David North writes:

While the bourgeoisie finds itself in a political impasse and the middle class looks for alternatives to the existing conditions, the working class—under the influence of past defeats—may display a reluctance to enter into decisive struggles. Trotsky acknowledged that the betrayals during the years leading up to the outbreak of war had created a mood of discouragement among the workers. “One should not, however, overestimate the stability or durability of such moods,” Trotsky advised. “Events created them; events will dispel them.”

Lenin warned against blaming the working class for their defeats. In What Is To Be Done?, he describes the “Primitiveness” of revolutionary organizations through an account of an Economist writer, a direct witness:

The recent trials, especially that of the Self-Emancipation Group and the Labour-against-Capital group,^[19] clearly showed that the young agitator, lacking a detailed knowledge of working class conditions and, consequently, of the conditions under which agitation can be carried on in a given factory, ignorant of the principles of secrecy, and understanding only the general principles of Social-Democracy [if he does], is able to carry on his work for perhaps four, five, or six months. Then come arrests, which frequently lead to the break-up of the entire organisation, or at all events, of part of it. The question arises, therefore, can the group conduct successful activity if its existence is measured by months?… Obviously, the defects of the existing organisations cannot be wholly ascribed to the transitional period…. Obviously, the numerical, and above all the qualitative, make-up of the functioning organisations is no small factor, and the first task our Social-Democrats must undertake … is that of effectively combining the organisations and making a strict selection of their membership.”

He later explains that this real problem of primitiveness, which the Economist acknowledges in the account above, arises from the very Economism that weighs down the theory of the revolutionary movement. This theory of Economism limited the scope of revolutionary activity in theory, thereby making it ineffective at acting with caution under difficult conditions much less controlling and improving those conditions.

But the term “primitiveness” embraces something more than lack of training; it denotes a narrow scope of revolutionary work generally, failure to understand that a good organisation of revolutionaries cannot be built on the basis of such narrow activity, and lastly — and this is the main thing — attempts to justify this narrowness and to elevate it to a special “theory”, i.e., subservience to spontaneity on this question too. Once such attempts were revealed, it became clear that primitiveness is connected with Economism and that we shall never rid ourselves of this narrowness of our organisational activity until we rid ourselves of Economism generally (i.e., the narrow conception of Marxist theory, as well as of the role of Social-Democracy and of its political tasks). These attempts manifested themselves in a twofold direction. Some began to say that the working masses themselves have not yet advanced the broad and militant political tasks which the revolutionaries are attempting to “impose” on them; that they must continue to struggle for immediate political demands, to conduct “the economic struggle against the employers and the government”^[1] (and, naturally, corresponding to this struggle which is “accessible” to the mass movement there must be an organisation that will be “accessible” to the most untrained youth). Others, far removed from any theory of “gradualness”, said that it is possible and necessary to “bring about a political revolution”, but that this does not require building a strong organisation of revolutionaries to train the proletariat in steadfast and stubborn struggle. All we need do is to snatch up our old friend, the “accessible” cudgel. To drop metaphor, it means that we must organise a general strike,^[2] or that we must stimulate the “spiritless” progress of the working-class movement by means of “excitative terror”.^[3] Both these trends, the opportunists and the “revolutionists”, bow to the prevailing amateurism; neither believes that it can be eliminated, neither understands our primary and imperative practical task to establish an organisation of revolutionaries capable of lending energy, stability, and continuity to the political struggle.

The defeat of the workers caused by the rise of the Nazis occurred as a result of Trotsky’s own leadership of the Fourth International. He should have acknowledged his mistake in forcing the Left Opposition to remain a part of the Comintern, even when others had broken from it on the grounds of the suppression of inner party democracy. The Stalin-Hitler pact did not arise suddenly after a customary meeting but actually constituted the fruition of a long social process in which Stalinism consciously and systematically betrayed the revolution while occupying leading positions within the various national Communist Parties. The self-preservation of the bureaucracy forced the workers to find a new organization in the Left Opposition. This Left Opposition itself had divisions, which Trotsky sought to hide or ignore.

Sylvia Pankhurst, the leader of the British Communist Party and signatory of the Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International, after a public argument with Lenin, called for the establishment of the Fourth International as early as 1921. Had Trotsky listened to this leading Communist, (who unlike Rosa Luxembourg, survived leading the revolutionary party through World War I and the revolutionary wave it produced) various revolutionary failures could have ended in victory. Workers would have had the quality and quantity of leaders they needed to respond to the betrayal of the Stalinist or the state bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and its agents in the various Communist Parties throughout the world. Instead, Trotsky advocated working within the Comintern, delayed the formation of the Fourth International, and only finally came to the same conclusion as Pankhurst shortly before World War II, when organizing the Fourth International from scratch would prove far more difficult. Trotsky’s Economism, (“Events created them; events will expel them,” as quoted approvingly by North), limited the scope of revolutionary activity to criticism of Stalinist leadership, rather than the formation of an independent leadership. This prevented the workers from taking the power in order to combat the rise of Nazism as had happened during the October Revolution with the fight against Kornilov.