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Whereas the founder of scientific socialism Karl Marx was obviously genuine, I am in no doubt that his collaborator Friedrich Engels was an agent of big business. Why else would the British ruling class allow them to live and develop Marxist theory in this country for so long, without assassinating one or both of them, unless they knew that one of them was on their side. My main evidence for Engels being an agent of big business is the dreadful book Anti-Dühring, which is supposed to explain the theory of “dialectical materialism” but contains some ridiculous errors (in particular giving 2 goes to –2 goes back to 2 again as an example of “negation of the negation” which is supposed to mean “history repeats itself on a higher level”).
In general, when there are two particularly strong collaborators, it is common for one of them to be on the side of the working class and the other to be on the side of big business. Otherwise, the opposing class would act to try to break them apart to prevent them from being too powerful opponents that would be a serious threat to them, or introduce a third person on their side who could act to limit their effectiveness.
That argument applies to Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as well as to Marx and Engels. Whereas at times in the past, I have held the point of view that Lenin was an agent of big business, I now realise that Trotsky was but Lenin wasn’t.
In Russia in 1917, there were two revolutions. After the February revolution, a capitalist Provisional Government came to power that would not grant any form of elections. As well as campaigning for ‘bread, peace and land’, the Bolsheviks (who later became known as the Communist Party) campaigned for a Constituent Assembly. However, because Russia was largely a peasant country, the Bolsheviks lost the elections after they came to power in October to the right-wing Social Revolutionaries (right SRs) based on the large landowners. Lenin and Trotsky, who had led the October revolution, persuaded the Bolsheviks to abolish the Constituent Assembly (by force). They argued that there would have been massive repression of the Bolsheviks if they let the right SRs take power, but surely the working class would have been able to defend them in a country that had had two revolutions in the same year! The result has been 87 years in which ‘socialists’ and ‘communists’ have often been regarded as ‘undemocratic’.
I have sometimes argued that only one of Lenin or Trotsky was an agent of big business (in a conspiratorial organisation that had infiltrated the Bolsheviks), but now realise that both of them were. Lenin was allowed to travel through Germany to return to Russia in 1917, to deliver the April Theses, in which he called for “All power to the Soviets”. The first programme in the Channel 5 series The Russian Revolution in Colour revealed that Lenin only spoke to workers and sailors from Kronstadt who had arrived at the Bolsheviks’ headquarters in Petrograd for about a minute during the July Days, making the point that he was not keen on spontaneous uprisings. Even if Lenin and Trotsky were correct in their analysis that it was necessary to hold the workers back, on the basis that the rest of Russia was not sufficiently prepared for a revolution, Lenin should have taken the opportunity to educate them, preparing them for a future revolution. If they had led the working class to power in Petrograd, the revolution could have quickly spread across Russia. Instead, the Bolsheviks were decimated, Lenin was accused of being a Russian spy, and a military-police dictatorship under Kornilov was on the verge of coming to power forcing the Bolsheviks to lead the October revolution. The Channel 5 programme was biased in ignoring Trotsky completely and calling the Provisional Government “democrats” despite the fact that they refused to hold elections, and the programme did not offer any clues as to why the Bolshevik-led Soviets held elections to a Constituent Assembly after coming to power after highlighting Lenin’s preference for the Soviets holding overall power. Nevertheless, it was pro-working class and the truth probably lies somewhere between it and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. I had heard through discussions in Militant that the Kronstadt sailors played an important role in the revolution, but Trotsky played their role down probably because of his Red Army’s later suppression of them when they correctly realised that the gains of the revolution was slipping away.
Lenin was excused by Militant members, who said that he thought that his dictatorial rule was only a temporary measure, needed because of the invasion from about 20 other countries, the civil war and the failure of the revolution to spread. Lenin supposedly realised the danger of Stalin coming to power too late, when he was approaching death.
Since Stalin killed all his other main opponents in the USSR, whereas he let Trotsky live in exile until getting one of his agents to kill him using an ice pick in 1940, it is rational to believe that Trotsky was also an agent of big business. There is further evidence of this, including excesses committed by Trotsky as leader of the Red Army. Most significantly, there was the disastrous position adopted by Trotskyists at the time of the Second World War, which led to the British Revolutionary Communist Party collapsing from a very strong organisation to a handful – describing it as a war between rival imperialisms trying to gain greater control of the world’s markets, like the First World War. It was in fact qualitatively different, because fascism (as adopted by Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini in Italy) is a mass movement of the middle class and so-called “lumpenproletariat” (a Marxist term for the lower levels of the working class, consisting of unemployed people and workers in low-waged, non-unionised jobs, who are often wrongly categorised as the “underclass” in modern terminology). Because the Nazis were a mass movement, they were much stronger than military-police dictatorships such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Iraq under Saddam Hussein and Saudi Arabia under the Royal Family supported by the West, which have relied or rely on a much smaller base of informers. The Trotskyists’ policy of opposing the Second World War (which started in 1939 shortly before Trotsky’s death) was disastrous, and led to them becoming a tiny force in Britain and around the world. For more about fascism, visit my page on racism and fascism.
[Note that my document on “The brain, politics and music” points out that many people who are overall on the side of the working class act against its interests at certain times, and that nobody is completely on the side of big business. For example, Trotsky did put forward some good politics at times, such as in the first volume of his History of the Russian Revolution, but I gave up fairly near the start of the second volume (which I think was largely due to his terrible attempts to justify the decision to abolish the Constituent Assembly). Trotsky's Transitional Programme pamphlet is terrible and bears little relationship to the programme of the Militant Tendency which was supposedly based on that pamphlet.]
Even today, in every edition of Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Socialist Worker platform of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), the “What the SWP stands for” column includes the text “The working class needs an entirely different kind of state – a workers’ state based upon councils of workers’ delegates and a workers’ militia.” The ‘councils of workers’ delegates’ were known as ‘soviets’ in Russia and the hierarchical structure they had enabled Stalin to come to power. In this day and age, it is obvious that proportional representation (PR) is a much fairer form of election than either soviets or constituencies, and PR has been instrumental in enabling the SSP to get six Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) elected. Furthermore, the Single Transferable Vote system should be used enabling voters to indicate preferences, instead of being put in a position where many vote tactically; if that was allowed then the SSP would have even more MSPs. In passing, it is worth noting that using the phrase “a workers’ militia” is surely designed to put people off – after atrocities such as in Dunblane, guns are hated so much in Britain that many workers seeing such a phrase would think “If that’s what you mean by socialism, then I’d prefer capitalism thank you very much.”
In my opinion, the above is evidence that the leadership of the SWP is dominated by agents of big business. Of course, some of their leaders are nevertheless on the side of the working class. The fact that their leading theoretician Alex Callinicos gives a strong hint that he has recognised the role of Engels in one of the introductions to his book The revolutionary ideas of Marx, by saying that many Marxists in the West regard Engels as Marx’s evil genius who has distorted the latter’s work (although he claims to reject this argument), suggests that Alex is genuine.
I will put a lot more about Marxist theory and practice, including my views about how mistakes (deliberate or otherwise) in it can be corrected, on this page in due course...
