Duncan Hallas
Against the Stream

The August 4th of the Communist International

"In January 1933 Hitler came to power and destroyed, in a matter of weeks, the strongest labour movement in the world. He did so without resistance. The collapse of the world’s biggest social-democratic party was to be expected. It was a continuation of the collapse of the international social democracy on 4 August 1914. The collapse of the German Communist Party, the largest party in the Communist International outside the USSR,was a different matter altogether."
Robin Yassin-Kassab speculates:"So many people who I considered allies, or admired, or even (in nasrallah's case) idolised have proved themselves to be ignorant and arrogant blanket thinkers, or pretend revolutionaries, or Islamophobes, or (unconscious) anti-arab racists, or just ideologically blinkered f***g idiots. It's a great shame. I expect clear-eyed socialists felt the same in 56 and 68, when so many of their 'comrades' convinced themselves that Soviet imperialism in Europe was in the interests of the proletariat, the future, etc..."
For most of the Trotskyist tradition those were secondary events, the point at which the Communist International had made such a debit in its credibility that it was utterly bankrupt had come much earlier. With the current generation we have what Marx and a half might say, "Hegel remarks somewhere that historical events occur thrice. He forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, third as community theatre, with a cast of unknowns and a tiny audience, worth only a couple of sad laughs." The two most significant parties of the far left in Britain, the SWP and Socialist Party (what used to be the Militant) have done fairly well on Syria, the latter may have been a bit mechanistic in their ideas of how the revolution should develop, but their hearts have been in the right place. And so those with something of an Aug 4th situation are most noticeably those from the last few splitlets from the SWP, which might have something to do with their orientation since the first US war in the Gulf in 1991, but that's a much less important question than getting the big questions right.