Trotsky on tactics: ‘Learn to think’

Should Marxists be indifferent to NATO?

A comrade criticised us for participating in a united front in Toronto a year ago which included the demand “Canada Out of NATO” as part of its basis of unity along with calls to “End NATO’s Proxy War in Ukraine” and “Disband NATO.” Our critic, who shares our opposition to NATO’s perfidious role in the devastation of Ukraine, takes the view that calling for a particular imperialist state to leave the US-led military alliance is tantamount to advocating participation in a different but qualitatively similar lash-up.

The groups that backed the October 2023 Toronto demonstration all opposed NATO’s proxy war, although several disagreed with our contention that “the international working class has an interest in a Russian military victory,” and our characterisation of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine as tactically aggressive but strategically defensive. At the rally, a speaker for the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT), which supports neither side in the Ukraine conflict, explained why they reject the slogan “Canada Out of NATO”:

“This demand suggests that Canadian imperialism might be less predatory and more progressive if only it was outside the US-dominated NATO military alliance. It fosters left-nationalist illusions in Maple Leaf imperialism as somehow ‘nicer’ and ‘kinder’ than its American counterpart. This is not a perspective that we share.”

Perhaps hoping to avoid sounding too wooden, the IBT comrade added:

“This does not mean we favor Canada remaining in NATO; we are simply opposed to the entire NATO military alliance, with or without Canada, and we are opposed to Canadian imperialism with or without NATO.”

What a muddle! If the IBT is not in favour of Canada remaining in NATO, why object to calling for it to leave? Marxists do indeed oppose NATO with or without Canada (or Britain, France, Germany, etc.) just as we oppose Canadian, British, etc., imperialism “with or without NATO.” But while claiming to favour “disbanding NATO,” the IBT illogically opposes advocating the departure of any of its imperialist components.

NATO’s mission: imperialist enforcers

Our critic asked: “Why did Lenin/Liebknecht/Luxemburg not demand Italy’s withdrawal from the Triple Alliance [an imperialist alliance of Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy aimed primarily at France and Russia that lasted from the 1880s to 1914]?” The Triple Alliance was one of several military treaties negotiated by European powers in the decades preceding World War I—another was the Triple Entente between Britain, France and Russia. NATO, by contrast, was founded in April 1949 as a counterrevolutionary military alliance to unite capitalist Europe against the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies.

After the 1991 triumph of counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc, NATO has continued to operate as an inclusive North American/European umbrella for imperialist aggression against countries deemed insufficiently subservient to the directions of the “rules-based international order” headquartered in Washington DC. It functions as a “united front” of global finance capital to coordinate the application of military pressure to advance the interests of multi-national corporations at the expense of the exploited and oppressed. This is exemplified by NATO’s role in Ukraine where, beginning in 2014, it built a proxy army to advance the long-term strategic objectives of eliminating Russia as a geopolitical rival and opening it up to penetration by American/West European capital. This is why revolutionaries side militarily with Russia in its current conflict with NATO’s Ukrainian proxies (see “Russia reacts to imperialist encroachment”, Bolshevik No. 4, 2022).

Internationalist Group on Germany, France & NATO

The departure of Germany, France, Britain, or any other lesser imperialist power would obviously weaken NATO’s war effort against Russia. None of America’s subordinate partners could offer more effective support to the imperialist proxy war outside the transatlantic alliance, nor are any currently in a position to militarily compete with the declining hegemon. This of course may change, but a majority of the German bourgeoisie currently believes that its interests can better be pursued within the US-dominated alliance than outside it. The comrades of the Internationalist Group (IG) agree:

“The discussion article [by the Kommunistische Organisation (KO), German Stalinists who support Russia against imperialism] claims: ‘“Germany out of NATO” is not currently advocated by the administrators of German finance capital.’ True, but that may be different tomorrow. Everyone knows that the economic war of attrition against Russia is at the same time a U.S. economic war against Europe under the domination of France and Germany, and this is not limited to sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. Whole sectors of German industry are no longer competitive without access to cheap Russian gas. The forces for a political about-turn are ready to take off.”
—The Internationalist No. 71, October 2023

Revolutionary tactics, as practised by Lenin and Trotsky, were always shaped by the concrete circumstances of a current political conjuncture and were therefore subject to modification when the situation changed. In the extremely unlikely event that the Canadian bourgeoisie, which to date has provided almost six billion Euros to Ukraine in the current conflict, were to leave NATO, it would represent a setback for the imperialist war effort. A German exit, which is more likely as it would open the door to restoring access to Russia’s valuable natural resources and domestic market, would be a more serious blow, as Germany is both a critical administrative hub for NATO’s proxy war and the source of more assistance to Ukraine than any country besides the US. It is therefore completely illogical for the IG, which favours a NATO defeat, to flatly oppose calls for Germany to exit NATO:

“According to the KO-ZL article, ‘It is in the interest of the German working class that Germany withdraw from NATO, weakening it and narrowing the Federal Republic’s aggressive room for maneuver.’ Not at all. History has already answered this question. In 1959-63, France under de Gaulle partially withdrew from NATO. NATO was not weakened by this. France eventually returned and became the vanguard of anti-Sovietism in the 1980s.”
—Ibid.

The IG’s assertion that the strained relations between France and NATO during the 1960s did not weaken NATO is clearly based on a lack of familiarity with the facts. The schism originated in 1958 when French president Charles de Gaulle, seeking to undercut American hegemony in Europe:

“proposed the creation of a tripartite Directorate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), whereby France, the United Kingdom and the United States would be put on an equal footing for the purposes of discussing nuclear strategy. In the event of its partners refusing, France, which wished to retain absolute control of its armed forces, reserved the right to withdraw from NATO….
”The United States and the United Kingdom did not accept the French proposals. Consequently, on 11 March 1959, France decided to withdraw its Mediterranean naval fleet from NATO command. In June, it refused to store foreign nuclear weapons on its territory, forcing the United States to transfer 200 military aircraft out of France. In the spring of 1960, the United States and the United Kingdom repeatedly informed the French Government of their refusal to conclude an agreement on nuclear cooperation, particularly on the development of nuclear warheads. France finally concluded that the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America was at work and decided to re-focus its efforts on establishing a political Europe. On 21 June 1963, France also withdrew its Atlantic and Channel fleets from NATO command.”
—cvce.eu

Tensions did not ease in 1963, as the IG chronology suggests, but continued to ratchet up until, in March 1966, de Gaulle “officially announced that France intended to withdraw from the Alliance and demanded that all NATO bases be removed from French territory” (Ibid.). NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) was hastily packed up and relocated from Paris to Brussels where new premises had to be constructed. This would obviously have disrupted operational capacity. While relations were eventually patched up, it is absurd to claim that, at least for a time, “NATO was not weakened by this.”

The acrimony between French imperialism and its erstwhile NATO allies was highlighted in June 1966, five months before work even commenced on SHAPE’s new headquarters, when de Gaulle travelled to Moscow to meet with Nikolai Podgorny, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The two co-signed an agreement pledging mutual cooperation on a number of issues ranging from scientific research to nuclear disarmament. Their joint declaration included an unambiguous criticism of American military activity in Vietnam:

“The French Government and the Soviet Government continue to believe that the only possible way out of such a situation, which represents a threat to the cause of peace, is a settlement on the basis of the Geneva agreements of 1954, excluding any foreign intervention in Vietnam.”
—Déclaration commune franco-soviétique, 30 June 1966

The IG’s inept invocation of de Gaulle was intended to elucidate Emmanuel Macron’s recent oscillations:

“We see something similar occurring today. Upon his return from Beijing, French President Macron warned against becoming a ‘vassal state’ of the United States and called for European ‘strategic autonomy.’ However, this did not stop him from increasing French arms supplies to Ukraine, nor did it diminish the oppressive nature of French imperialism in Africa, for example.”
—The Internationalist No. 71, October 2023

It is certainly true that if France (or any other advanced capitalist country) were to leave NATO, the inherently “oppressive nature” of imperialist rule would not be diminished. The only reason any imperialist power would break with the US alliance would be to enhance its position relative to rival predators in the capitalist jungle. This was clearly de Gaulle’s intent in the 1960s—the fact that his actions partially disorganised the forces of global capitalist reaction, particularly in relation to the USSR, was incidental. Yet, from the point of view of the international working class, it was a welcome development.

Does breaking with NATO ‘play into the hands’ of the ultra-right?

The IG claims that opposing German participation in NATO “plays into the hands” of the rightist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD):

“The slogan ‘Germany Out of NATO!’ plays into the hands of the AfD, just when it is necessary to fight this fascistic party as a misleader of the East German masses, which it is trying to divert into the dead-end of a völkisch (ethnic German) nationalist opposition to NATO.”
—Ibid.

While the AfD’s right wing, grouped around the fascist Björn Höcke, advocates an immediate break with NATO, the position of the majority, represented by Maximilian Krah, who was the first name on the party’s list for the June 2024 European parliamentary election, is somewhat less categorical: “There is currently no alternative to Nato, but we would like it to no longer be without an alternative”. The AfD majority, which is not fascist, advocates a more assertive policy for German imperialism and calls for expanding the already massive rearmament programme, but is not at this point calling for abandoning NATO.

The Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which recently split from the social-democratic Die Linke (Left Party), criticises NATO’s record of reckless attacks on neo-colonial countries and offers pacifist opposition to the current rearmament programme. While the BSW’s break with Die Linke was in part motivated by differences over the latter’s growing affinity for both NATO and Israel, it seems likely that, given a chance, Wagenknecht would join a coalition government committed to pursuing the pro-imperialist policies she denounces.

Revolutionary Marxists do not advocate an “independent” military policy for Germany, France, Britain, Canada, or any of NATO’s other imperialist components. We uphold Wilhelm Liebknecht’s formula: not one person, not one penny for the imperialist war machine. We oppose NATO because it is, at this historical moment, the primary instrument of global capitalism’s machinery of war. We would not support a demand to leave NATO if it meant joining a rival imperialist alliance, but that has not been a viable option since the 1940s.

The AfD denounced the demolition of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline by US imperialism and its allies—so did most of the left, including ourselves and the IG. Are we all “playing into the hands” of the reactionary right by doing so? Unlike the IG and IBT, a section of the AfD opposed NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine from the outset. After seven months, the IG finally got off the fence and belatedly came out in favour of a Russian military victory; the IBT, which continues to labour under the misconception that Russia is “imperialist,” maintains a mistaken position of even-handed neutrality.

The phenomenal rise of the AfD and similar expressions of right-wing populism in many NATO countries is largely attributable to the political convergence of the liberal and social-democratic parties of the “left” with their traditional opponents on the conservative right in supporting austerity and union-bashing at home and lavishly funded military adventures abroad. The task of Marxists is to undercut the appeal of rightist demagogues by demonstrating to the masses that declining living standards and rising military budgets are a natural and inevitable result of an irrational social system which prioritises the pursuit of private profit over human need.

The overtly pro-imperialist policy of the SPD, Greens and the many self-styled “Marxists” who support the proxy war in Ukraine has resulted in a significant layer of working people who have traditionally been hostile to the US-led NATO alliance, gravitating to the AfD. In the last German general election, the AfD gained more votes from former Die Linke supporters than any other party:

“In 2009, when the AfD did not yet exist, the Left Party won 11.9 percent of the vote in the federal election, but now it is polling at around five percent—i.e. on the brink of collapse. ‘The Left Party has lost voters to the AfD to almost the same extent as the [traditional bourgeois] CDU/CSU; in the last three federal elections, almost a million voters have switched from the the Left Party to the AfD,’ says political scientist Frank Decker from the University of Bonn. ‘The AfD has played a decisive role in the decline of the left,’ says Matthias Jung, board member at Forschungsgruppe Wahlen.”
—Sueddeutsche.de, 15 March 2023

Revolutionaries put forward demands to advance the interests of the international working class and others oppressed by imperialism—if at certain moments right-wing elements, for their own reasons, advocate policies objectively beneficial to the proletariat and its allies there is no reason to reflexively change our position. Instead, we must seek ways to show that, regardless of a transitory convergence on a particular issue, the politics of the reactionary right are counterposed to the interests of the exploited and oppressed.

In February 2023, an anti-war demonstration was organised in Washington D.C. by a coalition of left-liberals and right-wing Libertarians who, like the AfD, oppose NATO’s role in Ukraine. We released a statement in advance of the protest noting: “This unusual political configuration has come about because of the near unanimity with which both Democrats and Republicans routinely back U.S. military interventions,“ and announcing:

“we plan to attend in order to talk to participants who agree (as we do) with many of its slogans, including ‘Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine,‘ ‘Disband NATO,‘ ‘Abolish the CIA,‘ ‘Close all US military bases abroad,‘ ‘repeal the Patriot Act, and restore the right to privacy and habeas corpus‘ and ‘Free Julian Assange.‘“

We were the only “far left” tendency at the demonstration. Several left groups, including Socialist Action, reflecting the consensus of “progressive” radical-liberal opinion, characterised the rally as “reactionary” and called for a boycott. Most of the ostensibly Marxist left, including the IG and IBT, did not take a position one way or the other. Drawing a distinction between the Libertarians and other rightist sponsors of the rally from “fascists, who must be physically suppressed,“ we declared that we looked forward to:

“the opportunity to engage politically with disgruntled working people who, while recognizing that the whole system is rigged for the benefit of the billionaire elite, may have fallen for the pseudo anti-imperialism of the Libertarians or the social-democratic reformism of the People’s Party.”

Canada in NATO/NORAD: hot issue in the early 1960s

In the early 1960s the issue of Canadian membership in NATO and the ancillary North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), was a hot issue in the populist/social-democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP). After the pervasive anti-Communism of the 1950s, popular opinion in Canada was beginning to shift. Ross Dowson, leader of the Canadian Trotskyists, observed in an internal document that: “The past year [1959-60] has witnessed ever-widening expressions of concern amongst broad layers of the population over Canadian capitalism’s commitment to Wall Street’s war drive.” Dowson described how growing anti-war sentiment had impacted the CCF, which in the early 1950s had backed Canadian participation in the reactionary Korean War:

“Even the CCF brass which some 11 years ago having smashed the [left-wing] opposition in the party cemented itself to the bi-partisan [Liberal-Tory] foreign policy of support of the NATO military alliance, has reacted to these developments. In the last session the [eight-member CCF] parliamentary caucus made the record by voting against the military appropriations for the [nuclear-armed] Bomarc [missile system]. Now the CCF national convention has come out for Canadian withdrawal from both the NATO and NORAD military pacts.”
—“New Opportunities & new tasks in the anti-war fight”

Dowson pointed to the connection between NATO/NORAD and the dispute over whether the Canadian military should acquire nuclear arms:

“Yes, we are in favour of withdrawal from the NORAD and NATO military alliances—but we are not neutralists. We are partisans of the world-wide anti-war struggle. We support the anti-imperialist struggle of the colonial peoples which has been the biggest single factor in setting back the US State Department’s time schedule….For the defence of the USSR.
“But to intelligently converse with the masses and to overcome the restrictions such a [peace] movement imposes on us, we must devise a series of slogans around which the best elements can rally and for the adoption of which they can struggle. Having top priority at this time is our demand that the Canadian people should vote on the question of nuclear armament of Canadian forces.”

Dowson drew a parallel with a referendum the Canadian government conducted during the Second World War to obtain a mandate to impose conscription:

“Today the demand for a referendum on nuclear arms for Canada is a vote of non-confidence in a government which, behind the backs of the people is preparing to nuclear arm. We are confident that the government does not want such a vote in the knowledge that the vote would be a thunderous no. But let us suppose that contrary to our evaluation of the situation the government were to take up this question to the electorate, this would open up a nation-wide debate. Such a debate would give us an opportunity to present our full socialist analysis of the situation and the tasks before the workers. We would urge a no vote.”

We consider Dowson’s opposition to NATO/NORAD and his rejection of nuclear arms for the Canadian military to have been entirely correct. The call for a referendum on the hotly disputed issue of acquiring nuclear arms—which the majority of the population opposed—was an intelligent tactic. In such a referendum, which might also have included the question of NATO/NORAD membership, we agree with Dowson that revolutionaries would indeed “urge a no vote.” Do the IG and IBT agree? Or would they recommend abstention to avoid promoting the illusion “that Canadian imperialism might be less predatory and more progressive if only it was outside the US-dominated NATO military alliance”?

Social-democrats and liberal reformists advance pacifist demands because they are in the business of promoting the fallacy that capitalism need not be “red in tooth and claw.” Marxism teaches that the threat of imperialist war will only be ended by the victory of socialist revolution on a global scale. But in a period when a struggle for workers’ power is not immediately posed, revolutionaries have a duty to utilise whatever tactical openings arise to raise the level of popular political consciousness and promote militant class-struggle solutions to the problems facing working people.

1981 Labour Party schism: Little Englanders vs NATO ‘internationalists’

In October 1981, the resurgent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which had been a major political factor in Britain two decades earlier, organised a demonstration of 250,000 to demand unilateral nuclear disarmament. The issue was a hot topic at the Labour Party conference that year, where Tony Benn, leader of the party’s anti-nuclear left wing, challenged Denis Healey, a longtime pro-NATO right winger, for the post of deputy leader. The degenerating Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B) initially dismissed the Benn-Healey contest as a squabble among reformists, but six months later reversed its position and belatedly recognised:

“A distorted and uneven class line is being cleaved in the Labour Party under the impact of renewed anti-Soviet Cold War; between Little England reformists and NATO/CIA-loving ‘internationalists’, lacking in sharp programmatic counterposition but necessarily reflected in and inseparable from domestic class questions.”
—Spartacist Britain No. 41, April 1982

The SL/B correctly characterised Benn’s program as “a utopian unilateralist attempt to pull Britain out of the Cold War vortex” which was ultimately a “reformist dead end,” but also understood that the resulting “political realignments in and around the Labour Party” could potentially have posed an opportunity “to break the stranglehold of Labourite reformism over the working class and forge a revolutionary vanguard”. Spartacist Britain offered the following retrospective critique of its original abstentionist impulse:

“The election became a major showdown on the key issues tearing the Labour Party apart, albeit expressed negatively: for or against the CIA-loyal exponents of Cold War; for or against the architects of coalition and austerity. Who would doubt that mass defections by the right wing would have ensued had Benn won, leaving behind an unstable, left-dominated party? The situation dictated that a Trotskyist propaganda group which seeks to split Labour’s working-class base from its pro-capitalist misleaders to a revolutionary programme should have extended critical support to Tony Benn….”

The 1938 Ludlow amendment & the SWP

The current reluctance of Trump supporters in the US Congress to continue funding for NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine parallels the rightist opposition of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee of the late 1930s and early 40s to entanglement in the inter-imperialist war in Europe. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led by James P. Cannon, did not worry that its vociferous opposition to US war preparations might “play into the hands” of right-wingers who, for their own reasons, also wanted to avoid American involvement in the conflict.

On 10 January 1938 Democratic congressman Louis Ludlow put forward a motion to amend the American constitution to require the government to win a majority of voters in a national referendum before any US forces could be sent to fight overseas. The issue was discussed on the same day at the first meeting of the SWP’s Political Committee (the party had only been officially launched ten days earlier) where James Burnham suggested that Ludlow’s proposal posed a potential opening for popular anti-war agitation. The other six members of the political committee disagreed; they viewed Ludlow’s amendment as something that could only promote pacifist illusions. Leon Trotsky immediately wrote to Cannon to explain why he agreed with Burnham:

“What is the Ludlow initiative? It represents the apprehension of the man in the street, of the average citizen, the middle bourgeois, the petty bourgeois, and even the farmer and the worker. They are all looking for a brake upon the bad will of big business. In this case they name the brake the referendum. We know that the brake is not sufficient and even not efficient and we openly proclaim this opinion, but at the same time we are ready to help the little man go through his experience against the dictatorial pretensions of big business. The referendum is an illusion? Not more and not less an illusion than universal suffrage and other means of democracy. Why can we not use the referendum as we use the presidential elections?”
“….The referendum illusion of the American little man has also its progressive features. Our task is not to turn away from it, but to utilize these progressive features without taking the responsibility for the illusion. If the referendum motion should be adopted, it would give us in case of a war crisis tremendous possibilities for agitation. That is precisely why big business stifled the referendum illusion.”
—“The Ludlow Amendment,” 1 February 1938

The SWP leadership took Trotsky’s advice and reversed their position on the “referendum illusion.”

Workers Vanguard’s polemics with Pabloites over NATO exit

The IG/IBT’s opposition to calling for Germany, France, Canada, etc., to exit NATO is flatly counterposed to the position taken by the Spartacist League (SL) in the 1970s, when it was still a revolutionary organisation. In 1979 the SL criticised the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR—flagship section of Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat [USec]) for omitting the demand for France to leave NATO from its electoral programme:

“Proof of the unseriousness of the ‘orthodox’ elements in the USec’s platform was the alacrity with which the LCR dropped any reference to defending the deformed and degenerated workers states against imperialism, to its demand for withdrawal from NATO, and to its opposition to the extension of the EEC [The European Economic Community—forerunner of the EU] in order to form a joint slate with the economists of Lutte Ouvriere.”
—Workers Vanguard (WV) No. 233, 8 June 1979

The same issue of WV criticised the USec’s Canadian section, the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL), for not including “demands for Canada to get out of NATO or NORAD” in its election propaganda:

“Like the NDP, the RWL dropped all demands for nationalization (with or without compensation) and omitted any demands for Canada to get out of NATO or NORAD. The RWL also dropped its demand for withdrawal of Canadian troops from the Near East, where under UN auspices they serve as border guards for Zionist expansionism. The RWL has even dropped paying lip-service to the Trotskyist position of military defense of the degenerated/deformed workers states from imperialist attack or domestic counterrevolution which was contained in its previous electoral statements.”

In 1979 the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) was the only genuinely Trotskyist organisation in the world. Its support for the traditional call of the left wing of the workers’ movement for a break with the US-led counterrevolutionary military alliance was entirely logical. NATO remains just as much the enemy of working people today as it was in the 1970s—its reactionary character has not changed. What has changed is the position of the leading cadres of the IG and IBT who claim to uphold the programme of the iSt from the 1960s and 70s. The issue of WV which criticised the French and Canadian Pabloites for failing to call for exiting NATO was edited by the IG’s Jan Norden; IG supporter Charles Burroughs was associate editor and IG founder, the late Marjorie Stamberg, was one of a six-member editorial board (along with Jon Brule, George Foster, Liz Gordon, James Robertson and Joseph Seymour). We hope the IG comrades will eventually get around to correcting their mistaken opposition to demanding a German withdrawal from NATO. In the meantime, we look forward to their explanation of why it was correct to call for a break with NATO in 1979 but is now a mistake.

NATO has been a reactionary imperialist instrument since its 1949 founding. At any point in its history, its break-up would have been a good thing. Ideally NATO will be shattered as a result of a wave of victorious socialist revolutions, but pending that, revolutionaries are duty bound to support any partial steps that weaken and disorganise the forces of imperialist reaction. The defection of one or more members of the military alliance headed by the American hegemon would have this effect, which is why we advocate the departure of France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Luxembourg and all the rest. If, in the current circumstances, we had a deputy in a legislature where a motion was put forward to pull out of NATO, we would vote “yes” rather than abstain. Our advice to the IG, IBT and any other self-proclaimed revolutionaries who may be inclined to disagree, is to follow Leon Trotsky’s advice and “Learn to Think.”