By Sean Matgamna
Our discussion about the unions, the Blair Labour Party, standing in elections, and the role of the AWL has raised many basic questions.
In fact, the differences reduced to practicalities are not, in my opinion, very large. But Tom's and Maria's document raises many of the basic questions the answers to which constitute the raison d'etre of Solidarity and Workers' Liberty. And indeed of all tendencies rooted as we are in the early Communist International and Trotsky's movement in the 1920s and 30s.
If Tom and Maria understand what they have written, and mean what they write, then the differences are very large indeed. Implicitly or explicitly, they raise many very important questions about the nature of working-class movements and of organisations like the AWL. The organisation is faced with a discussion of the basics of the Marxist conception of "the class, the party and the leadership".
Nowhere, except in the 1917 Russian Revolution, were the complexities of that question unfolded more clearly than in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-9.
In Catalonia the workers made a great revolution but were unable to consolidate it or even to defend it against the Republican bourgeois-Stalinist counter-revolution that destroyed it and prepared the way for fascist victory in the whole of Spain and 40 years of fascist rule thereafter.
Trotsky's writings on Spain during the 1930s have been collected into a large book, which those comrades who have not read it should read. I made the following collection of extracts from Trotsky's commentaries in 1995 for a special issue of Workers' Liberty on the Spanish Revolution. I believe it has much to say to our discussion now.
The last item is dated 20 August 1940, the day Stalin's assassin used an ice-pick to strike down Leon Trotsky. He died the next day. Trotsky's working title was, "The class, the party and the leadership". It is a tremendously valuable analysis of the fundamentals of the questions that concern us in our current "trade-union" discussion.
Read Trotsky on the Spanish Revolution here.
