How Trotsky applied the Marxist method to the problem of affiliation¶
Core Argument¶
Here the author defends the Revolutionary Communist Party’s (RCP) tactical line on affiliation to the Labour Party against a critic, Stuart, who has invoked Trotsky to discredit it. Stuart’s argument is that Trotsky’s 1935-36 intervention in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) proves affiliation cannot be a decisive question for a centrist party; it must be subordinated to programmatic clarity. The author counters that Stuart’s method is mechanical and anti-dialectical, wrenching quotations from their concrete context.
The core of the rebuttal turns on two distinct phases of Trotsky’s thinking on the ILP. Stuart cites only the first: Trotsky’s insistence that the ILP, if it was to become a revolutionary party, needed a sharp programme as a precondition for turning toward the mass organisations (i.e., the Labour Party). The author then produces a second, later Trotsky, one Stuart has evidently overlooked. At a stage when the ILP had become isolated from the masses and its bureaucracy had suppressed the Trotskyist group, Trotsky raised affiliation to the Labour Party not as a distant programmatic goal but as the very issue on which to organise a split from the ILP. He explicitly dismissed “knightly courtesy” and programmatic conditions, advocating instead for unconditional affiliation to open work among the Labour Party rank and file. The author presents this not as a contradiction but as the application of the dialectical method: tactics shift with the concrete relation of forces, the degree of isolation from the masses, and the character of the centrist leadership.
The polemic is thus directed against a vulgarised “Bolshevism” that Stuart treats as a fixed set of tactical prescriptions—always demanding a break with reformists, never affiliation. The author accuses Stuart of a mechanical transposition of American experience onto Britain, of treating Trotsky’s writings as a static codex rather than a living method. The real issue, the author insists, is not the isolated quotation but the Marxian method of approach: affiliation cannot be judged abstractly but only as part of a broader strategy within the Labour movement as a whole. Stuart’s method, by contrast, is condemned as undialectical, a formalism that would lead to absurd positions—such as opposing the demand for a mass Labour Party in America had Trotsky not later written on it.