This is the title of a pamphlet handed out by the National Front outside a recent Alliance Party conference in Wellington. The purpose of the Leaflet is to label the Alliance and all those of the broad left as a front for ‘Trotskyites’ and then to smear Trotskyites as ‘Red Fascists. Both are lies. This is a provocation by the neo-fascists against communists. The soft left are not Trotskyists. They will never defend the workers against fascism. Nor are Trotskyists fascists. One thing that the NF forgot to quote was Trotsky’s promise to real fascists to “acquaint their faces with the pavement”.
NF: finds Trots everywhere
Trots are accused of ‘entering’ the ‘respectable” Alliance. What’s the evidence? Matt McCarten goes every year to Sydney as guest speaker at events put on the ‘Trot’ Democratic Socialist Party. But the DSP is not Trot, so there goes that argument. The DSP see article on Venezuela are Castroites if theyre anything and Castro is no Trot.
Leading light in the Alliance, Len Richards and Mike Treen (ex-Alliance) are both undercover Trots. Richards was invited to CWG public meeting in early 2004 to talk about the Alliance. If he was at all influenced by the real Trot CWG he didn’t show it in rejecting the violent seizure of power. Mike Treen, was a member of the Communist League, who are ex-Trots, and now Castroites. No Trots here then.
The ‘comrades’ are cooking up something
Then there’s the open policy of the Socialist Workers to work with the Alliance, in the same way it has fused with the Scottish Socialist Party because workers have to be won from parliament. But the SWO are not Trots either, so their open entry is not going to lead to revolution. In fact the broad left only exist to stop revolution. (See article on Venezuela).
Maybe the NF should stop attributing its own bad faith to the left. After all fascism has had a bad press for half a century, and maybe workers need to be won to fascism by the NF dressing itself up as ‘respectable’ patriots opposed to ‘Red Fascism’.
Trotsky no ‘Red Fascist’
The NF then repeats lots of lies from Stalinist and Anarchist sources portraying Trotsky as a ‘Red Fascist’. Trotsky was actually the leader of the October Insurrection, the almost bloodless revolution that took power from the Tsar and his western imperialist cronies. He then led the Red Army in the Civil War to defeat the many armed invasions by Western and reactionary Russian forces.
In other words Trotsky led the Dictatorship of the Proletariat against the Dictatorship of the Capitalists and won. In the process he imposed the same discipline on the Red Army that the capitalists impose on workers who fight their wars. The difference was Trotsky was defending a workers’ state and not the rule of private property. Those who betrayed the revolution to the bosses’ forces were shot. But if you count up the deaths in the First World War and the Civil War it is the capitalists who are the mass killers, not Trotsky of the Bolshevik Party.
The Red Terror
That’s why the term the term ‘Red Terror’ is term used by the bosses to smear the Bolsheviks. The only people terrorised by the Russian Revolution were the bosses who lost their profits, and all their petty bourgeois hangers-on who lost their privileges. The class enemies of the working class were always given the opportunity to change sides and avoid punishment. The Red Army was staffed with Tsarist officers who came over the workers’ side. So were the sailors of Kronstadt given the chance to surrender; only when the workers cause was openly betrayed did those involved meet with death, and always after public trials.
Real Fascism
Far from ‘Red Fascism’, Trotsky represented the best elements of the Russian Revolution. His downfall at the hands of Stalin was the effect of the Russian Revolution being strangled by encirclement and isolation. Trotsky carried the flag of Communism in Germany in 1933 when the German Communist Party betrayed the world revolution by failing to stop Hitler.
That is the real reason the NF hates Trotskyists. They know like the Stalinists and the Anarchists, that only Trotsky was correct in confronting fascism in Germany and in Spain. Here the combined rotten politics of the Stalinists and the Anarchists sold out the workers and allowed Hitler and Franco to come to power. Trotsky’s and our policy towards the neo-fascists is to organise a workers’ unite front to smash them before they smash us!
From Class Struggle 60 March-April 2005
No comments:
Post a Comment