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PETER WEISS
The May 1968 revolution of workers and students in Paris is
called in this book a revolt of "anarchist adventurism," provoked by
"trotskyist-maoist inflammatory watchwords." With this, the great event
of the last years - namely that a revolutionary situation can develop
in a highly industrialized country - has been badly distorted. The
anarchist tendencies in this context cannot affect Trotsky, who opposed
anarchy and individual terror. It would be much more informative
to provide a description of the actual power relations and of the
intentions behind the revolt, as well as an explanation of its being
repressed and quashed.
So far as the reference to trotskyist groups within the Czecho–
slovakian reform movement is concerned, this is in harmony with the
attempt to establish a workers' democracy and an open cultural policy.
These are also traits that Trotsky has in common with the "left
radicalism" of the Italian communists. What is relevant to us here,
however, and what can never be clarified by global rejection, is the
question which way Trotsky's alternatives transformed themselves after
the period of the stalinist cult of personality, which of these still con–
tinue to work on today, after the victory of the revolution in Vietnam,
in China, Korea and Cuba and after the beginning of a war of libera–
tion in Africa and Latin America, which of these have found novel
and definite forms and what is still useful and necessary under cer–
tain conditions.
When in this book Trotskyism is described as the mouthpiece of
blind forces, as representing the position contrary to the principle of
peaceful coexistence, when Trotsky is adduced as the common deno–
minator for the existing explosive forces everywhere, then this can only
emphasize that problems are hidden behind such an unscientific con–
struction and that one shies away from tackling them.
Peter Weiss
(Translated from the German by Gertrud Lenzer)
