Stalinism and Centrism¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter dissects the political degeneracy of centrism through the prism of Trotsky's confrontation with Fenner Brockway and the Independent Labour Party during the Moscow trials. The core argument is that centrist organisations, while professing impartiality and anti-fascist unity, function in practice as a screen for Stalinist crimes and a barrier to proletarian emancipation. Brockway's proposal to replace an impartial international inquiry into the Moscow frame-ups with a partisan political trial against Trotskyism—to be judged by Otto Bauer, Branting, Norman Thomas, and an unnamed Frenchman—exemplifies this dishonest factionalism. Trotsky rejected this as a manoeuvre designed to shield Stalin's judicial murders, noting that Bauer and Brockway had previously dismissed Lenin and Marx as sectarians.
The chapter situates this struggle within the broader historical context of the late 1930s, when the Comintern's push for 'People's Fronts' with liberal parties in Britain aimed to impose imperialist censorship on the Labour Party and facilitate Stalin's rapprochement with British imperialism. Trotsky contrasts his own open political struggle with Brockway's hypocritical use of commissions to settle factional scores. The London Bureau's refusal to participate in the International Commission of Inquiry, citing the initiating committee's name, is exposed as a cover that enabled the GPU to murder Andres Nin and crush the POUM in Spain.
The analysis extends to the Nazi-Soviet pact period, drawing on Molière's Tartuffe—the seventeenth-century comedy of a pious crook outwardly ascetic but secretly a sensual glutton—as a metaphor for Stalinism's hypocritical internationalism. When Stalinists in every country opposed the Allies' war plans, their sudden defeatism was not proletarian internationalism but a distorted patriotism centred on the Kremlin. In Britain, the Daily Worker was temporarily suppressed; in France, the Communist Party faced even greater difficulties after surrender and occupation. Trotsky's polemic establishes that a new International is necessary, and that genuine anti-fascist struggle requires breaking decisively with both the Second and Third Internationals, whose leaderships remain obstacles to working-class emancipation.