MORNING PROCRASTINATION: Leon Trotsky, Leszek Kolakowski, & Edmund Wilson Edition
From the "Slouching Towards Utopia" cutting-room floor (and probably also from the extended notes)
Me trying to explain why I—and also so many others of my karass have a strong tendency to write of Leon Trotsky with more affection than he deserves, a tendency we need to struggle against:
Why do people like Leon Trotsky? It is not as though he stands at the head of a great political movement. And he was not terribly likable:
READING: Leszek Kolakowski: On Trotsky in Exile
Leszek Kolakowski’s judgment does seem to me to be tough but fair, even if the preceding rant is a little—but just a little—one-sided:
The fact that [Trotsky’s] theor[ies were]… rejected by… almost everyone… [has weight because they were] theories that ha[d] an inbuilt self-interpretation to the effect that they are an ‘expression’ of great historical tendencies (or of the will of Providence)… embody the true consciousness of the class… destined soon to triumph, or… constitute a revelation of truth, and… must inevitably prevail…. If a theory of this kind fails to secure recognition, its failure is an argument against it on its own premisses. (On the other hand, success in practice is not… [just] an argument… that the faith inspired… corresponded to essential social needs… Stalin’s successes did not prove that he was ‘right’ as a theorist.)…. The failure of Trotskyism in practice… is… proof that… theory as Trotsky conceived it was wrong….
But he was an outstanding personality, endowed with immense courage, will-power, and endurance. Covered with obloquy by Stalin and his henchmen… persecuted by the most powerful police and propaganda… he never faltered…. His children were murdered, he was… hunted down like an animal… finally done to death. His amazing resistance to every trial was the result of his faith…. Unfortunately, the intensity of a faith and the willingness of its adherents to undergo persecution for it are no proof that it is intellectually or morally right….
Trotsky was not unique in criticizing Soviet despotism, nor was he the first to do so. On the contrary, he criticized it much more mildly than the democratic socialists, and he did not object to it qua despotism…. Trotsky did not offer any alternative form of Communism…. Trotsky advocated ceaseless revolutionary aggression and endeavoured to convince himself and others that if he had been running the Soviet state and the Comintern, the whole world would have been set ablaze without delay; his reason for so believing was that Marxist historiosophy taught him that such were the laws of history…..
Stalinism was the natural and obvious continuation of the system of government established by Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky refused to recognize this fact and persuaded himself that Stalin’s despotism bore no relation to Lenin’s; that coercion, police repression, and the devastation of cultural life were due to a ‘bureaucratic’ coup d’etat and that he himself bore no vestige of responsibility for them. This desperate self-delusion is psychologically explicable. What we have here is… the tragedy of… a revolutionary despot entangled in a snare of his own making. There was… only a deposed leader who… could not realize that his efforts were vain, and who would not accept responsibility for a state of affairs which… was in fact the direct consequence of the principles that he, together with Lenin and the whole Bolshevik party, had established as the foundations of socialism.
So why is Trotsky likeable to, well, to someone like me?
First, the guy could write—and had good translators: “Every man has a natural right to be stupid; but Dwight Macdonald abuses the privilege”. That means that the sub-Turing instantiation of Trotsky’s mind we spin up from the black squiggles on the page, run on our own wetware in a separate sandbox, and then talk to is a wonderful and entertaining simulacrum of a guy.
Second, it is the sheer rightness of the narrative thrust of his story that, I think, makes it attractive to someone like me:
A smart young whippersnapper finds an intellectual doctrine that he thinks is a lever with which he can change the world.
He thus falls victim to what can only be described as an irrational cult.
Wonderful initial successes.
But things go horribly wrong.
And he spends the last fifteen years life as a sorcerer’s apprentice, trying to dispel the demons that his own spells had raised—and yet at the end has very painfully repaired some of the damage earned a certain kind of wisdom: the story, in a way, of Œdipus at Colonos.
(Unfortunately, it is not really the story of Œdipus at Colonos, for Trotsky never gains wisdom, and never repairs any of the damage: he is still objectively pro-Hitler and calling for international support of Stalin’s régime against bourgeois imperialism to the end of his days, which is ultimately why his Shachtmanite and Burnhamite American followers broke with him; Kolakowski: “In 1939–40 he explained indignantly to Shachtman and Burnham that the Soviet [1939] invasion of Poland coincided with the revolutionary movement… and that in Finland too the [1939–40] war with the Soviet Union had awakened revolutionary feelings. True, this was a revolution of a ‘special kind’, since it was introduced at the point of the bayonet and did not spring from the depths of popular feeling, but it was a genuine revolution all the same.”)
The best-written lines on all this come from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: Study in the Writing and Acting of History:
We who of recent years have seen the State that Trotsky helped to build in a phase combining the butcheries of the Robespierre Terror with the corruption and reaction of the Directory, and Trotsky himself figuring dramatically in the role of Gracchus Babeuf, may be tempted to endow him with qualities which actually he does not possess and with principles which he has expressly repudiated. We have seen the successor of Lenin undertake a fabulous rewriting of the whole history… to cancel-out Trotsky’s part, pursue Trotsky from country to country, persecuting even his children and hounding them to their deaths; and at last, in faked trials and confessions more degrading to the human spirit than the frank fendishness of Iván the Terrible, try to pin upon Trotsky the blame of all the mutinies, mistakes and disasters that have harassed his administration±till he has made the world conscious of Trotsky as the Accuser of Stalin’s own bad conscience, as if the Soviet careerists of the thirties were unable to deny the socialist ideal without trying to annihilate the moral authority of this one homeless and hunted man.
It is not Trotsky alone who has created his role: his enemies have given it a reality that no mere self-dramatization could have compassed. And as the fires of the Revolution have died down in the Soviet Union at a time when the systems of thought of the West were already in an advanced state of decadence, he has shone forth like a veritable Pharos, rotating a long shaft of light on the seas and the reefs all around.
But we must try to see the man inside the role and to examine his real tendencies and doctrines….
There has been… no other… for whom the Marxist conception of History… plays so frankly teleological a role…. History… with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Capón to bless, and will cruelly discredit and destroy certain Pharisees and Sadducees of Marxism before it summons the boiling lava of the Judgment, These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and the dialectic of history the words Providence and God. And this Providential power of history is present in all the writing of Trotsky…. Of late, in his solitude and exile, this History, an austere spirit, has seemed actually to stand behind his chair as he writes, encouraging, admonishing, approving, giving him the courage to confound his accusers, who have never seen History’s face….
What it may mean in moments of action to feel History towering at one’s elbow with her avenging sword in her hand is shown in the remarkable scene at the first congress of the Soviet dictatorship after the success of the October insurrection of 1917, when Trotsky, with the contempt and indignation of a prophet, read Mártov and his followers out of meeting: “You are pitiful isolated individuals”, he cried at this height of the Bolshevik triumph: “You are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the rubbish-can of history!”
These words are worth pondering for the light they throw on the course of Marxist politics and thought.
Observe that the merging of yourself with the onrush of the current of history is to save you from the ignoble fate of being a “pitiful isolated individual”, and that the failure so to merge yourself will relegate you to the rubbish-can of history, where you can presumably be of no more use.
Today, though we may agree with the Bolsheviks that Mártov was no man of action, his croakings over the course they had adopted seem to us full of far-sighted intelligence.
He pointed out that proclaim ing a socialist regime in conditions different from those contemplated by Marx would not realize the results that Marx expected; that Mars and Engels had usually described the dictatorship of the proletariat as having the form, for the new dominant class, of a democratic republic, with universal suffrage and the popular recall of officials; that the slogan “All power to the Soviets” had never really meant what it said and that it had soon been exchanged by Lenin for “All power to the Bolshevik Party.”
There sometimes turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the rubbish-can of history—things that have to be retrieved later on.
From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where Trotsky himself is today; and he might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual must needs be pitiful“ for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People that ”the strongest man is he who stands most alone."
But Trotsky-the-person never could and never did reach the destination of intellectual and moral enlightenment that the narrative current of his story forces us to believe that he was destined to attain.
I stopped having much admiration for Trotsky after I read Marxism and Terrorism (and wrote a paper on it) for a college history class. The Marxist professor wasn't enamored of my analysis.
I had great fun in HS subscribing my HS civics teacher, whom I actually liked for her rigor, to a Trotskyite newspaper.