efforts to win over and misuse famous authors for deliberate and destructive ideological purposes,” and “it should be recognised that the enemy has succeeded in turning the author Peter Weiss, who has been successfully featured in our theatres. The Stasi report described Trotsky in Exile as a “clear commitment to anti-Soviet positions” and made clear it favoured a total ban on the work and its author in the GDR.
To conclude, as Weiss writes, “ Every word that I write down and submit for publication is political. It is intended to reach a large audience and achieve a specific effect. I submit my writings to one of the communication media, and then they are consumed by the audience. The way in which my words are received depends to a great extent on the social system under which they are distributed. Since my words are but a small and ever-diminishing fraction of available opinions, I have to achieve the greatest possible precision if my views are to make their way”[5]
Notes
1. The Heritage We Defend David North, 1988. The Heritage We Defend was first published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party of the United States, from 1982 to 1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section, the Workers Revolutionary Party.
2. Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968
[3] The ICFI’s exposure of Ernest Mandel’s “neo-capitalism” and the analysis of the global economic crisis: 1967–1971-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/09/rvtn-s09.html
A Trumpet of Sedition 