The Twilight of World Trotskyism

Most reviews of John Kelly’s recent The Twilight of World Trotskyism (2023) will turn upon their reaction to the preface’s opening sentence – outrage from Trotskyists writing for Cosmonaut and Marx & Philosophy, nodding enthusiasm from the pages of the Morning Star. That sentence is: ‘The Trotskyist movement has an unparalleled record of political failure.’ (p. xi) Neither response – nor that opening sentence – quite does justice to the depth of Kelly’s research into the history of Trotskyism, better represented by 2018’s Contemporary Trotskyism, nominally focused on Britain but already beginning to look elsewhere. In fact, Kelly’s critical investigation of Trotskyism goes back to one of his earliest major books, Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, (1988) written while he was still a member of the CPGB in the process of shrugging away his earlier confident Eurocommunism.

The themes of that earlier book continue to motivate Kelly. There, he derided Leon Trotsky’s belief in the ‘imperialist epoch’ as the ‘epoch of wars and revolutions’, (p. 41) the weight which he placed ‘on the role of the bureaucracy in retarding revolutionary trade union struggle and consciousness’, (p. 42) and his famous call for ‘transitional demands’ as a means of causing ‘a collision between the economic potential of capitalism and the economic demands of the working class’. (p. 46) In Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, Trotsky’s theorisation of trade unionism was taken to task for ‘the absence of any developed concept of contradiction’, typical of ‘an old-fashioned theorist of inevitable collapse, and a simple economic determinist with an apocalyptic vision’. (p. 48) In Contemporary Trotskyism, these three themes persist as part of Trotskyism’s core elements to which he added the theory of ‘permanent revolution’, the ‘united front’ (as opposed to the ‘popular front’), the critical analysis of the USSR as non-socialist, the need for a Fourth International and for ‘a democratic centralist, revolutionary vanguard party’ (p. 18) whose task was ‘to launch a revolutionary seizure of power and establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.’ (p. 31) Whilst acknowledging that not all of these themes are distinctively Trotskyist and that Trotskyists have disagreed considerably over their interpretation, Kelly used these disagreements to draw out ‘seven families of Trotskyism’: ‘Mainstream’, ‘Third Camp’, ‘Orthodox’, ‘Institutional’, ‘Radical, ‘Latin American’, and ‘Workerist’. (p.  72)

Focusing on Britain, Contemporary Trotskyism chiefly dealt with those families whose sections dominated the history of British Trotskyism: the International Marxist Group (Mainstream), the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party (Third Camp), the Workers Revolutionary Party (Orthodox), and the Militant Tendency/Socialist Party (Institutional). Though not silent when it comes to Trotskyism’s limitations, this framework allowed for some nuanced assessments of the achievements of these different scions – Contemporary Trotskyism highlights their role in founding and sustaining social movements like the Anti-Nazi League and the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, their introduction of ‘the ideas of classical Marxism to successive cohorts of young people’ and ‘contribution to the revival of interest in Marxist ideas’, their opposition to the right wing of the Labour Party, and ‘their resilience in the face of adversity, internal conflicts, limited political influence and their failure to build anything approaching a mass party.’ (pp. 233-234)

One of the first things that will strike the reader of The Twilight of World Trotskyism – particularly those that have read Kelly’s earlier work – is its brevity, clocking in at a mere 124 pages (including references), roughly half the length of Contemporary Trotskyism and that’s with the wider ambition of addressing ‘the historic failure of the Trotskyist movement around the world.’ (p. xiii) Some of this might be down to unfortunate publishing decisions; Contemporary Trotskyism had already covered some of the history of the Fourth International(s) and the fortunes of Trotskyist organisations in Western Europe, and at times Twilight feels as if it were collecting Kelly’s leftovers. It may also be political – whereas Contemporary Trotskyism erred on the side of sympathy towards Trotskyists contributing to the Corbyn project, Twilight is much more recalcitrant as a desperate attempt by Kelly to put the nail in the coffin of ‘a dead end for socialists.’ (p. 105) This is a shame. Whilst the earlier volume could appeal to Trotskyists softly interrogating their own tradition, Twilight rarely provides the depth and range of evidence which could break through the sectarian walls to which Kelly devotes so much attention. Although Contemporary Trotskyism’s treatment of Trotskyist organisations as hybrids of parties, sects and social movements might have raised some eyebrows, it was founded in extensive archival research and interviews with Trotskyists from as many as 20 different groups. Twilight is much more dependent upon secondary literature and the published material of the Internationals and chiefly their British representatives – there are no new interviews, and neither book really makes any effort to connect to the oral history research conducted with Trotskyists since the 1990s.

Moreover, the helpful framework established in Contemporary Trotskyism to distinguish between Trotskyism’s various ‘families’ is, bar a few references, largely abandoned in Twilight. After a repackaging of the summation of Trotskyist doctrine from the previous book, Kelly sets out to describe the history of groups in ‘the four main centres of World Trotskyism’: Argentina, Britain, France, and the USA. Later chapters provide an international equivalent to Contemporary Trotskyism’s discussion of Trotskyist membership and electoral prospects (without the same volume of detail) and accounts of the famous Bolivian and Sri Lankan ‘success stories’, before a more general attempt to survey Trotskyism’s limitations. There is a real missed opportunity here, to evaluate the ‘families’ framework internationally and in particular to trace those families without significant representatives in Britain – notably the ‘Latin American’ Trotskyism of Nahuel Moreno (who Kelly confesses to effectively not understanding at all) and the ‘Workerist’ Trotskyism of Lutte Ouvrière (whose annual fête remains significant beyond their own tendency) – and the relationships between them.

In abandoning some of this breadth and richness, though, the thrust of Kelly’s animosity towards Trotskyism has become clearer. Equally, for those of us not used to having to defend Trotskyism, the points which he chooses not to criticise become more obvious. Despite focusing upon ‘World Trotskyism’, Twilight has remarkably little to say about Trotskyists’ understanding of internationalism or the capitalist world system, or the importance which most Trotskyists assign to the formation of Internationals. As J. Moufawad-Paul has argued, Trotskyists have tended to treat capitalism theoretically as:

a global mode of production that develops in a combined and uneven manner, rather than a theory … of a world system of capitalism where capitalist modes of production form the centers of capitalism, and impose/control global capitalism through imperialism, and capitalist social formations on the periphery that are still economically defined, internally, as pre-capitalist modes of production.

What this means is that, in spite of Trotsky’s important recognition of global unevenness, there remains a powerful tendency in Trotskyism (and exacerbated in post-Trotskyist ‘returns to Marx’ or the Marxism of the Second International) to neglect an analysis of discrete national social formations in favour of viewing each country as a microscopic fragment of a global capitalist mode of production, local barriers and residues notwithstanding. From this understanding of an already-global capitalism arises an emphasis upon a ‘single world socialist revolution’ – led, it might reasonably follow, by an international Communist Party, of which national Trotskyist groups (hope to) consider themselves to be sections. Despite their emphasis on the concept in the abstract, therefore, the ‘internationalism’ of Trotskyists is often shallow, because there is less interest in the dynamics of the capitalist world system than in condemning ‘the sin of nationalism’. Again, in spite of the emergence of Trotskyism within the specificity of the Russian revolution, the temptation is to elide national specificities and to return to a remarkably linear, even stageist, model of working-class-led democratic revolutions held in permanence pending ‘the victory of the proletariat in the West’ (but in which the significance of the working class, the Party, and their respective tasks are otherwise broadly the same).

For Kelly, however, these understandings of the world are not fundamentally in question – whilst Kelly would no doubt find their discussion of revolutions worthy of ridicule, his own understanding of the world is basically similar. Jumping between discussions of Trotskyism in Britain, France, Argentina, the United States, Bolivia, and Sri Lanka, Kelly dedicates almost no time at all to considering the consequences of their differing positions within the capitalist world system and the problems these might pose for the Trotskyists organising there. As already mentioned, Kelly struggles to understand the resentments of Latin American Trotskyists towards those Internationals based elsewhere, and although he observes (in Contemporary Trotskyism) that a body like the International Marxist Tendency is headquartered in Britain despite the relative strength of its section in Pakistan, this is merely used to comment upon the preponderance of ‘long-serving, charismatic or authoritarian leaders’ (pp. 223-224) and the issue is not returned to in Twilight. Whereas, as Robert Biel argued in Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, Trotsky could be faulted for advancing an ultimately Eurocentric line within the emergent Third International, for Kelly the problem with Trotskyists is that they discuss and even act upon anti-imperialism at all. Unsurprisingly, Kelly is disinterested in discussing those Trotskyists that (in varying ways, and with differing levels of success) eventually moved away from Trotskyism over these (and other) questions, influenced by struggles in the Third World – figures like James and Grace Lee Boggs, C.L.R. James, Sam Marcy, or David Yaffe.

If Trotskyists could often be criticised for a simplistic and one-sided emphasis upon the working class, Kelly shares their workerism. Here, it is important to situate Kelly’s arguments about Trotskyism within his life’s work as an Industrial Relations scholar. Ever since Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, Kelly has been a formidable critic of naïve claims about working-class consciousness and trade unionism, drawing out many of the complexities which are overlooked in absurd Trotskyist statements that every strike is ‘a revolution in miniature.’ Nevertheless, Kelly still remains primarily interested in struggles at the point of production and shares with (some) Trotskyists a reluctance or inability to think properly beyond the conventional category of the ‘working class’. Given Kelly’s reservations about theories of imperialism, we will not be shocked to discover that he apparently finds discussions of the labour aristocracy unpersuasive. Kelly occasionally notes Trotskyism’s difficulties in responding to struggles over race and gender, however it is characteristic that Kelly’s discussion of ‘cycles of world protest’ (drawing upon the work of Joseph Choonara, a Trotskyist) wholly neglects the struggles gathered under the name Black Lives Matter. Where Trotskyist involvement in ‘social movements’ like the Anti-Nazi League was criticised by Black radicals (and other Trotskyists) for focusing on the National Front and neglecting the racism of the British state, Kelly sees such ‘doctrinal moderation’ positively.

Similarly, in spite of references to feminist critics of Trotskyist organisations, and Contemporary Trotskyism includes some promising accounts of the ‘different life situations’ (p. 98) of Trotskyist leaders and their members, his criticism of ‘procrustean efforts to force identity issues into the unyielding mould of general class politics’ (p. 238) does not signal less uneasiness around the struggles which have been labelled ‘identity issues’. Indeed, ‘mobilization theory’ (the Industrial Relations approach for which Kelly is best-known) has itself been described as ‘weakened’ by an ‘often gender and race blind approach.’ In presenting the problem for Trotskyists as one of responding to demands which did not require ‘the overthrow of capitalism’, (p. 209) Kelly sidesteps revolutionary feminist and queer criticisms of Trotskyist groups for not having been willing to go far enough. Contemporary Trotskyism’s reference to the influential 1979 booklet Beyond the Fragments (pp. 210-211) effectively ignores its celebration of thorough-going transformations far beyond (but connected to) the advocacy of ‘equal pay’ and the provision of childcare; Kelly’s praise for Big Flame’s criticism of Trotskyist ‘neglect of the women’s and other autonomous social movements’ (p. 58) does not mean an endorsement of Big Flame’s rejection of ‘patching [capitalism] up with piece-meal reforms through Parliament’ or its call for ‘a total transformation of existing social relations.’

One of the abiding themes of Kelly’s criticisms of Trotskyist groups in Twilight is the rejection of ‘an apocalyptic vision in which their tiny organizations are rapidly transformed into mass, revolutionary parties leading a global wave of successful, anti-capitalist insurgencies.’ (p. xiii) As he argues, Trotskyism has frequently struggled with explaining the failure of Trotsky’s predictions in the post-war period – albeit this was a problem which, as Ben Harker has found, similarly afflicted supporters of the CPGB, confident that capitalism’s death knells were being sounded. This is the phenomenon which Grace Lee Boggs described as ‘the D-day concept of revolution’, and which Moufawad-Paul has called ‘insurrectionism’. Beyond this schema, alternative ways of imagining revolution are possible – as I have suggested elsewhere, this was one of the reasons that the metaphor of the ‘Long March’ was to prove compelling in the 1960s and 1970s, spatially and temporally more expansive than Trotskyist descriptions of ‘the October road’.

For Kelly, though, revolution is insurrection and insurrection is revolution. In fact, in Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, Kelly’s outlook on the prospects for socialism at the end of the 1980s remained fundamentally insurrectionist in orientation (albeit coloured by a spontaneism indebted to his reading of Rosa Luxemburg):

It is to those periods of ‘special grievance’, marked by waves of strikes and industrial conflict, that socialists must look for the seeds of radicalisation, and for the forces that will shift the balance of power decisively and finally against capital. Trade unions will play an essential role in this process as the principal agents of working-class mobilisation, but, as Marxists have always recognised, the unions must work in tandem with a mass socialist political party, something that Britain conspicuously lacks. One of our major hopes for the immediate future must therefore be that such a party emerges from the radicalisation brought about by the next wave of strikes to hit the British economy. Once that happens the full fruits of militant trade unionism can then be reaped. (p. 304)

These hopes have been long dashed, of course. Perhaps influenced by apparent failings in the ‘long wave theory’ that he had subscribed to earlier, Kelly has abandoned this belief in the possibility of sudden and dramatic changes in consciousness provoked by capitalist crisis. Without an alternative imagining of revolution, Kelly’s perspective has shifted decisively in favour of the most tepid gradualism – a gradualism which is somewhat novel today because of its primarily syndicalist, rather than electoral, mechanism. As noted earlier, Kelly retains a sympathetic assessment of ‘the ideas of classical Marxism’ such that his principal interest in the relationship between Marxism and trade unionism is not the significance of trade unions for Marxist politics but what, if anything, Marxism can offer to trade unionism.

Kelly’s abandonment of Marxism not so much as a mode of analysis but as an impulse – ‘it is right to rebel!’ – is particularly apparent in a passage of Twilight which provides a startlingly optimistic assessment of the contemporary world and a criticism of the ‘realm of almost pure negativity’ (p. 77) within which Trotskyists reportedly reside. Amongst other things, Kelly lists the EU’s worker rights directives, minimum wage and anti-discrimination legislation, the legalisation of same-sex marriage and abortion, the spread of ‘multiparty democracies’ in Latin America and Africa and ‘the collapse of the one-party “socialist” states of Russia and Eastern Europe’ (p. 79) as evidence against a supposed ‘end of the reformist era’. (p. 78)

Setting aside the dubious claim that Trotskyists have somehow been reluctant to endorse reforms (and the role of Trotskyists in bringing some of these changes about), it is admittedly the case that any theory which is unable to respond to these changes is woefully inadequate – the insurrectionism and catastrophism to which Trotskyism has been prone can be vulnerable on that score. However, to present such a rosy picture of international progress, in the absence of any really serious consideration of the problems facing the world today, is astonishing. When these problems are acknowledged, it is only to castigate Trotskyism for failing to expand amidst ‘unusually propitious’ circumstances. (p. 102) Although the rise of ‘Green’ (and ‘Radical Left’) electoral parties is used as another baton with which to beat the Trots, ecological crisis is barely acknowledged in Twilight; one might question whether, as Kelly argues, ‘the apocalyptic mantra of “socialism or barbarism”’ still ‘opens up an unbridgeable chasm’ between ‘Trotskyist groups and the lived experience of millions of people’, (p. 103) given the extent of the climate anxieties affecting young people especially.

That is not to suggest falling back upon climate catastrophism as a contemporary iteration of ‘Trotsky’s doom-laden prognoses of the late 1930s’. (p. 103) At the same time, it should not be difficult to identify the reasons for dissatisfaction with what Max Ajl has labelled ‘green social democracy’ or the other reforms which are celebrated by Kelly. If attempts to build a ‘Social Europe’ allowed ‘a rudderless centre-left, for lack of any better ideas’ to ‘eke out some defensive concessions’, they have also smoothed the construction of ‘the fullest realization of the neoliberal political vision.’ That EU has been instrumental in the dismantling of the economic and welfare systems built by ‘the one-party “socialist” states of Russia and Eastern Europe’ – processes closely associated with the growth of a far-right which directly threatens the rights which Kelly seems to take for granted. Nor should it be forgotten that legal progress in areas like marriage law, though valuable in its own way, is a poor substitute for queer and trans liberation.

In effect, Kelly abandons any effort to understand the motivations which might lead Trotskyists (or anybody else) to commit themselves to revolutionary socialism, leaning upon their foolishness or blinkered faith as the only reasonable explanation. Well, communism does require faith – in equality, in the ‘actuality of revolution’ (p. 103) – as much as a standpoint like Kelly’s requires faith in its opposite: people are unequal and incapable, revolution is impossible. And yet, at least as surely as the accumulation of reforms which Kelly celebrates, rebellions continue, ‘the hard thing gives way’. If we turn to Marxism for sustenance in our struggles, and in recognition of the fragility and frustrations of the concessions which we are involved in winning, we make a decision also to position ourselves within a movement towards emancipation which goes beyond them.

It would be odd if this decision did not lead us to seek out others, and different answers to the problem of organisation have been posed. For some, a coalitional politics is the solution, bringing together the disparate struggles supported by those that call themselves socialists. For others, a ‘party of a new type’ is needed, learning from Maoism’s breaks with Cominternism. Clearly, we do not have to share Trotskyism’s answers to this problem. But, if we have decided that we are communists, we cannot escape the challenges of articulating the ‘elements for communism’ which we experience already. Kelly, who has decided that he is not a communist, can sidestep the problem, treating Trotskyism’s attempts to answer it as an eccentric (but much-resented) curio, unthreatening to a class society whose survival is all-but guaranteed.

In one particularly mean spirited paragraph which closes Twilight’s penultimate chapter, Kelly snarks that ‘instead of being carried forward to revolutionary triumph by the laws of history, the forces of Orthodox Trotskyism are being carried into oblivion by the laws of biology.’ (p. 99) The book, and even more so the predecessor, is useful in exploring the history of Trotskyism, including its failings – the worst of which, I have suggested, Kelly himself shares. Oblivion, however, confronts us all. It is up to us whether we commit ourselves to refusal to admit that fact, or to a communism convinced ‘that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.’

The Twilight of World Trotskyism
John Kelly
Routledge, 2023
9781032350080