S LIBERAL HELPERS

68Western Europe and North America.) In North The Outcome of TrotskyAmerica, the only vanguard force worth mentioning isthe Labor Committees and their collaborators. Around Today, as the professedly Trotskyist organizationsthis kernel, the entire mass workers movement must be have, omitted themselves as a faction of the currentdirectly built. However, the possibility of actualizing the socialist movement, the word Trotskyism has lost allaccelerating Labor Committee influence among millions meaning. There is no Trotskyist faction within theof workers into a mass organization depends significatly movement to be treated as a ponderable current, andupon the establishment of an international program- there is no corpus of thought called Trotskyism worthmatic united front in Europe. That European effort then anyone's resurrecting. All that remains are the lessons ofdepends upon the reciprocal effects of its activity upon Trotsky's efforts and the obligation of the futurethe potentialities of the North American working class. . Communist movement to restore L.D. Trotsky himself toThus, in effect, the North American movement is his proper status as a past contributor to the struggles.organicially linked to the European (and JaPanese and If there might have been something hypotheticallyAustralian) movements, useful in Trotsky's role in the Left Opposition, some-In Europe, the possibil!ty of stopping fascism depends thing to focus upon for leading suggestions for today'supon the programmatic alliance of the Communist efforts, we have long since eliminated that 15ossibility.To the extent that Trotsky's views may coincide withparties, the left wings of mass-based social-democracies, notions of continued usefulness to the movement, weand the Labor Committees. Why, one might ask, is thishave develgped conceptions which are far superior torole of the small Labor Committees essential to thesuccess oftheroleofthemass-based workers'parties? In Trotsky's, and which are grounded in the work ofTrotsky's predecessors, such as Marx and Luxemburg.sum, the Labor Committees offer not only the uniquely Utlder these circumstances, to turn to Trotsky forcorrect strategic and tactical programmatic outlooks,authoritative guidance on such matters would be to takebut also represent the only repository of the capacities fora significant step backwards.necessary .further development of those strategic andThis warning is not made lightly nor arbitrarily. Intactical policies under the conditions of mass struggles, the recent year's experience within the Labor Corn-The role of the Labor Committees as a revolutionary mittees we have found that cadre's sudden preintelligentsiais indispensable, such that without them occupation with the study of Trotsky's writings for guidtheCommunist and social-democratic mass-based ance on a question with a regression to impotence in hisorganizations would be disoriented and so defeated in anor her current political activity. This recurring correlaactualdecisive struggle, tion prompted us to investigate the phenomenon ofIt' is the active qualities of the vanguard which are endemic "Trotskyism" within the Labor Cornessential.Any small organization which premises itself mittees more deeply. That study was made duringupon the perfection or semi-perfection of either simple the spring and summer of 1973, during whichrecipes or even articulated bodies of "orthodox doctrine" period we examined a number of individual cases withis a useless sect, with no positive role to contribute to the the resulting clinical definition of what we termed thestruggles of mass-based vanguard organizations. "Trotsky syndrome." It was that study which ledTrotsky himself had no conception at all of such a directly to this present article.development of an organization of the revolutionary The healthy revolutionary cadre of today will regard .,intelligentsia. In part, this was a reflection of his L.D. Trotsky as one of the principal Bolshevik leaders !Oblomovist flaw; he ridiculed the notion of a whose failure to establish a viable tendency was not !revolutionary intelligentsia in 1903 and regarded this accidental. His achievements were real, and lawfully so.notion of Lenin's as "exaggerated" even later in life. In His failure, however his effort was correctly premised inpart, his lack of conception of building a viable tendency part, was also quite lawful. Consequently, there is a rolewas a direct result of his failure to develop adequately in the movement for those who graduate from Trotsuchqualities in himself. He did not recognize the skyism, but no useful place for those who return to it.rampant philistinism of the Cannon crew as constituting Trotskyism today is a psychonet[rotic socialist' deterinitself the pervasive bankruptcy of the organizations mination to be impotent, so as not to unduly offend theidentified with his name. dangerous ruling capitalist circles _.