http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/22/the-indispensable-trotsky
The indispensable Trotsky
Todd Chretien reviews a brief book about one of the 20th century's
revolutionary giants.
September 22, 2015
Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1939
Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1939
THE RUSSIAN revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once remarked that without
revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice. Forty-five
years into neoliberalism's attempt to erase all memory of socialism, or
even basic human decency, the U.S. is today witnessing a new outburst of
enthusiasm for the "S" word--most notably, but not only, through Bernie
Sanders' campaign for president.
Paul Le Blanc's new biography Leon Trotsky offers a strong jolt of the
kind of history and theory needed if his readers--especially younger
ones--are to build up socialism as a revolutionary force in U.S. politics.
Le Blanc is at pains to stress Trotsky's "unoriginality" --in the sense
of his firm grounding within and development of a long tradition of
working-class revolutionary politics. Yet in the context of contemporary
U.S. politics, these ideas are provocative, out of the ordinary.
But as we mark the 75th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination by a
Stalinist hit man, young readers might well ask why they should bother.
As it turns out, aside from the drama and grandeur of an intrinsically
fascinating career, near the end of his life, Trotsky was attempting to
reach exactly the same sort of audience Le Blanc is after.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
TROTSKY DEFINED his only truly indispensable contribution to the working
class as his defense of the genuine Marxist tradition and history of the
Russian Revolution in the 1930s from the distortions of Stalinism. He
strove to pass along their lessons to a few dozens of younger organizers
and a few thousands of their followers.
Review: Books
Paul Le Blanc, Leon Trotsky, Critical Lives Series, Reaktion Books,
2015, 224 pages, $16.95.
.
This idea that the most important part of Trotsky's life came when he
was most isolated appears on its face to be absurd.
After all, Trotsky was arguably the best-known figure in all of
Europe--more so than Lenin--from 1917 until his exile from the then-USSR
in 1928. Friend and foe alike acknowledged this wunderkind--elected
president of the 1905 Petrograd Soviet at age 26--as the continent's
greatest orator, as the sword of the Russian Revolution, as that
wonderfully ambiguous word bolsheviki made flesh. He personified, like
Malcolm X and Che Guevara after him, the highest hopes and most
determined commitments of a generation.
So why did Trotsky judge his final decade, when he was banished from the
global stage, to be so important?
Simply put, without Trotsky, the identification of revolutionary
socialism, of the self-emancipation of the working class, of Marxism as
a liberatory theory and practice, might have been strangled in the
gulag. Thousands were repulsed by the brutality and hypocrisy of the
counterrevolution in Russia led by Stalin, but their scattered protests
required a rallying point to stop the retreat and carve out politically
(and physically) defensible positions from which a future advance might
be organized.
Trotsky's keen intellect and his indisputable credentials allowed his
views to puncture the dual agonies of fascism and Stalinism, and gain a
hearing. If no longer the voice of the Revolution, Trotsky served as its
conscience. And the small but dogged forces he fought to gather together
rescued the Revolution's better angels from oblivion. Their wings
broken, there were able to speak.
In the absence of Trotsky's work during these terrible years, the
struggle of future generations to counter Margaret Thatcher's famous
dictum "There Is No Alternative" to capitalism would be immeasurably
more difficult, even hard to imagine.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
PAIRING ACCESSIBLE prose with just enough historical detail to set the
stage, Le Blanc packs the major episodes in Trotsky's life into just
over 200 pages, while setting out and commenting critically on his
best-known theoretical contributions.
Among these, Le Blanc reviews Trotsky's economic analysis of combined
and uneven development, the tactics of the united front, criticism of
the Soviet bureaucracy, anti-fascist strategy, transitional demands and
political programs, and methods of international revolutionary
organization. Le Blanc's clarity guides readers unfamiliar with this
history through what can otherwise be an easily bewildering landscape.
Achieving efficiency of this scale inevitably leaves Leon Trotsky open
to criticism over points of interpretation at times.
By way of example, Trotsky's refusal to submit to Stalin's
counterrevolution stands as one of his main historical contributions,
and Le Blanc recounts this fight with a keen Marxist analysis that gives
proper weight to material and ideological circumstances.
"There was a method in the madness," writes Le Blanc. "What Marx called
primitive capitalist accumulation--involving massively inhumane means
(which included the slave trade and genocide against native peoples, as
well as destroying the livelihood of millions of peasants and
brutalizing the working class during the early days of
industrialization)--had created the basis for a modern capitalist
industrial economy."
To my mind, if you don't understand this dynamic--and believe instead
that revolutions can simply end in tyranny for no reason at all, or only
because a single individual desires power--then there is little hope for
humanity. Here, Le Blanc is spot on.
However, in documenting the early stages of this fight, Le Blanc denotes
Trotsky as a "Communist Authoritarian," arguing that "Lenin, Trotsky and
other leaders had by 1922 crushed oppositional currents--the Workers'
Opposition, Democratic Centralists and others--whose perspectives had
been rooted deeply in Bolshevik ideals that culminated in the 1917 triumph."
Le Blanc is right to point out--as Rosa Luxemburg did some years
earlier--a tendency among Bolshevik leaders to make a virtue of
necessity during the Revolution's darkest days.
But this is one of the few instances when Le Blanc does not provide
sufficient weight to the objective circumstances which forced many of
these choices on them. For instance, Le Blanc places scant emphasis on
the brutal post-1917 Civil War that set the stage for emergency
measures--perceived as extraordinary and temporary, in the face of an
unforeseen and unprecedented crisis--restricting workers' democracy.
This criticism aside, Le Blanc presents his case in a crisp, no-nonsense
manner that helps facilitate a more fully informed debate, rather than
shutting it down.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SIMILARLY, LE Blanc's treatment of Trotsky's conception of permanent
revolution--what is usually considered his most important (and
controversial) contribution to Marxist theory--is as concise at it is
provocative. He writes:
Trotsky's version of the theory contained three basic points: (1) The
revolutionary struggle for democracy in Russia could only be won under
the leadership of the working class, with the support of the peasant
majority. (2) This democratic revolution would begin in Russia a
transitional period in which all political, social, cultural and
economic relations would continue to be in flux, leading in the
direction of socialism. (3) This transition would
be part of, and would
help to advance, and must also be furthered by, an international
revolutionary process.
I think this is a very helpful summary. This broad view of permanent
revolution has been challenged recently by Marxist author and activist
Neil Davidson, who believes that Trotsky's theory only functions in more
narrow circumstances and is no longer applicable. Le Blanc and Davidson
have discussed these different conceptions elsewhere, and Leon Trotsky
does not refer explicitly to this ongoing exchange, but Le Blanc's
defense of the theory's contemporary relevance typically helps clarify
the terms of the debate:
One might go further: permanent revolution has applications in the
capitalist heartland, not simply in the periphery. Struggles for genuine
democracy, struggles to end militarism and imperialist wars, struggles
to defend the environment from the devastation generated by the capital
accumulation process, struggles simply
to preserve the quality of life
for a majority of the people, cannot be secured without the working
class coming to power and overturning capitalism. Such struggles in the
here and now also have
a "permanentist" dynamic.
I am partial to Le Blanc's views here, but whether one rejects this
position or accepts it in whole or in part, it is precisely the sort of
discussion that links history and theory to the struggles we face today.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
GIVEN TROTSKY'S preeminently political life, Le Blanc could be forgiven
for concentrating solely on his public role, leaving aside a portrait of
his personality. But Le Blanc takes on the challenge, even if he leaves
us with an ambiguous assessment.
Here, we face the classic nature-and-nurture debate. What part of
Trotsky's reputed self-possession, iron will and driving confidence did
he bring to the revolutionary movement, and what part of those traits
were imparted to him by the movement itself? Is it possible to separate
a figure like Trotsky from a great historical process he was, for his
entire adult life, so intimately associated with?
Attempting to untangle this dilemma, Le Blanc reports Comintern leader
Angelica Balabanoff's assessment:
Trotsky proved himself capable of arousing the masses by the force of
his revolutionary temperament and his brilliant intellectual
gifts...[However], his arrogance equals his gifts and capacities, and
creates very often a distance between himself and those about him which
excludes both personal warmth and any feeling of equality and reciprocity.
At the other extreme are the remarks of a collaborator, U.S. Socialist
Workers Party leader Joe Hansen: "The word that occurred to me was
mellowness; yet that was not quite right...He did not seem to drive
others as hard as
he had before. He had more consideration, I felt, for
weaknesses
in his collaborators. It was subtle but definitely there."
Is it possible to choose between "arrogance" and "mellowness" given the
gulf between circumstances? Can we say that one is "better," in a moral
sense, than the other?
Between these two extremes lay a 45-year political career spanning some
of the most inspiring and terrifying moments in human history. What I
find fascinating about Trotsky the man is that, perhaps more than any
other revolutionary figure, the interplay between individual and social
force persists for decades, and Le Blanc helps explain why this is so.
In a very real way, Trotsky's life is the story of the first half of the
20th century, and no one book can possibly do it justice. But if you are
not familiar with Trotsky and the Russian Revolution and are looking for
a place to begin, you can do no better than Le Blanc's book. And if you
are a veteran of this history, you will be challenged and invigorated by
his point of view.
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