Ridley and Brockway exponents of confusion¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter delivers a blistering critique of two figures whose contributions to the internal bulletin of the revolutionary movement are judged to be a catalogue of theoretical errors, betraying a profound failure to grasp the central question of the epoch: the international. The polemic opens by dismantling Ridley’s conception of internationalism, which is condemned for treating it as a transhistorical sentiment rather than a material product of capitalism’s creation of a world market. Marx’s call for workers of the world to unite was a scientific deduction from this material basis, not a piece of moralising. Ridley’s treatment of the successive Internationals is dismissed as light-minded fatalism. To argue that the decline of the Third International was an objective inevitability is to abandon Marxism for passivity. His claim that Bolshevism’s revolutionary character derived from Russia’s feudal-absolutist state is shown to be inadequate, as it fails to explain the simultaneous emergence of Menshevism and the later betrayals of Stalin. The real conflict is not between the needs of a backward Russian state and world revolution—these are indissolubly bound—but between the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy and international revolution.
Ridley’s blindness to the heroic revolutionary attempts of Western workers between 1919 and 1926 is a serious omission; a new international must be built on their lessons. His dismissal of Trotsky as “too egotistic for a successful practical politician” is exposed as a shallow evasion that offers no critique of Trotsky’s theoretical achievements. An international is a programme and a system of methods, not a single individual. Ridley’s further claim that Hitler has unified Europe, creating the basis for a future socialist international confined to the advanced countries, is denounced as a bankrupt, Victorian-European arrogance. It ignores the interdependent character of the world economy and the revolutionary potential of the colonies, where the theory of permanent revolution shows that the proletariat must lead and turn to socialist measures, sustained only by extending revolution to the advanced world.
The chapter’s most sustained theoretical intervention concerns the dictatorship of the proletariat. Ridley’s rejection of this term in favour of anarchist borrowings is a retreat from Marxism. The dictatorship is not the opposite of workers’ democracy but its supreme expression, directed only against class enemies. Ridley’s error is to counterpose the two and to imagine that the dictatorship will be progressively transformed into democracy as socialism develops. In reality, as bourgeois society is transformed, both the dictatorship and workers’ democracy will wither away together with the state itself, dissolving into economic and cultural organisation. Socialism means not the transformation of the dictatorship into democracy, but their common dissolution.
Brockway’s method for building a new international is condemned as centrist and unprincipled. His questionnaire, inviting collaboration from mutually incompatible tendencies—social democrats, Stalinists, anarchists, syndicalists—is derided as a recipe for confusion. A genuine international must be built on a clear, principled programme, not vague goodwill. The only sound organisational method is democratic centralism, as developed by Lenin and Trotsky. The Fourth International alone offers the correct programme and method.