The most revealing line in this book is a chapter heading. Chapter Three, section two, asks: "Do Present-Day Deviations Remain Petty-Bourgeois?" Seven years earlier, Boris Leibzon had written a whole volume for Progress Publishers on the assumption that they did — Petty-Bourgeois Revolutionism (1970), which classified Maoists, anarchists and Trotskyists as specimens of a single social disorder. Now, writing with Mikhail Basmanov, he puts his own category in the interrogative. And the answer he gives concedes almost everything before retrieving the word anyway: "the petty bourgeoisie whose views were opposed by Marx and Engels is today non-existent in Europe as well. It has become to a large extent a quite different petty bourgeoisie." Régis Debray had complained that the label meant nothing in Latin America. The authors accept that it means little in Europe either, and keep it: "Leftism, both present and past, is the product of the petty bourgeois maddened by the horrors of capitalism."
Something has replaced the class analysis, and this book announces what on its first working page. "The attitude to the problem of a Party, to the character and role of that Party remains the criterion of a true revolutionary spirit in the working-class movement." Not the class you come from; the party you accept. "Vanguard" now does the sorting that "petty-bourgeois revolutionism" used to do, and it does it more efficiently, because it needs no sociology at all. This is the third of four books in this series by these two men — Leibzon in 1970, Basmanov's Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth? in 1973, Leibzon alone again in Unity, Solidarity, Internationalism in 1981 — and it is the one where the machinery is visible without disassembly.
The pairing is itself the commission. Leibzon was a Comintern historian working from party archives; Basmanov was the Soviet apparatus's professional answerer of Trotskyists, published in Kommunist and translated into English by the people he attacked. One held the ultraleft file, the other the Trotskyist file. Basmanov was known well enough abroad to be answered by name: Intercontinental Press gave most of a thirty-two-page issue to him in 1970, printing his "The New Stalinist Case: Role of Trotskyism in the Modern World" in full beside a point-by-point reply, George Saunders's "Role of Basmanov in the New School of Stalinist Falsification" (vol. 8 no. 16, 27 April 1970). Two years later the same reviewer reported the instruction this book carries out. In Kommunist no. 18 for 1971, Boris Ponomarev — the article carries his rank, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee — set the propaganda cadres five tasks, the first being "To profoundly lay bare the anti-Leninist essence of Trotskyism, its ideological and political kinship with open anti-Communism, with opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions." Saunders translated the passage in Intercontinental Press vol. 10 no. 3, 24 January 1972, and noted that Ponomarev's assignment followed "a decade of steadily mounting attacks on Trotskyism written by obscure apparatus-propagandists" — of whom the first he names is Basmanov.
The directive's punctuation travels with it. Brezhnev, quoted here from the 1969 Moscow Meeting, calls for "an intensification of the struggle against revisionism and both Right and 'Left' opportunism". The scare quotes sit on one side only, and so does the arithmetic: this book uses some form of Right opportunism twenty-two times and "Left" opportunism twice. Right opportunism is a thing; "Left" opportunism is a thing in inverted commas, which is to say a counterfeit. It matters that this can be traced to a printed order rather than inferred from a habit of speech.
For the date is the whole point. Between the two earlier books and this one, the West European communist parties had begun to move. The French party dropped the dictatorship of the proletariat at its Twenty-Second Congress in February 1976. Thirty European parties met in East Berlin at the end of June 1976 and produced a document with no reference to proletarian internationalism as Moscow understood it. Berlinguer, Marchais and Santiago Carrillo met in Madrid on 2 March 1977. Carrillo's "Eurocomunismo" y Estado appeared that April; the Soviet journal New Times attacked him by name that June. The word for all this was in every newspaper in Europe.
It does not occur in this book. Neither does the name Carrillo — and that nil has been tested, because in Leibzon's 1981 volume the same search returned zero and the man was there, spelled "Carillo" by the scanner. Here he is absent under every spelling I can construct, as are Eurocommunism, Euro-communism and Eurocomunismo. Berlinguer appears three times, always as a friendly witness — on the Italian party's handling of the 1974 divorce referendum, on the party of "cadres and the masses." Marchais appears once, to be quoted saying that "democratic centralism is the highest form of democracy." The Spanish party appears four times: once for the civil war, and otherwise only as a patient. Its theoretical journal Nuestra Bandera is cited from the close of 1973 for the error of holding that peaceful coexistence was "consolidating the socio-political status quo in the world"; and "those Spanish Communists, who held a negative view of the effects of detente, reconsidered their attitude" after an October 1974 meeting with a CPSU delegation. The largest communist parties in Western Europe are present in this book only as evidence for the case against them.
The case is instead prosecuted through proxies, and the choice of proxies is the argument. Roger Garaudy, expelled from the French party in 1970, is named twenty times. Ernst Fischer, expelled from the Austrian party in 1969 — the authors say so — seventeen, including his suggestion that membership be opened "to many of those who do not approve of all the provisions of the programme." The Il Manifesto group, expelled from the Italian party in 1969, is quoted saying "the writings of Marx contain nothing about the theory of the Party." André Gorz is convicted of holding that "today the revolutionary Party of the new type cannot imitate the Leninist pattern." Every position the Italian, Spanish and French leaderships were actually advancing in 1977 is answered here in the mouth of a man those leaderships had already thrown out. It is a way of having the argument while denying that there is one, and it lets the authors write, at the very end, that "Revisionism's ideological and organisational defeat by no means signifies that there is no longer any need to fight on two fronts." That sentence was published in the year of the Madrid summit.
Now that all four of these men's Progress volumes can be read together, something can be said about this one that cannot be said about any of the others. Count the opportunis- stem in each, against a pooled rate of 1.56 per 10,000 words across the 195 Progress volumes held here. Leibzon alone in 1970: seventeen uses, 3.49 per 10,000. Basmanov alone in 1973: one, and that one inside a quotation from Lenin — in 23,783 words about Trotskyism he never once reaches for the word in his own voice. Leibzon alone again in 1981: twenty-three, 2.84. And the two of them together in 1977: eighty-one, 8.75 per 10,000, the fourth densest use in the whole catalogue. Now count Trotsky. Leibzon 1970: 207 mentions. Basmanov 1973: 415. Leibzon 1981: one. Here: 131. The two vocabularies are separately available to both men. What is unique to the collaboration is the weld: passages in which a Trotsky word stands within 120 characters of an opportunism word occur eleven times here, and not once in any of the other three books.
This is not an argument from frequency, and it should not be mistaken for one. Frequency proves nothing about rigour — the Fourth International's own Tenth World Congress documents run at 1.69 per 10,000, which is indistinguishable from the Progress average. The point is narrower and it is about authorship. Leibzon had a Comintern historian's interest in opportunism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon with a Bernstein in it. Basmanov had a polemicist's file on Trotskyism, and no use at all for the word. Put them in one room and the result is a book in which the historian's category is soldered to the polemicist's target, so that "opportunism" ceases to name a policy and becomes the substance of which a named enemy is made. Neither man wrote that book alone, before or after.
Where the real dispute does surface, it surfaces as a question about internationalism. Chapter Nine, the last, is a sustained argument that a party's independence and its loyalty to the movement are not in tension, and that anyone who says they are is a nationalist. Brezhnev is quoted from the Twenty-Fifth Congress: "Unfortunately, some have begun to interpret it in such a way that, in effect, little is left of internationalism." The authorities marshalled behind him are Gus Hall of the United States, on the danger of admitting "two kinds of nationalism," and William Kashtan of Canada — leaders of small parties, cited against the mass parties of Italy and France. The formulation the chapter is proudest of is borrowed from the West German journal Marxistische Blätter: "The GCP is in fact dependent. It is dependent on the interests and demands of the working class, for it is part of the working class." This is offered as a refutation of the charge that the parties took direction from Moscow. It is a play on the word.
And it is in this chapter that the book's method with sources is easiest to catch. Trotskyist "national nihilism", the authors write, "stems from Trotsky's following thesis: 'The unshakeable certainty that the basic class aim ... cannot be achieved by national means or within national boundaries is the essence of revolutionary internationalism.'" No source is given. The Posadas quotations that frame it are footnoted to Lucha Obrera; Trotsky gets nothing. The sentence is real. It is from The Third International After Lenin (1928), chapter III, where the standard English has it: "The invincible conviction that the fundamental class aim, even more so than the partial objectives, cannot be realized by national means or within national boundaries, constitutes the very heart of revolutionary internationalism." What the ellipsis removes is the clause in which Trotsky grants that partial objectives exist — in a book that elsewhere convicts him of holding "that there can never be intermediate aims in the struggle for socialism."
That is not an isolated slip; it is the book's practice, and it is measurable. The volume's apparatus runs to 244 blocks of footnotes; Lenin's Collected Works is cited in seventy-three of them. It cites Deutscher's The Prophet Outcast, Léo Figuères's Le trotskisme, cet anti-léninisme, and a dozen Trotskyist newspapers and pamphlets — World Outlook, Keep Left, The Newsletter, Lutte Ouvrière, Voix Ouvrière, Lucha Obrera, the Ligue communiste's own manifesto. It does not cite a single work by Trotsky, and it does not name one. This is a regression, not a house style: Leibzon on his own in 1970 named My Life, Terrorism and Communism and The Permanent Revolution, quoted from each, and even told the reader which chapter of the last he was objecting to. Opponents who are cited can be checked. Opponents who are only characterised cannot.
What the difference costs is visible wherever the book states a doctrine. "The revolutionary teaching is reduced to the theory of 'permanent revolution' in its Trotskyist interpretation... Everything is reduced to two non-historical propositions. The first is that there can never be intermediate aims in the struggle for socialism and, the second, that socialism can only triumph on a global scale." The second is fair: Trotsky's own summary of the theory — the numbered postulates in The Permanent Revolution (1930), chapter 10 — has the socialist revolution attaining completion "only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet." The first is a reversal. The same postulates hold that in colonial and semi-colonial countries "the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses" — democratic and national tasks being the whole content of the theory, not an omission from it. A reader with the book open beside this one can settle the question in a minute. A reader with only this one cannot, which is the purpose of leaving it uncited.
The starkest case had already been pointed out to the authors in print. Here, a Trotsky phrase is introduced as common property: "The words 'war is the mother of revolution', coined by Trotsky long ago, are quoted by all ultra-revolutionaries who want action but do not know where to apply their strength." Basmanov had used the same phrase, equally unsourced, in the text Intercontinental Press reprinted in April 1970, and Saunders answered it in the notes to that issue: it comes from the Manifesto of the Fourth International adopted at the movement's Emergency Conference of 9–16 May 1940, drafted by Trotsky, and the sentence entire reads "In history war has not infrequently been the mother of revolution precisely because it rocks superannuated regimes to their foundation, weakens the ruling class, and hastens the growth of revolutionary indignation among the oppressed classes." Seven years after being given the source and the missing qualification, the co-authors print the fragment again, still with no source, and now with the added claim that Trotsky coined it — which he did not, and did not say he had.
One question is worth putting to a book like this, and it is not about the word count. Can the category it prosecutes ever be turned on the people using it? In 92,620 words, exactly one passage places an opportunism word anywhere near the CPSU, and it is Gus Hall at the Twenty-Fifth Congress: "Opportunism appears wherever strong ideological pressure is felt from the enemy." Opportunism, so defined, is not something a communist party can generate; it is weather blowing in from outside, and the party's only possible relation to it is resistance. Compare the documents of the Fourth International's Tenth World Congress, printed in Intercontinental Press vol. 12 no. 46, 23 December 1974, which attach the same word to a named organisation and a described policy — "the ultraopportunist policy of the CPI and the CPI(M) — a policy of governmental collaboration, alliance with the possessing classes and their parties, repression of popular movements" — and which apply the category to their own sections as readily as to anyone else's. One usage can be wrong about a particular case. The other cannot be wrong at all, and that, rather than how often the word appears, is what distinguishes them.
Against all of this the reader should set what the anti-Stalinist left was writing in the same months, because it is locatable and it is contemporaneous. Ernest Mandel's "Three Facets of 'Euro-Communism'" ran in Inprecor on 28 April 1977 and was reprinted in Intercontinental Press vol. 15 no. 19, 23 May 1977. Gerry Foley covered the East Berlin conference in "The East Berlin CP Summit Conference," Intercontinental Press vol. 14 no. 27, 12 July 1976; when Moscow moved against Carrillo he wrote "High Stakes in Conflict Over Carrillo" and reviewed "Eurocomunismo" y Estado in the same issue, vol. 15 no. 26, 11 July 1977. Mandel's book-length answer, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, followed from NLB in 1978. None of these treated the Eurocommunist turn as a vindication; the criticism from that quarter was that the Western parties were adapting to their own bourgeoisies while their break with Moscow remained diplomatic rather than programmatic. Two hostile critiques of the same object, from opposite directions, are more useful to a reader than either alone. Mandel, incidentally, is named once in this book, as "the ideologist of Trotskyist social-reformism", with nothing of his quoted and nothing of his cited.
Then there is the history, and here the record has to be corrected by subtraction. Search this volume of 92,620 words for Stalin and you will not find him. Not once — the same result as Basmanov's 1973 book, in a volume four times the length, and in a book whose entire subject is the history of the communist party as an institution. The nil is real and not a scanner artefact; no token in the book lies within two edits of the name. There is no Left Opposition, no Fifteenth Congress, no 1927, no Tenth Congress and its ban on factions, no Moscow trials. The year 1937 appears exactly once in the whole book, in a sentence about Soviet industrial output. Karl Radek is named once, for the draft theses he prepared for the Third Comintern Congress, with nothing to indicate that he was sentenced in the second Moscow trial of January 1937 and did not survive his sentence. The subject index has entries for Anarchism, Liquidationism, Menshevism and Cosmopolitism, and none for any of these things.
The shape of the silence has changed since 1973, and the change is worth noticing, because it runs the wrong way. Basmanov's earlier book did narrate the defeat of the Opposition: the Party meetings of 1927 at which "only 4,000 persons, less than one per cent, supported Trotsky's views"; the Fifteenth Congress of late 1927 which "adopted decisions that put on record this defeat"; the Comintern Executive's Ninth Plenum of February 1928 ruling that adherence to the opposition "cannot be compatible with membership of the Communist International". Told wholly from the winning side, and stopping short of what happened to the losers — but a narrative, with dates in it. Here the narrative of the party question runs from the Communist Manifesto through the Second and Third Comintern Congresses of 1920 and 1921, praises the Seventh Congress of 1935, notes the Second World War, and then arrives in the 1960s. The whole inner history of the party that these two men had spent their careers studying has been lifted out — including the part one of them had been willing to print four years earlier.
One passage shows what that costs. The authors praise the Seventh Comintern Congress for correcting the parties' faults: "Sectarian complacency, narrowness in politics, lack of flexibility and the inability to adopt decisions quickly and independently in keeping with the changing situation were becoming a serious obstacle to the fulfilment by the Communist parties of their vanguard role." Every element of that indictment — rigidity, dependence, the inability to decide independently — is what the Italian and Spanish parties were saying in 1977 about the international movement. Granted to the past, denied to the present.
Czechoslovakia, though, is no longer absent, and that is the single largest change from Leibzon's 1970 volume, where it did not appear at all. It appears here once: "The Hungarian and Czechoslovak Communists drew serious lessons from the counter-revolutionary events in Hungary (1956) and in Czechoslovakia (1968)." What follows is not an account of the Prague Spring but a discussion of party recruitment. The Czechoslovak party grew too fast after 1945, admitted people who had not shed "Social-Democratic habits," and this, the authors explain through a long quotation from Gustáv Husák, produced "the situation that facilitated the rapid growth of the Right-opportunist and anti-socialist forces in 1968." So 1968 enters the record as a membership-composition problem, diagnosed by the man the Soviet Union installed to normalise the country. The five Warsaw Pact armies are not mentioned. Neither is the screening of 1970, which expelled or struck from the rolls something on the order of half a million members — roughly a third of the party — the single largest purge of a ruling communist party in Europe since the war, and one that would have been directly relevant to a chapter arguing that party membership should be regulated for quality. Neither is Charter 77, published in January 1977 while this book was in production, or the prosecution of its signatories. On that the reader can consult Jiří Pelikán — director of Czechoslovak television in 1968, then an exile — whose "The Charter 77 Movement" appeared with the full text of the Charter and Gerry Foley's "In the Sarcophagus With Stalin" in Intercontinental Press vol. 15 no. 5, 14 February 1977. (Leibzon repeated the recruitment explanation, without even Husák to pad it, in 1981.)
Chile is handled with more nerve, and it is the one place in the book where an accusation is cashed out into something a reader could disprove: an organisation, a date, an act. "On August 31, 1973, ten days before the fascist putsch, the Chilean Trotskyists demanded the resignation of the Allende Government." (Eleven days, in fact.) No source is given for it.
It does not survive the check. The Chilean section of the Fourth International, the Partido Socialista Revolucionario, adopted a Central Committee statement on 1 September 1973, and Intercontinental Press printed it in English three weeks after the coup, in vol. 11 no. 34, 1 October 1973. It does say that the Popular Unity government "has exhausted its possibilities" and has evolved rightward — the authors could have made something of that. What it demands is the opposite of a resignation: crush the employers' offensive and the truck owners' strike, support the cordones industriales in requisitioning the strikers' vehicles, "No return of factories to their former owners", continue expropriating the national bourgeoisie, build unity with the MIR and with "advanced sectors" of the Socialist Party. (The Intercontinental Press scan splits words across its column joins — it sets the third of those phrases as "No re turn of factories to their former own ers" — and I have closed the joins in quoting; the words themselves are as printed.) It warns that the bourgeoisie is pressing for "the government's complete capitulation" as its first option while "organizing to forcibly overthrow it". The word resignation does not appear. It remains possible that some smaller group said something like what the book reports on the day the book reports it — the book gives no source, so there is no way to tell. What can be checked is the position of the organisation the phrase would most naturally denote, and it had been in print in English since 1973, saying the opposite. That is the difficulty with cashing a label out: it can be looked up.
The larger evasion in that passage is not the charge but its function. It stands in for an account of the coup in which the only actors with agency on the left are the groups to the government's left. What the Chilean Communist Party itself argued in those months — the constitutional road, the search for an understanding with the Christian Democrats, the resistance to arming the industrial cordones — is not examined at all, though it was the strategy actually in force when the tanks moved. Gerry Foley's "The Coup — What Happened and Why," Intercontinental Press vol. 11 no. 33, 24 September 1973, is the contemporary answer and remains worth reading beside this.
None of which makes the book worthless, and there is a real reason to reprint it beyond its symptoms. Chapter Three's first section, on the changing social structure of capitalism, is serious labour sociology and has aged well. The authors document the growth of subcontracted homeworking in Italy — some 1,200,000 artisan enterprises in 1970, and around 1,700,000 people, a tenth of the employed population, working at home, four-fifths of them women, at wages often 40 per cent of the average, in what Italians called "black labour." They set out the Japanese dual labour market with figures: in 1969, 63 per cent of workers at Japanese factories employing more than 500 were union members, against 4.9 per cent at enterprises employing up to thirty. They understand what this does to solidarity, and they are right that a working class scattered across "parcel" enterprises is harder to organise. Their material on party cadres and composition — the Italian party's million and a half members supported by only a few hundred full-time functionaries, the age profiles of French and British congress delegates — is the kind of concrete institutional detail that is genuinely hard to find elsewhere in English for this period.
They are also not wrong about everything they attack. Their catalogue of self-proclaimed vanguards — the thousand-odd groups reported in the American press in January 1972, the West Berlin circle of about twenty students announcing an organisation to found a communist party — is funny because it is accurate, and their line about the fragmentation of Trotskyism ("Today there are six 'Fourth Internationals' and the protozoan multiplication of Trotskyist organisations continues") is a fair blow that the tradition has had to absorb. A movement that could produce Alain Krivine's remark that "a student can change a party like a shirt, without serious consequences to his studies and to his activities" had made itself quotable against its own interest.
The book closes: "Ever larger segments of the people today regard the Communists not only as a political Party but as the vanguard of the new life that is bringing liberation to all mankind." Within a year the Spanish party had formally abandoned Leninism at its Ninth Congress and the French party had walked away from the Union of the Left; within a decade the argument this book was written to win had been lost in every country it discusses. That outcome does not prove the Eurocommunists were right about very much. It does show what happens to a category that has stopped describing anything. "Petty-bourgeois revolutionism" at least gestured at a social class. "Vanguard," as used here, means the parties that agree, and the test the reader is offered — the attitude to the Party as "the criterion of a true revolutionary spirit" — is a test that can only ever return the answer it was set to return. Two capable historians, working with real material and reading four languages, spent 92,620 words demonstrating it, cited Lenin seventy-three times and Trotsky not once in a book that names him 131 times, and could not write the name of the man whose party this had been.