The Abandonment of the Fight for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees - A Dangerous Error

The Abandonment of the Fight for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees - A Dangerous Error

History

As the educated Trotskyist will be aware, the demand for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees occupied a central place within The Transitional Program. To quote a large excerpt from that document, from the section titled The Picket Line, Defense Guards/Workers’ Militia and The Arming of the Proletariat: 

"In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defense. [emphasis added] It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defense, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.

A new upsurge of the mass movement should serve not only to increase the number of these units but also to unite them according to neighborhoods, cities, regions. It is necessary to give organized expression to the valid hatred of the workers toward scabs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press. 

Only with the help of such systematic, persistent, indefatigable, courageous agitational and organizational work always on the basis of the experience of the masses themselves, is it possible to root out from their consciousness the traditions of submissiveness and passivity; to train detachments of heroic fighters capable of setting an example to all toilers; to inflict a series of tactical defeats upon the armed thugs of counterrevolution; to raise the self-confidence of the exploited and oppressed; to compromise Fascism in the eyes of the petty bourgeoisie and pave the road for the conquest of power by the proletariat.

Engels defined the state as “bodies of armed men.” The arming of the proletariat is an imperative concomitant element to its struggle for liberation. When the proletariat wills it, it will find the road and the means to arming. In this field, also, leadership falls naturally to the sections of the Fourth International."

Following the publication of The Transitional Program, the demand for Workers' Defense Guards/Committees occupied a significant place within the work of Trotskyists for decades. However, the growth of opportunism within the movement has at various times undermined and distorted this demand. Central texts of the modern Trotskyist movement, such as The Heritage We Defend and How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism, took up the question of the failures of movements during periods of political backsliding to properly raise or defend this demand. 

Workers League leaflet calling for the organization of defense guards to protect the Poor People's March, 1968

In relation to the SWP in its period of political retreat, David North wrote in The Heritage We Defend that "The SWP did not raise the demand for the formation of defense guards among the black population to fight back against the racist thugs functioning under the protection of the state government." 

In the same book, this time concerning the WRP, North wrote: "When pressed to explain the WRP’s official programmatic call for workers’ defense guards, the News Line reported the following opportunist testimony: 'Mr. Redgrave said that the party called for workers’ defense guards to protect immigrant areas where fascist attacks occurred and the police on the ground were unable to give protection. The police themselves admit they cannot cope with the situation, he said.'

In other words, Redgrave’s testimony presented the workers’ defense guards not as organs of defensive struggle against the violence of the capitalist state and its agents, but as an auxiliary force to supplement an inadequate police force!"

Touching on this same issue in How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism, North wrote "Redgrave went so far as to suggest that workers’ defense guards were only necessary where there weren’t sufficient police to patrol the areas!"

The demand for workers' defense guards, properly raised, therefore occupied a central place in the Trotskyist movement in the years following major struggles against opportunism. Several examples from ICFI materials available online from between 1986-1992 make this clear concerning the period following the split with the WRP:

Labor Must Act on Iran-Contra Crisis, 1986:

“Mobilize the strength of the labor movement against racist and fascist attacks, establishing workers’ defense guards against Klan and neo-Nazi activities. Abolish the FBI, state and local police, and establish a workers’ militia to defend the working class.”

Workers League 1988 Election Platform: 

"Form Workers’ Defense Committees: Against the armed violence of the capitalist state, the army of hired security thugs, scabs and police, the working class must form its own self-defense groups to protect its picket lines, demonstrations and meetings."

The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, 1988:

"Even the specific “transitional” demands which Trotsky proposed—the sliding scale of wages and hours, factory committees, abolition of business secrets and workers’ control of industry, expropriation of private banks and nationalization of the banking industry, the formation of workers’ defense guards, the establishment of a workers’ and farmers’ government—retain their vitality as practical levers for the revolutionary mobilization of the working class." [emphasis added]

On the Assassination of L.W Panditha, 1988: 

“Without delay, the working class must build its own militia against the bourgeoisie’s, not to defend the bourgeoisie or the bourgeois state, when it is preparing the counterrevolution and discarding bourgeois democracy. A workers’ defense militia should be formed to defend the organizations of the working class, its newspapers, and all the gains of the working class in the previous period.”

The Case of Patrick Slaughter, 1988:

“In other words, workers should deal with trash like Brown and Slaughter by building defense guards that will acquaint their faces with the pavement and send them on their way.”

Long Live the Memory of Comrade R.A. Pitawala!, 1988:

"The only way forward for the working class is to form its own defense committees to safeguard its organizations and protect its meetings, demonstrations and leaders. A catastrophe threatens the working class unless it repudiates the parliamentary cretinism of its reformist leadership and undertakes practical measures to organize its own defense."

Repression and the State in Sri Lanka, 1990:

“This urgently raises the issue of forming defense committees and defense squads under the leadership of the working class, involving the rural poor and the youth for self-defense. It is of prime importance that these defense committees organize their own independent investigations into the murderous conspiracies and activities of the state forces and the goon squads in order to raise the consciousness of the masses about the necessity of fighting for the overthrow of the capitalist state.

The demand for arming the workers must be raised within every working class organization”

Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism and the Working Class, 1992: 

“As far as racism and xenophobia are concerned, we are also for concrete action, but we place no trust in a government and state which provide a breeding ground for the brown plague. We call instead on the working class itself to become active and to build defense committees.”

Modern Day

Of the material available on WSWS as of the time of writing, founded in 1998, since 1992 the demand for some similar kind of "defense committees" appears to us to have been raised only eight times, and only on a few occasions in which it is clearly used in the same manner as Trotsky used it.

One instance, which also appears to be the only time in which workers' "guards" are called for, is a recent statement from 19 May 2022, Sri Lankan workers and rural poor must mobilize against the Rajapakse-Wickremesinghe austerity agenda! There it was said: "Defense committees and guards must be established in the face of government-organized goon squads." 

Two recent articles concerning Chile raised the idea of "defense-committees" in connection with the fight against fascism and authoritarianism, for example the article Chilean government mobilizes police and military on anniversary of social revolt from 18 October 2020 which said: "What must be prepared is the fight to establish a workers’ government where delegations of factory committees, neighborhood committees, production and distribution committees, communications and civil-defense committees composed of workers and youth take the lead."

Another article, Political issues in the struggle against the threat of fascism and dictatorship in Greece from 28 September 2013 said that "It is necessary to form self-defense committees in neighborhoods and factories to protect workers and immigrants from the fascist gangs and their police accomplices, and prepare strike action."

Of the remaining material we found, the demand is raised, not for workers' defense committees in general, but specifically "immigrant defense committees." The nature of these committees is not specified, and since the SEPs have formed "defense committees in support of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning around the globe" which are clearly of a different nature than those discussed by Trotsky in connection to the arming of the working class, the mere invocation of the words "defense committees" in combination is not at all necessarily an application of the ideas that Trotsky fought for.

From the usages above, the exceptions that prove the rule - namely that the demand for workers' defense committees/guards has been all but abandoned - we can determine the limited circumstances in which these rare instances are manifest: Only when the forces of fascism and authoritarianism have already mobilized their own goons.

This is approaching the positions expressed by the WRP as criticized in How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism: "The possibility of resorting to arms was limited to struggle against the fascist state - that is, until after the defeat of the proletariat."

Similar positions to that adopted in practice by the modern ICFI were subjected to withering criticism by Trotsky, including for example in Whither France? against l’Humanité: "At the present time, according to this paper, it is inadmissible to advance a slogan which is only opportune 'in a full revolutionary crisis.' It is dangerous to load your rifle, says the 'too-prudent' hunter so long as the game remains invisible. But when the game puts in an appearance it is a little too late to load the rifle. Do the strategists of l’Humanité really think that in 'the full revolutionary crisis' they will be able without any preparation to mobilize and arm the proletariat? To secure a large quantity of arms, one needs a certain quantity on hand. One needs military cadres. One needs the invincible desire of the masses to secure arms. One needs uninterrupted preparatory work not only in the gymnasiums but in indissoluble connection with the daily struggle of the masses. This means:

It is necessary immediately to build the militia and at the same time to carry on propaganda for the general armament of the revolutionary workers and peasants."

As one member of the SEP put it in describing attitudes amongst elements of the present-day leadership: "You mention the need to approach the subject, crickets. You call the secretary and talk to him, he politely deflects and crickets. There's not even a desire to approach the topic."

The virtual abandonment of this critical demand by the Trotskyist movement is part of a generalized turn towards opportunism that has been underway in the 21st century, reflecting the growth of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois social and ideological influence within the movement. This opportunism can only be defeated through the fight for genuine proletarian internationalism!