The Anarcho-Syndicalist Prejudices Again!¶
Core Argument¶
In this polemic from May 1923, Leon Trotsky dissects the shifting and contradictory arguments of Comrade Louzon, a French syndicalist within the Communist International. The chapter’s core narrative thrust is to expose the theoretical incoherence of Louzon’s position, which Trotsky charges has moved from a false universalism to an equally untenable national exceptionalism, and to defend the necessity of a distinct revolutionary party against syndicalist attempts to substitute the trade union for it.
Trotsky begins by noting Louzon’s retreat. Previously, Louzon treated trade unions as representing “the working class as a whole,” a claim Trotsky had dismissed as written from Sirius. Now, Louzon concedes that French unions are only an active minority, effectively a party, but insists this syndicalist party is superior to the Communist Party because it is purely proletarian and rejects bourgeois democracy and parliamentary struggle. Trotsky skewers the logic: if Louzon’s syndicalist party is so superior, why does he remain in the Communist International alongside the small British Communist Party, rather than in the Second International with the mass British trade unions and Labour Party? Louzon began with a supra-historical law and ends with an exceptional law for France alone, a position that negates the possibility of any common international tactics.
The chapter draws heavily on the recent historical experience of the First World War. Trotsky demands that Louzon account for the role of the CGT (the main French trade union confederation) during the war. He argues that Jouhaux’s leadership was no less treacherous than that of the social-patriotic politician Renaudel; the difference was only that the Socialist Party acted systematically while the syndicalists acted empirically and with “wretched and stupid improvisations.” This is a pointed historical refutation of syndicalism’s claim to revolutionary purity.
Trotsky then addresses the question of trade union unity. He favours merging the revolutionary CGTU with Jouhaux’s reformist confederation, even if it gives Jouhaux a temporary majority, because a larger battlefield for communist ideas is a revolutionary gain. Louzon’s position, by contrast, logically leads to substituting the party with a trade union of the “active minority,” producing an organisation too indefinite for a party and too small for a trade union.
The polemic targets anarchist residues in Louzon’s thinking, particularly the refusal to “soil fingers” with bourgeois democracy. Trotsky argues that workers will vote regardless, and that having communist deputies in parliament working alongside revolutionary unions is a plus, not a minus. He dismisses the French tradition that deputies are traitors, insisting the Communist Party exists to break with such traditions. On Louzon’s complaint about petty-bourgeois intellectuals in the party, Trotsky acknowledges the problem but points to the Fourth Congress resolutions and the growing number of workers in the Central Committee as evidence of progressive evolution. Louzon’s syndicalist metaphysics, he concludes, can only retard this development.