READING: Leszek Kolakowski: On Trotsky in Exile

Tough but fair. From "Main Currents in Marxism: Volume 3: Breakdown"

Jul 10, 2022

Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism: Vol. 3: ’Trotsky: The years of exile: IN January 1929, after the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union had been almost entirely wiped out by repressive measures, its leader, Leon (Lev) Davidovich Trotsky, who had been in exile in Kazakhstan for a year, was deported to Turkey, where he took up his abode on Prinkipo Island in the Sea of Marmara. For a long time other countries were unwilling to admit to their territory a man reputed to be the most dangerous revolutionary in the world; during the four years he lived in Turkey Trotsky left it only once, to deliver a lecture in Copenhagen.

While in Turkey he wrote his vast History of the Russian Revolution, an analysis of the causes and development of the revolutionary process in which he sought to prove that history had confirmed the rightness of his predictions and especially the idea of ‘permanent revolution’: i.e. that the democratic revolution was bound to develop continuously into a dictatorship of the proletariat, and could only have been successful in that form. At this time he also wrote an autobiography and a huge number of articles, appeals, and letters for the purpose of supporting and developing the Left Opposition against Stalin, both in Russia and in the world at large.

Within a few months of his deportation he founded a journal in Russian, the Opposition Bulletin, which continued to appear till the end of his life: it was published by his son, Leon Sedov, first in Germany and, after the Nazis came to power, in Paris. As with Trotsky’s books in Russian, its main purpose was to promote the organization o fan opposition movement in the Soviet Union; before long, however, police measures made it almost impossible to smuggle the journal into the country, and Trotsky’s contacts with remnants of the Left in Russia were to all intents and purposes broken off.

At the same time Trotsky devoted a large part of his untiring energy to enlisting adherents in other countries. Small groups of dissident Communists existed here and there, and through them he hoped eventually to regenerate the Comintern and revive the spirit of true Bolshevism and Leninism in the Communist movement. These groups, under the collective title of the International Left Opposition, were active from 1930 onwards and regarded themselves as a fraction of the Comintern-an ideological fiction, since the Trotskyists had been expelled from the Comintern once and for all, and those who remained in Russia were mostly in camps and prisons.

A meeting of Trotskyists from several countries was held in Copenhagen during their leader’s stay there in November 1932, and a few months later a similar meeting took place in Paris. For some years Trotsky had firmly opposed the foundation of a Fourth International, as he held that Stalinism, having no social base, must collapse at any moment and that its only possible and natural heirs would be the ‘Bolshevik Leninists’, who would restore the Comintern to its true purpose. In 1933, however, after Hitler’s accession to power, he decided that a new international revolutionary organ was necessary, and set about organizing his followers under a new banner. The Fourth International was officially set up at a congress in Paris in September 1938.

At the end of 1932 Trotsky formulated the strategy and ideology of the International Left Opposition in eleven points:

recognition of the independence of the proletarian party, and hence condemnation of the Comintern’s policy of the 1920s in China (Communists joining the Kuomintang) and Britain (the Anglo-Russian trade union committee);
the international and therefore permanent character of the revolution;
the Soviet Union was still a workers’ state despite its ‘bureaucratic degeneration’;
condemnation of Stalin’s policy, both in its ‘opportunist’ phase in 1923–8 and in its ‘adventurist’ phase in 1928–32;
Communists must work in mass organizations, especially trade unions;
rejection of the formula of the ‘democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasants’ and of the possibility of its developing peacefully into a dictatorship of the proletariat;
the necessity for interim slogans during the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, in cases where it was necessary to fight against feudal institutions, national oppression, or Fascism;
a united front with mass organizations, including social democrats, but not in an ‘opportunist’ form;
rejection of Stalin’s theory of ‘social Fascism’;
a distinction within the Communist movement between Marxists, the center, and the Right; alliance with the Right against the center (the Stalinists) was ruled out, and the center should be supported against class enemies;
there should be democracy within the party.

Trotsky held to these principles until the end, but their full meaning only became clear in his more detailed analyses of the nature of the Soviet state, the concept of party democracy, and the idea of political alliances.

During his first years of exile, Trotsky deluded himself that the opposition in Russia was a tremendous political force, that the Stalinist bureaucracy was increasingly losing its grip, and that the Soviet Communist party was polarizing rapidly into true Bolsheviks on the one hand and ‘Thermidorians’, i.e. advocates of a capitalist restoration, on the other. When it came to a clash between these two forces the bureaucracy would once more have to seek help from the Left if the Soviet system was to survive. Accordingly, Trotsky addressed letters and declarations to the Soviet leaders assuring them that the Opposition was prepared to join in the struggle against restoration and foreign intervention; he promised that he would not take revenge on his opponents, proposed an ‘honourable agreement’, and offered the Stalinists his aid against class enemies in the hour of mortal danger.

Clearly, he imagined that when a crisis eventually came Stalin would beg him for help, and he would then name his conditions. This, however, was fantasy; Stalin and his followers had no intention of coming to terms with the Trotskyists, and would not ask them for aid under any circumstances. The Left Opposition in Russia did not gain in strength, as Trotsky thought it must by virtue of the laws of history, but was ruthlessly exterminated. When Stalin proclaimed the ‘new course’ of forced industrialization and collectivization the majority of oppositionists fell into line, recognizing that Stalin had taken over their policy; this applied, for example, to Radek and Preobrazhensky. Rakovsky, the most prominent Leftist after Trotsky, resisted longer than the rest, butafter a few years of persecution he too capitulated. None of these ever again occupied a political post of any importance, and none escaped destruction in the Great Purge.

Trotsky continued to believe that the opposition stood for the authentic forces of the proletariat as against the ruling bureaucracy, which lacked any social base; the opposition must therefore prevail in the end, and temporary defeats and persecutions could not destroy it. Repressions, he wrote, might be effective against a class condemned by history, but never against a ‘historically progressive’ class. In actual fact the Left Opposition vanished completely within a few years of Trotsky’s exile, as a result of repression, slaughter, demoralization, and capitulation.

It is true, however, that Stalin could hardly have done more to keep alive Trotsky’s hopes and his belief in the potential strength of the opposition. The series of campaigns against ‘Trotskyism’, the show trials, and judicial murders might indeed have convinced an outside observer that ‘Trotskyism’ was still a powerful enemy of the Soviet state. Stalin in fact had an obsessive hatred of Trotsky and used his name as a symbol of universal evil, a stigma with which he branded adversaries of all descriptions or anyone whom he wished to destroy for any reason. In this way he coined portmanteau expressions–such as ‘the Trotskyist-Rightist bloc’, ‘Trotskyist-Fascist’, ‘Trotskyist-imperialist’, ‘Trotskyist-Zionist’-to suit the purposes of his successive campaigns; the prefix ‘Trotskyist’ served much the same purpose as ‘Jewish’ in the mouth of anti-Semites who talk of ‘the Jewish-Communist conspiracy’, ‘Jewish-plutocratic reactionaries’, ‘Jewish-Liberal corruption’, etc.

From the beginning of the thirties ‘Trotskyism’ had no specific meaning in Stalin’s propaganda, but was simply an abstract emblem of Satanism. As long as Stalin was opposed to Hitler, Trotsky was pilloried as Hitler’s agent; when Stalin and Hitler made friends, Trotsky became an agent of Anglo-French imperialism. In the Moscow show trials his name recurred ad nauseam as the victims, one by one, related how the arch-fiend in exile had impelled them to conspiracy, sabotage, and murder. This paranoid mythology of Stalin’s purges was a constant reassurance to Trotsky himself: since he was so incessantly denounced, it must be that Stalin was genuinely afraid of the ‘Bolshevik Leninists’ who stood ready to dislodge him from the throne he had usurped. More than once Trotsky expressed the view that the Moscow trials had been organized in the hope that he, Trotsky, would be handed back to the Soviet police: Stalin, according to some, regretted that he had expelled his enemy instead of murdering him without further ado. Trotsky believed, too, that the last Comintern congress in 1937 was called for the sole purpose of meeting the Left Opposition threat.

In short, the exiled leader played the part for which Stalin had cast him, but the duel took place largely in his own imagination. The International Left Opposition, like the Fourth International after it, was a cipher in political terms. Trotsky himself, of course, was a celebrated figure, but the movement which, according to the great laws of history, was bound to shake the foundations of the world at any moment proved to be an unimportant sect with virtually no impact on Stalinist parties anywhere.

A few Communists who were disillusioned by Stalinism or had been associated with Trotsky in the Comintern came out on his side, including Chen Tu-hsiu, the former head of the Chinese party. Intellectuals in various countries supported Trotsky as the embodiment of the true revolutionary spirit, which the Soviet leaders no longer represented. But sooner or later his adherents fell away, especially the intellectuals; Trotsky himself was largely responsible for this fact, as he demanded absolute obedience and tolerated no deviation from his own opinion on any subject.

Apart from personal issues, his dictatorial manner, and astonishing belief in his own omniscience, the chief disagreement was over relations with the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s insistence that the U.S.S.R. was still a dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the bureaucracy was not a class but only an excrescence on the healthy body of socialism, was a prime cause of argument and schism, as his views seemed increasingly out of touch with obvious reality. He remained obdurate, however, on this matter throughout his life, with the result that all the important intellectuals abandoned his cause: Souvarine in France, Victor Serge, Eastman, and, later, Hook, Shachtman, and Burnham in the U.S.A.

He also lost the support of Diego Rivera, the well-known painter, who was his host in Mexico.

The doctrinaire rigidity of Trotskyist groups caused them to break up incessantly and was one reason, though doubtless not the chief one, why the movement never became a political force. Trotsky himself, whenever the complete fruitlessness of his efforts was pointed out, had the same answer ready: Lenin in 19 14 was almost completely isolated, and three years later he led the revolution to victory. What Lenin had done he, Trotsky, could do, as he too represented the profound tendencies of historical development. This belief inspired all his activity and political analyses, and was the source of his indomitable hope and energy.

As to the empirical evidence on which Trotsky based his hopes of an early victory of the Left in Russia, from today’s viewpoint it appears amazingly slight. One or two minor Soviet diplomats quitted their posts and remained in the West; Trotsky cited this repeatedly as a proof that the Stalinist party was breaking up and that ‘Thermidorian elements’ and traitors to the revolution were coming to the fore, which must mean that the true Bolsheviks on the other side of the barricade were also gaining in strength. At the outbreak of war in 1939 he read in a newspaper that someone in Berlin had painted on a wall the slogan ‘Down with Hitler and Stalin, long live Trotsky!’ This filled him with encouragement, and he wrote that if there ever had to be a black-out in Moscow under Stalin, the whole city would be plastered with such notices. Later he read that a French diplomat had told Hitler that if France and Germany went to war, Trotsky would be the only victor; this too he quoted triumphantly in several articles as proof that even the bourgeoisie understood how right he was.

He was unshakeably convinced that the war must end in a world revolution in which the true Bolsheviks, i.e. the Trotskyists, would be victorious. His article on the foundation of the Fourth International ended with the prophecy that ‘During the next ten years the programme of the Fourth International will be the guide of millions, and these revolutionary millions will know how to storm earth and heaven’ ( Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938–1939, ed. N. Allen and G. Breitman, 1974, p. 87).

In the summer of 1933, after long efforts, Trotsky finally secured permission to live in France, subject to various police restrictions. He stayed at different addresses for two years, his personal situation growing more and more dangerous: all the Stalinist parties were loudly hostile, and terrorist operations of Trotsky the Soviet police were on the increase. In June 1935 he was granted asylum in Norway, where he wrote perhaps the best known of his books, The Revolution Betrayed: a general analysis of the Soviet system, its degeneration and prospects, and an appeal for the overthrow of Stalin’s bureaucracy by revolution.

At the end of 1936 the Norwegian Government got rid of their awkward guest by sending him to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his life. Much of his energy during this period was devoted to unmasking the forgeries of the Moscow trials, in which he was denounced as the master-mind behind all the conspiracies, sabotage, and acts of terrorism perpetrated by the accused. Through the efforts of Trotsky’s friends an international commission of inquiry was set up under the chairmanship of John Dewey, the American philosopher and educationist; this body visited Mexico and took evidence from Trotsky himself, and in due course concluded that the trials were a complete fabrication.

Trotsky lived in Mexico for over three and a half years. The local Stalinists organized a campaign of persecution, and in May 1940, together with Soviet agents, made an armed attack on his house. Trotsky and his wife miraculously escaped alive, but not for long: an agent of the Soviet police, posing as a visitor, struck him down on 20 August. His son Leon, who acted as his father’s representative in Europe, died in Paris in 1938, probably poisoned by Soviet agents. Another son, Sergey, who never left Russia or engaged in politics, disappeared in Stalin’s prisons. Trotsky’s daughter Zina committed suicide in Germany in 1933.

During his eleven years of exile Trotsky published innumerable articles, pamphlets, books, and manifestos; he issued instructions, advice, and appeals at every turn, either to the world proletariat as a whole or to the workers of Germany, Holland, Britain, China, India, and America. Inasmuch as all these documents were read only by a handful of true believers and had not the slightest influence on events, one might be inclined to dismiss Trotsky’s activity as a game with toy soldiers.

But the fact remains that the assassin’s ice-pick was not a toy and that Stalin devoted much energy to destroying Trotskyism throughout the world—a purpose in which he was largely successful.

Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet system, the bureaucracy, and ‘Thermidor’: All Trotsky’s analyses are based on the conviction that his and Lenin’s policies were unfailingly right, that the theory of permanent revolution was abundantly borne out by events, and that ‘socialism in one country’ was a pernicious error. In an article on ‘Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution’ ( 1939) he argued as follows. The Populists believed that Russia could bypass capitalism altogether; the Mensheviks thought the Russian revolution could only be of a bourgeois character, so that there could be no question at that stage of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin then put forward the slogan of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in the hope that a revolution conducted under this banner would give the impulse for a socialist victory in the West, which would make possible a rapid transition to socialism in Russia.

Trotsky’s own view was that the programme of the democratic revolution could only succeed in the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat, but that the latter could only maintain itself if the revolution spread to Western Europe. In 1917 Lenin took the same line, as a result of which the proletarian revolution was successful in Russia. As Trotsky shows at length in his History of the Revolution, none of the Bolsheviks doubted that the Russian proletariat could only conquer if it was supported by the Western proletariat, and the pernicious idea of ‘socialism in one country’ did not enter anyone’s head until it was invented by Stalin at the end of 1924.

How did it happen, then, that Trotsky’s unquestionably correct policy, which was also Lenin’s from 1917 onwards, resulted in government by a ‘parasitic bureaucracy’, and that Trotsky himself was driven from power and branded as a traitor? The answer was to be found in an analysis of the degeneration of Soviet power and ‘Thermidorianism’.

During the first years of his exile Trotsky took the view that Stalin and his group occupied the ‘centre’ of the Russian political spectrum and that the chief danger to the revolution came from the ’Right’—then represented by Bukharin and his followersand counter-revolutionary elements which threatened a ‘Thermidorian reaction’, i.e. the restoration of capitalism. Accordingly, Trotsky offered to support Stalin against counterrevolution. Stalin, he thought, had made too many concessions to the Right, with the result, as seen in the successive trials of the ‘Industrial party’ and the Mensheviks, that saboteurs and enemies of the people had occupied the highest posts in the state planning organization and were deliberately slowing up industrialization. (Trotsky believed implicitly in the guilt of the accused, and it did not occur to him for a moment that these trials might be fabrications; he only began to wonder years afterwards, when his own misdeeds and those of his friends were proved by equally strong evidence in the great show trials.)

In the early thirties Trotsky also spoke of ‘Bonapartism’ in the Stalinist regime. In 1935, however, he observed that in the French Revolution Thermidor had come first and Napoleon afterwards; the order should be the same in Russia, and, as there was already a Bonaparte, Thermidor must have come and gone. In an article entitled ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism’ he amended his theory somewhat. He stated that the Thermidorian reaction had taken place in Russia in 1924 (i.e. when he himself was finally removed from power); it was not, however, a capitalist counter-revolution but a seizure of power by the bureaucracy, which had begun to destroy the advance guard of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat had been preserved, as the state still owned the means of production, but political power had passed into the hands of the bureaucrats; the Bonapartist system must soon collapse, however, as it was contrary to the laws of history. A bourgeois counter-revolution was possible, but it could be avoided if the true Bolshevik elements were properly organized.

Trotsky added, however, that he had in no way altered his view as to the working-class character of the Soviet state, but was merely expressing the historical analogy with more precision; in France, too, Thermidor was not a return to the ancien regime. The Soviet bureaucracy was not a social class, but a caste which had deprived the proletariat of its political rights and introduced a brutal despotism. Its existence in its present form, however, depended on the system of state ownership, the supreme achievement of the October Revolution, which the bureaucracy was obliged to defend and did defend in its own way. It was therefore the duty of the world proletariat to defend the Soviet Union unconditionally as the bastion of world revolution, while at the same time fighting against Stalinist degeneration (Trotsky did not explain in detail how these aims could be combined in practice).

By 1936 he came to the conclusion that Stalinism could not be overthrown by reforms and internal pressures: there must be a revolution to remove the usurpers by force. That revolution would not alter the system of ownership, and would therefore not be a social revolution but a political one. It would be carried out by the advance guard of the proletariat, embodying the traditions of true Bolshevism which Stalin had destroyed.

The theory of ‘socialism in one country’ was responsible for all the bureaucracy’s failures at home and abroad. It meant abandoning hope of world revolution and hence of Russia’s main support in the world proletariat. Socialism in one country was impossible, i.e. it could be started but not completed: in a state closed within itself, socialism was bound to degenerate. The Comintern, which until 1924 had pursued a correct policy aimed at stirring up world revolution, had been transformed by Stalin into an instrument of Soviet policy and espionage, reducing the worldwide Communist movement to a state of degeneracy and impotence.

Trotsky made many attempts to explain how it was that the political power of the proletariat had been destroyed and the bureaucracy had gained control and introduced (as he later put it more than once) a totalitarian system of government. These attempts, contained in various books and articles, do not form a consistent argument.

At times he maintained that the chief cause of degeneration was the delay in the outbreak of world revolution: the West European proletariat did not assume its historic mission in time. On the other hand, he maintained equally often that the defeat of revolution in Europe was the fault of the Soviet bureaucracy. It thus remained in doubt which phenomenon was the cause and which the effect-though later, as he pointed out, they aggravated each other.

In The Revolution Betrayed we are told that the social basis of the growth of the bureaucracy was the faulty policy of the N.E.P. years, which favoured the kulaks. If so, one would expect that the liquidation of the kulaks and forced industrialization under the first five-year plan would at least have weakened the bureaucracy if not destroyed it; in fact precisely the opposite happened, and Trotsky nowhere explains why this was so.

Later in the same book he says that the bureaucracy was originally an organ of the working class but that later, when it became involved in the distribution of goods, it began to place itself ‘above the masses’ and to claim privileges. This does not explain, however, whether and in what way the system of privilege could have been avoided, and why the working class, which was truly in charge, permitted such a thing to happen.

Still in the same work, Trotsky says that the main cause of bureaucratic government was the slowness of the world proletariat to fulfil its historic mission.

In an earlier pamphlet, Problems of Development of the U.S.S.R. (1931), he gives other reasons: the weariness of the Russian proletariat after the Civil War, the collapse of illusions fostered in the heroic days of the Revolution, the defeat of revolutionary outbreaks in Germany, Bulgaria, and Estonia, and the bureaucracy’s betrayal of the Chinese and British proletariat.

In an article in the following year he stated that the war-weary workers handed over power to the bureaucracy for the sake of order and reconstruction; but he did not explain why these tasks could not have been carried out by ‘true Bolshevik-Leninists’ under his own leadership.

From all these explanations one clear argument emerges, namely that Trotsky himself did not contribute in the smallest measure to the establishment of a bureaucratic regime, and that the bureaucracy had nothing in common with the dictatorship of the first six years after the Revolution, but was its exact contrary. The fact that the party apparatus exercised absolute power during those years had, it seems, nothing to do with the regime of Stalin and his clique, since the party in those days was the ‘advance guard of the proletariat’, while Stalin’s subsequent apparatus represented nothing and no one.

In that case, we may ask, why could not the proletariat shake off the clique of usurpers who lacked any social backing? Trotsky has an answer to this too: the proletariat does not rebel against Stalin’s government (elsewhere, however, we read that it is in constant rebellion) because it fears that in the present situation a proletarian revolution might lead to the restoration of capitalism.

It is not clear from Trotsky’s arguments whether there was any means of avoiding such a disastrous outcome. It seems, on the whole, that there was not, since otherwise Trotsky and his group, who invariably pursued the right policy and ‘expressed’ the true interests of the proletariat, would surely have prevented the bureaucracy taking over. If they did not prevent it, it was because they could not; and if the bureaucracy continued to maintain itself without any visible social foundation, this must surely be due to the operation of historical laws.

Bolshevism and Stalinism: The idea of Soviet democracy Trotsky thus took every opportunity to emphasize that there was no continuity between true Bolshevism or Leninism, that is to say Trotsky’s own ideology and politics on the one hand, and Stalinism on the other. Stalinism was not only not the true heir of Leninism, but a glaring contradiction of it. In an article of 1937 he takes issue with Mensheviks and anarchists who were saying: ‘We told you so from the beginning.’ Not at all, replies Trotsky. The Mensheviks and anarchists predicted that despotism and the stifling of the Russian proletariat would come as a result of Bolshevik government; they have indeed come, but as a result of Stalin’s bureaucracy, which has nothing to do with true Bolshevism. Again, Pannekoek and some German Spartacists say that the Bolsheviks set up a dictatorship of the party instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat, and that Stalin established a bureaucratic dictatorship on that basis. This is not the case either. The proletariat could not take over state power except through its own vanguard, in which the working masses’ aspirations to freedom were crystallized.

In this article as in many others, Trotsky was obliged to answer the objections frequently raised by his adversaries and also by such supporters as Serge, Souvarine, and Burnham. Surely, they pointed out, the Bolsheviks had from the beginning, with Trotsky’s active participation, liquidated all Russian political parties including the socialists; they had themselves forbidden the formation of groups within the party, had destroyed the freedom of the press, had bloodily suppressed the Kronstadt revolt, and so forth.

Trotsky answered these objections many times, and always in the same way: the actions complained of were right and necessary and in no way infringed the healthy foundations of proletarian democracy.

In a letter to the workers of Zurich, published in August 1932, he wrote that the Bolsheviks had certainly used force to destroy the anarchists and Left S.R.s (other parties are not even mentioned in this context), but they did so in defence of the workers’ state, and therefore their action was right; the class struggle could not be carried on without violence, the only question was which class the violence was exercised by.

In a pamphlet of 1938, Their Morals and Ours, he explained that it was absurd to compare Communism with Fascism, as the resemblance in their methods was ‘superficial’ and related to secondary phenomena (for example, the abolition of general elections); what mattered was the class in whose name such methods were used. Trotsky, it was objected, had taken hostages, including children, from the families of political opponents, and was now indignant when Stalin did the same thing to Trotskyists. But, he replied, there was no true analogy, for what Trotsky did was necessary to fight the class enemy and bring victory to the proletariat, whereas Stalin was acting in the interests of the bureaucracy.

In a letter of 1940 to Shachtman he agrees that the Cheka originated and functioned when he was in power-of course it did, but it was a necessary weapon against the bourgeoisie, whereas now Stalin was using it to destroy ‘true Bolsheviks’, so there was no proper comparison. As to the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt, how could a proletarian government be expected to give up an important fortress to reactionary peasant soldiers, among whom there might be a few anarchists? As to the forbidding of party groups, this was absolutely necessary, for when all non-Bolshevik parties were liquidated the antagonistic interests that were still present in society were bound to seek expression in different tendencies within the one party.

It is clear from this that for Trotsky there was no question of democracy as a form of government, or of civil liberties as a cultural value: from this point of view he was faithful to Lenin and did not differ from Stalin. If power was wielded by the ‘historically progressive’ class (through its vanguard, of course), then by definition this was an authentic democracy, even if oppression and coercion in every form were otherwise the order of the day; for all this was in the cause of progress. But from the moment that power was taken over by a bureaucracy that did not represent the interests of the proletariat, the same forms of government automatically became reactionary and therefore ‘anti-democratic’.

In an article of 1931 entitled ‘The Right-Left Bloc’ Trotsky wrote:

What we mean by the restoration of party democracy is that the real revolutionary proletarian core of the party win the right to curb the bureaucracy and to really purge the party: to purge the party of the Thermidorians in principle as well as their unprincipled and careerist cohorts who vote according to command from above, of the tendencies of tail-endism as well as the numerous factions of toadyism, whose title should not be derived from the Greek or Latin but from the real Russian word for toady in its contemporary, bureaucratized and Stalinized form. This is the reason we need democracy’ (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 193er1931, ed. G. Breitman and S. Lovell, 1973, p. 57).

It is thus clear that by ‘democracy’ Trotsky means government by Trotskyists, expressing the historical aspirations of the proletariat.

In an article of December 1939 Trotsky again answers the question whether he himself was not responsible for the liquidation of all political parties except the Bolsheviks. Certainly, he replies, and it was quite right to do so. ‘But,’ he goes on, ‘one cannot identify the laws of civil war with the laws of peaceful periods’—and then, it clearly having occurred to him that in that case the liquidated parties should have been re-legalized after the Civil War, he adds: ’ [or] the laws of dictatorship or the proletariat with the laws of bourgeois democracy’ ( Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939–1940, ed. N. Allen and G. Breitman, 1973, p. 1 33).

In a statement dating from the end of 1932 we read:

Every regime must be judged first and foremost according to its own rules. The regime of the proletarian dictatorship cannot and does not wish to hold back from infringing the principles and formal rules of democracy. It has to be judged from the standpoint of its capacity to ensure the transition to a new society. The democratic regime, on the other hand, must be judged from the standpoint of the extent to which it allows the class struggle to develop within the framework of democracy (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1932–1933, 1972, ed. G. Breitman and S. Lovell, p. 336).

In short, it is right to be indignant and to attack democratic states when they infringe the principles of democracy and freedom, but one must not treat a Communist dictatorship in this way, because it does not recognize democratic principles; its superiority lies in the promise to create a ‘new society’ in the future. In The Revolution Betrayed we are even told that Stalin’s constitution, by proclaiming universal suffrage, made it clear that there was no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat. (Trotsky also remarks that by introducing the secret ballot Stalin evidently wished to purge his regime of corruption to some extent. Incredible as it may seem, he evidently took Stalin’s elections at face value.)

Thus, while Trotsky constantly attacked Stalin and his regime and demanded a return to ‘Soviet democracy’ and ‘party democracy’, it is clear in the light of his general principles that ‘democracy’ signifies the rule of those whose policy is ‘right’: it does not mean that the ‘rightness’ of a policy is determined as the result of different groups contending for popular support. In The Revolution Betrayed he writes of the need to regain freedom for ‘Soviet parties’, starting with the Bolsheviks (i.e. Trotsky and his followers); but it not clear which other parties qualify as ‘Soviet’. Since only the genuine vanguard of the proletariat is to exercise power, that vanguard must also have the right to decide which parties are ‘Soviet’ and which are counterrevolutionary. In Trotsky’s eyes, the upshot seems to be that socialist freedom means freedom for Trotskyists and no one else.

The same arguments apply to cultural freedom. Trotsky sometimes expressed indignation at the gagging of art and science by Stalin’s regime. In The Revolution Betrayed he recalled that in 1924 he himself had formulated rules for the dictatorship of the proletariat in art and literature: the sole criterion was to be whether a work was for or against the Revolution, and beyond that there should be perfect freedom. In July 1932 he wrote that there should be freedom in art and philosophy, ‘eliminating pitilessly only that which is directed against the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat’ ( Writings, 1932–1933, p. 279). This, however, is the same principle that prevailed under Stalin: the party authorities decide what is ‘directed against the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat’ and must therefore be ‘pitilessly eliminated’. Freedom thus defined has never been infringed in the Soviet state.

Of course, under such a general formula the degree of repression and regimentation of culture may be greater or less according to various political circumstances, and in the twenties it was certainly less than in the thirties. Since, however, the principle is that the rulers decide in every case what manifestations of culture are in accordance with their political needs, no degree of repression and enslavement can possibly offend against the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The whole question reduces once again to the same pattern: if Trotsky had been in charge he would not, of course, have allowed freedoms that he thought dangerous to his authority; Stalin behaved in the same way, and in both cases it was a matter of self-interest. The whole difference comes down to this, that Trotsky believed himself to ‘represent the historical interests of the proletariat’, while Stalin believed that he, Stalin, did so.

In Their Morals and Ours Trotsky endeavoured to refute the objection of those of his followers who claimed that his rule of morality was simply ‘What is good for me is right’ and that in his view the end justified the means. To this he replied that if the means were to be justified by something other than the aims evolved by history, that something could only be God. In other words his questioners were falling into religiosity, just as the Russian revisionists Struve, Bulgakov, and Berdyayev had done; they tried to combine Marxism with some kind of morality superior to class, and ended up in the bosom of the Church.

Morals in general, he declared, were a function of the class struggle. At the present time morality could be in the interest of the proletariat or in that of Fascism, and, obviously, warring classes might sometimes use similar means; the only important question was which side they benefited:

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man (Their Morals and Ours, 1942, p. 34).

In other words, if a policy is conducive to technical progress (the power of man over nature), any means which furthers that policy is automatically justified; it is not clear, however, why Stalin’s policy should in that case be condemned, since it certainly raised the country’s technical level.

As to the abolition of the power of man over man, Trotsky himself enunciated the principle (which Stalin took over) that before this power can be abolished it must be increased to the highest degree; Trotsky reiterated this view in an article in June 1933. But in future things will be different. The ‘historical aim’ is embodied in the proletarian party, which therefore decides what is moral and what is immoral. As to Souvarine’s remark that, as Trotsky’s party does not exist, he must regard himself alone as the embodiment of morality, the prophet replies once again by pointing to Lenin’s example: he too stood alone in 1914, and what happened after that?

In a sense the critics’ objection was invalid: Trotsky did not maintain that what served his party’s interests was morally good, and what injured them was morally bad. He held simply that there were no such things as moral criteria, but only criteria of political efficacy: ‘Problems of revolutionary morality are fused with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics’ (ibid., p. 35). To say that a thing was good or bad in itself, irrespective of political consequences, was tantamount to believing in God. It was meaningless to ask, for instance, whether it was right in itself to murder the children of one’s political opponents. It had been right (as Trotsky says elsewhere) to kill the Tsar’s children, because it was politically justified. Why then was it wrong for Stalin to murder Trotsky’s children? Because Stalin did not represent the proletariat.

All ‘abstract’ principles of good and bad, all universal rules of democracy, freedom, and cultural values were without significance in themselves: they were to be accepted or rejected as political expediency might dictate. The question of course then arises why anyone should side with the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ rather than with its opponents, or identify himself with any aims whatever. Trotsky does not answer this question, but merely says that ‘The end flows naturally from the historical movement’ (ibid., p. 35). This presumably means, though he does not say so clearly, that we must first find out what is historically inevitable, and then support it for no other reason than that it is inevitable.

As for democracy within the party, Trotsky is quite categorical about this also. In Stalin’s party, when his own group was in opposition, he naturally demanded free intra-party discussion and even freedom to form ‘fractions’. On the other hand, he defended the prohibition of fractions enacted by himself and others at the Tenth Congress in 1921, on the ground that it was an ‘extraordinary measure’. It is hard to interpret this otherwise than as meaning that it is right to prohibit fractions when they are wrong, but that Trotsky’s group must not be prohibited because it expresses the interest of the proletariat. During his exile he also endeavoured to impose ‘true Leninist’ principles on the small groups of his adherents: he unceasingly condemned all variations from his own statements, ordered the exclusion of all who resisted his authority on any subject, and proclaimed the doctrine of Communist centralism at every turn.

He denounced Souvarine’s group of ‘Communist democrats’ in Paris, saying that their very name showed that they had broken with Marxism (on which point he may have been right).

He reprimanded Naville’s group when, in 1935, they proclaimed a programme of their own within the Left Opposition.

He condemned Luciano Galicia, the leader of the Mexican Trotskyists, who forgot about centralism and demanded full freedom of opinion within the Fourth International.

He lashed out furiously at the American Trotskyist Dwight Macdonald, who had said that all theory must be treated with scepticism: ‘He who propagates theoretical scepticism is a traitor’ ( Writings, 193fr1940, p. 341 ).

He pronounced irrevocable sentence on Burnham and Shachtman when they finally came to doubt that the Soviet Union was a workers’ state, and talked of Soviet imperialism in invading Poland and in the war with Finland. On this occasion he refused to agree to a referendum within the American Trotskyist party (which, with about a thousand members according to Deutscher, seems to have been the biggest contingent in the Fourth International) on the ground that party policy was not ‘simply an arithmetical total of local decisions’ (In Defence of Marxism, 1942, p. 33).

The fact that this absolutism caused his movement to shrink and to become more and more like a tiny religious sect, convinced that its members and they only were destined to salvation, did not worry Trotsky at all—once more, what about Lenin in 1914? He also shared Lenin’s ‘dialectical’ view that the true or ‘underlying’ majority did not consist of those who happened to be in larger number but of those who were right or stood for historical progress. He seems to have genuinely believed that the working masses of the world were on his side in their inmost hearts, even though they did not yet know it; for the laws of history made clear that this must be so.

Trotsky’s attitude to the problems of national oppression and self-determination was on similar lines. His writings contain a few references to Stalinist suppression of the national aspirations of the Ukrainians and other peoples; at the same time he emphasized that no concessions must be made to Ukrainian nationalists, and that true Bolsheviks in the Ukraine must not form a ‘people’s front’ with them. He went so far as to say that the Ukrainians, divided as they were among four states, constituted an international problem no less crucial than, in Marx’s opinion, the Polish question had been in the nineteenth century.

But he saw nothing reprehensible in the socialist state bringing the ‘proletarian revolution’ to other countries by means of armed invasion. In 1939–40 he explained indignantly to Shachtman and Burnham that the Soviet invasion of Poland coincided with the revolutionary movement in that country, that the Stalinist bureaucracy had given a revolutionary impulse to the Polish proletariat and peasantry, and that in Finland too the 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.

Trotsky’s knowledge of what was happening in Eastern Poland and Finland was based, of course, not on any empirical data but on the ‘laws of history’: the Soviet state, degenerate though it was, represented the interests of the popular masses, and therefore the latter must support the invading Red Army. On this point Trotsky certainly cannot be accused of deviating from Leninism: as the ‘true’ national interest coincides with that of the vanguard of the proletariat, it follows that wherever the vanguard is in power (albeit in a state of ‘bureaucratic degeneration’) the right of national self-determination has been realized, and the masses must support this state of affairs, for so the theory requires.

Criticism of Soviet economic and foreign policy: Since, in theory at least, industrialization and the future agricultural policy were a vital issue to the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was in an awkward position when it turned out that Stalin had taken over all the opposition’s policies, and had done so in an intensified form. He solved the difficulty by declaring that Stalin had indeed carried out the opposition’s aims but had done so in a bureaucratic and ill-considered manner:

The Left Opposition began with the struggle for the industrialization and agrarian collectivization of the Soviet Union. This fight is won in a certain sense, namely in that, beginning with 1928, the whole policy of the Soviet government represents a bureaucratically distorted application of the principles of the Left Opposition ( Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933–1934, ed. G. Breitman and B. Scott, 1972, p. 274).

The bureaucracy ‘had been compelled’ to carry out these measures in its own interest, by the logic of government, and although it had performed the historical tasks of the proletariat in a distorted manner, the changes in themselves were ‘progressive’; moreover, it was leftist pressure that had forced Stalin to change his tune:

Between the creative forces of the revolution and the bureaucracy there exists a profound antagonism. If the Stalinist apparatus constantly comes to a halt at certain limits, if it finds itself compelled even to turn sharply to the left, this occurs above all under the pressure of the amorphous, scattered, but still powerful elements of the revolutionary party ( Writings, 193Cr–1931, p. 224).

As to collectivization, Trotsky criticized the haste and lack of economic preparation and emphasized that the Stalinists were wrong in regarding the kolkhozes as socialist institutions: they were no more than a transitional form. What was more, collectivization turned out to be a step towards the restoration of capitalism. In The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky wrote that Stalin had annulled the nationalization of the land by giving it to the kolkhozes, and by allowing the peasants to cultivate private plots on the side he had strengthened the element of ‘individualism’. Thus, when Soviet agriculture lay in ruins and millions of peasants were starving to death, or were kept alive only by the permission they had at last received to maintain private plots, Trotsky’s chief concern was the danger of ‘individualism’ that this represented. He even held that the fight against the kulaks was insufficiently thorough, as Stalin had given them a chance to organize in the kolkhozes and, after the first liquidation campaign, had made further.substantial concessions which must lead to renewed class differentiation in the countryside. (This was Trotsky’s line in 1935, when he perceived a ‘swing to the right’ in Stalin’s foreign policy and therefore looked for symptoms of a similar turn in Soviet internal affairs.)

On several occasions, in The Revolution Betrayed and elsewhere, Trotsky condemned the ‘barbarous’ introduction of piece-work into Soviet industry. It was hard to tell from his arguments, however, whether he thought material incentives to productivity should be replaced by police compulsion or revolutionary zeal, and, in the latter case, how that zeal was to be evoked.

As to Stalin’s foreign policy, Trotsky harped on the theme that international revolution was being abandoned for the sake of ‘socialism in one country’: hence the revolution had been successively betrayed in Germany, China, and Spain. (The Spanish Civil War, according to Trotsky, was ‘essentially’ a proletarian struggle for socialism.) He did not say whether the Red Army should have been sent to aid the German Communists in 1923 (as he himself had vainly tried to do in 1920), or to aid the Chinese in 1926. In general Trotsky opposed the policy of supporting the ‘national bourgeoisie’ in undeveloped countries.

This policy was often quite successful in weakening the great capitalist Powers; Trotsky, however, thought it pernicious on the ground that in colonial territories, as elsewhere, the tasks of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ could only be performed under Communist leadership, which would bring the revolution continuously into a socialist stage. It was, for instance, absurd to suppose that India could gain its independence otherwise than by a proletarian revolution; this was absolutely ruled out by the laws of history. The example of Russia showed that the only possibility was a ‘permanent revolution’ led from the outset by the proletariat, i.e. the Communist party. Trotsky regarded Russian models as absolutely binding on all countries of the world, and he therefore had ready-made answers to all their problems whether or not he knew anything about their history or specific conditions.

Trotsky did not dispute that Communists in a revolutionary period must make use of transitional aims before they could control the situation completely. Thus in a letter of August 1931 to the Chinese Trotskyists he wrote that the idea of a national assembly must not be dropped from their programme, because when the support of the poor peasants was being canvassed ‘the proletariat will have to convoke a national assembly in order not to arouse the mistrust of the peasantry and in order not to provide an opening for bourgeois demagogy’ (Writings, 1930–1931, p. 128).

On the other hand, we read elsewhere that it would be a fatal mistake to repeat Lenin’s pre–1917 slogan of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’. At the outset of the Russian revolution the government was referred to as representing the proletariat and the poor peasantry. As to this, Trotsky writes: ‘True, subsequently we called the Soviet government worker and peasant. But by this time the dictatorship of the proletariat was already a fact, the Communist Party was in power, and consequently the name Workers’ and Peasants’ Government could not give rise to any ambiguity or grounds for alarm’ (ibid., p. 308). In short, once the Communists were in power there could be no harm in fictitious and deceptive names.

Trotsky’s supporters and admirers, such as Deutscher, have often emphasized, as a fact greatly to his credit, that he opposed the slogan of ‘social Fascism’. It is true that he criticized this slogan because it cut off the Communists from the working masses in the social democratic parties, but he does not seem to have had any real policy to suggest as far as the social democrats were concerned. He wrote that there could be no question of permanent co-operation with organizations which did not break radically with reformism and which sought to regenerate social democracy. At the same period, before Hitler’s accession to power, he blamed the Stalinists simultaneously for talking of ‘social Fascism’ and for capitulating to the social democrats. In June 1933, just after the Nazi victory, he declared that there could be no thought of a united front with the German social democrats, who were Hitler’s lackeys.

But Trotsky’s indignation was aroused in earnest by the change of Soviet policy in 1934–5. Stalinism had at last shown its Rightist countenance: the Stalinists were allying themselves with the renegades of the Second International and, worse still, were talking of peace and international arbitration and dividing states into democratic and Fascist as if that were the important difference. They spoke of Fascism threatening world war, yet as Marxists they must know that imperialist war had an ‘economic foundation’. They even accepted at Geneva a formula defining the aggressor in terms which would apply equally to all wars, including those between capitalist states.

This was a surrender to bourgeois pacifism: Marxists could not be opposed to all wars in principle, they left that sort of cant to Quakers and Tolstoyans. Marxists judged war from the class point of view and were not interested in bourgeois distinctions between the aggressor and his victim; their principle was that a war in the interests of the proletariat, be it aggressive or defensive, was a just war, while a war between imperialists was a crime.

In reality all Trotsky’s earlier appeals for a change of attitude towards the social democrats were illusory and could have borne no fruit even if he had been in power: for he seems to have imagined that it was possible to maintain ideological ‘purity’ vis-a-vis the social democrats while at the same time soliciting their help in particular circumstances. When Stalin, to prevent France coming to terms with Nazi Germany, launched the policy of the ‘popular front’ and an anti-Fascist alliance with the socialists, he realized that he must pay a price, at all events in propaganda terms, if his policy was to be successful. Trotsky, on the other hand, thought it possible to form an anti-Nazi front with the socialists while denouncing them at every turn as impostors, agents of the bourgeoisie, traitors to the working class, and lackeys of imperialism-the only taboo epithet being ‘social Fascists’. It is evident that if he had been in charge of the Comintern at that time, his policy would have been even less successful than Stalin’s.

Trotsky was indeed a true adherent of Lenin’s opinion that (as the latter repeated many times during the war and the Revolution) reliance on international treaties, arbitration, disarmament, and so on was idle reactionary chatter. It did not matter who was the aggressor, but which class was waging the war. The socialist state, representing the interests of the world proletariat, was ‘right’ in every war, regardless of who began it, and could not seriously consider itself bound by treaties with imperialist governments. Stalin was concerned with the security of the Soviet state, not with world revolution, and therefore had to present himself on various occasions as an advocate of peace and a champion of international law and democracy.

Trotsky, however, believed that the main elements of the situation were still as he had seen them in 1918: on one side the imperialists, on the other the socialist state and the world proletariat waiting for the right slogans to unleash a revolution. Stalin, the exponent of Realpolitik, did not believe in the ‘rising tide of revolution’, and used the European Communist parties as instruments of Soviet policy. Trotsky was the advocate of incessant ‘revolutionary war’, and his whole doctrine was based on the conviction that the world proletariat was, in the nature of things and by the laws of history, tending towards revolution, and that only the erroneous policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy prevented this innate trend from taking effect.

Fascism, democracy, and war: How doctrinaire and unrealistic Trotsky’s political thinking was in the 1930s may be judged from his remarks on the coming war and his recommendations for action in the face of the Fascist threat.

A few days after the outbreak of war he wrote:

I do not see the slightest reason for changing those principles in relation to world war which were elaborated between 1914 and 1917 by the best representatives of the workers’ movement under the leadership of Lenin. The present war has a reactionary character on both sides. Whichever camp is victorious, humanity will be thrown far behind (Writings, 1931–1940, p. 85).

These words written after the German invasion of Poland and the Anglo-French declaration of war, but before the Soviet invasion of mid September-were an epitome of Trotsky’s views on the subject of a war among capitalist states such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Poland, France, Britain, and the U.S.A.

For many years he repeated indefatigably that it was a fatal illusion and a capitalist trick to suggest that there was or could be a front of ‘democratic’ states against Fascism, or that it made any difference whether victory went to Hitler or to a coalition of the Western democracies, since neither side had nationalized its factories. The proletariat of the belligerent countries, instead of helping their reactionary governments to fight Hitler, should rise against them as Lenin had urged during the First World War. The cry of ‘national defence’ was in the highest degree reactionary and anti-Marxist; what was at issue was a proletarian revolution, not the defeat of one bourgeoisie by another.

In a pamphlet of July 1934 entitled War and the Fourth International Trotsky wrote:

The sham of national defence is covered up wherever possible by the additional sham of the defence of democracy. If even now, in the imperialist epoch, Marxists do not identify democracy with fascism and are ready at any moment to repel fascism’s encroachment upon democracy, must not the proletariat in case of war support the democratic governments against the fascist governments? Flagrant sophism! We defend democracy against fascism by means of the organizations and methods of the proletariat. Contrary to Social Democracy we do not entrust this defence to the bourgeois state … Under these conditions, the support by a workers’ party of “ its” national imperialism for the sake of a fragile democratic shell means the renunciation of an independent policy and the chauvinistic demoralization of the workers … The revolutionary vanguard will seek a united front with the worki"ng-class organizations-against its own ‘democratic’ government-but in no case unity with its own government against the hostile country. ( Writings, 1931–1934, pp. 306–7)

The Third International, Trotsky emphasized in an article in 1935, had always combated pacifism, not only social patriotism, and had always condemned talk of disarmament, arbitration, the League of Nations, etc.; yet today it was endorsing all these bourgeois policies. When L’ Humanite called for the defence of ‘French civilization’ it showed that it had betrayed the proletariat and was taking a nationalist stand, inviting workers to help their own government to fight German imperialism. Wars were the product of capitalism, and it was senseless to argue that the chief danger at present was from Nazism. ‘On this road one quickly arrives at the idealization of French democracy as such, counterposed to Hitler Germany’ ( Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1934–1935, ed. G. Breitman and B. Scott, 197 1, p. 293).

A year before the war Trotsky declared that democracy and Fascism were simply two alternative instruments of exploitation—the rest was all a deceit.

Really, what would a military bloc of imperialist democracies against Hitler mean? A new edition of the Versailles chains, even more heavy, bloody and intolerable…. The Czechoslovakian crisis revealed with remarkable clarity that fascism does not exist as an independent factor. It is only one of the tools ofimperialism. ‘Democracy’ is another of its tools. Imperialism rises above them both. It sets them in motion according to needs, at times counterposing them to one another, at times amicably conciling [sic] them. To fight against fascism in an alliance with imperialism is the same as to fight in an alliance with the devil against his claws or horns. (Writings, 1938–1939, p. 21)

In short, there was no such thing as a fight between democracy and Fascism. International treaties took no account of such pseudo-antagonisms: the British might conclude a pact with Italy, the Poles with Germany. No matter who the contending parties were, the coming war would bring about an international proletarian revolution-such was the law of history. Humanity would not endure the war longer than a few months; rebellions against national governments, led by the Fourth international, would break out on every hand. In any case the war would at once wipe out all traces of democracy, so that it was absurd to talk about the defence of democratic values.

In reply to a Trotskyist group in Palestine who suggested that Fascism was the chief threat to be resisted at that time and that it was wrong to preach defeatism in countries combating it, Trotsky wrote that their attitude was no better than social-patriotism. For all true revolutionaries, the chief enemy was always at home.

In another letter, of July 1939, he declared:

The victories of fascism are important, but the death agony of capitalism is more important. Fascism accelerates the new war, and the war will tremendously accelerate the revolutionary movement. In case of war every small revolutionary nucleus can and will become a decisive historic factor in a very short time ( Writings, 1938–1939, p. 349).

The Fourth International would play the same part in the coming war as the Bolsheviks had in 1917, but this time the downfall of capitalism would be complete and final. ‘Yes, I do not doubt that the new world war will provoke with absolute inevitability the world revolution and the collapse of the capitalist system’ (ibid., p. 232).

When war actually came it did not alter Trotsky’s opinion on these matters, but strengthened it. In the manifesto of the Trotsky Fourth International, published in June 1940, he declared that ‘A socialist who comes out today for the defence of the “fatherland” is playing the same reactionary role as the peasants of the Vendee who rushed to the defence of the feudal regime, that is of their own chains’ ( Writings, 1937–1940, p. 190). It was pointless to talk of defending democracy against Fascism, for Fascism was a product of bourgeois democracy, and it was not any ‘fatherland’ that had to be defended, but the interests of the world proletariat:

But the first to be vanquished in the war will be the thoroughly rotten democracy. In its definitive downfall it will drag down with it all the workers’ organizations which Served as its support. There will be no room for reformist unions. Capitalist reaction will destroy them ruthlessly….
But isn’t the working class obliged in the present conditions to aid the democracies in their struggle against German fascism? This is how the question is put by broad petty-bourgeois circles for whom the proletariat always remains only an auxiliary tool for this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. We reject this policy with indignation. Naturally there exists a difference between the political regimes in bourgeois society, just as there is a difference in comfort between various cars in a railway train. But when the whole train is plunging into an abyss, the distinction between decaying democracy and murderous fascism disappears in the face of the collapse of the entire capitalist system … The victory of the imperialists of Great Britain and France would be no less frightful for the ultimate fate of mankind than that of Hitler and Mussolini. Bourgeois democracy cannot be saved. By helping their bourgeoisie against foreign fascism, the workers could only accelerate the victory of fascism in their own country (ibid., p. 213, p. 221).

Here, again, is Trotsky’s advice to the Norwegian workers at the time of Hitler’s invasion:

Should the Norwegian workers have supported the “ democratic” camp against the fascist? … In reality this would be the crudest kind of blunder…. In the world arena we support neither the camp of the Allies nor the camp of Germany. Consequently we have not the slightest reason or justification for supporting either one of their temporary tools within Norway itself’ (In Defense of Marxism, p. 172).

Accordingly, if the workers of Poland, France, or Norway had read Trotsky’s proclamations and obeyed them they would have turned their arms against their own governments at the time of the Nazi invasion, as it made no difference whether they were ruled by Hitler or their own bourgeoisie; Fascism was an instrument of the bourgeoisie, and it was an absurdity to talk of all classes forming a common front against Fascism. Lenin, in the same way, had preached defeatism in the First World War, and lo, the revolution had broken out.

Trotsky, it should be observed, thought it very likely that the war would be one of all capitalist states against the Soviet Union, as the former were united by class-interest. If, however, the Soviet Union were allied with one capitalist Power against another, the war could only be a very short one, as a proletarian revolution would at once break out in the defeated capitalist state, as in Russia in 1917, and the two hostile Powers would then unite against the fatherland of the proletariat.

Thus, for Trotsky, the general upshot of the war was a foregone conclusion. Capitalism would finally collapse, Stalinism and Stalin would be swept away, the world revolution would break out, the Fourth International would instantly gain ascendancy over the workers’ minds and appear as the final victor. As he wrote in reply to the criticisms of Serge, Souvarine, and Thomas:

All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution, even though it may seem non-existent today to the sightless rationalizers, just as during the last war the party of Lenin and Liebknecht seemed to them non-existent ( Their Morals and Ours, p. 4 7).

In addition Trotsky made many detailed predictions with complete assurance. It was, for instance, absolutely impossible for Switzerland to avoid being dragged into the war; democracy could not survive in any country, but must by an ‘iron law’ develop into Fascism; if Italian democracy were restored it could only last a few months before being swept away by the proletarian revolution. As Hitler’s army consisted of workers and peasants it was bound eventually to ally itself with the peoples of the occupied countries, for the laws of history taught that the bonds of class were stronger than any other.

As to the general nature of the Fascist danger, Trotsky put forward a very interesting analysis in August 1933:

Theoretically, the victory of fascism is undoubtedly evidence of the fact that democracy has exhausted itself; but politically the fascist regime preserves democratic prejudices, recreates them, inculcates them into the youth and is even capable of imparting to them, for a short time, the greatest strength. Precisely in this consists one of the most important manifestations of the reactionary historic role of fascism ( Writings, 1931933, p. 294).

‘Under the yoke of the “fascist” dictatorship the democratic illusions were not weakened, but became stronger’ (ibid., p. 296). In other words, the threat of Fascism lies in the fact that people subjected to it long for democracy, and thus democratic prejudices are preserved instead of being dispelled; Hitler is dangerous because he makes it harder to destroy democracy.

Shortly before his death Trotsky reaffirmed his predictions as to the development of the war and at the same time put the question, in a rhetorical vein, as to what would happen if they were not fulfilled; he answered that it would signify the bankruptcy of Marxism.

If this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletarian revolution, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureaucracy in the USSR and the regeneration of Soviet democracy on a far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918…. If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its faster fusion with the state, and the replacement of democracy, wherever it still remains, by a totalitarian regime.
The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilization. An analogous result might occur in the event that the proletariat of advanced capitalist countries, having conquered power, should prove incapable of holding it and surrender it, as in the USSR, to a privileged bureaucracy. Then we would be compelled to acknowledge that the reason for the bureaucratic relapse is rooted not in the backwardness of the country and not in the imperialist environment, but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become a ruling class.
Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish [sic] that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting regime on an international scale…. However onerous the second perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist programme, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia. (In Defence of Marxism, pp. 8—g)

This is an unusual argument to find in Trotsky’s works. Naturally he states with confidence that the pessimistic second alternative is an unreal one, and he continues to believe that world revolution is inevitable, not merely as a general proposition but as a result of the war in progress. But the mere fact that he envisages another hypothesis seems to point to a certain hesitation, if we compare the above passage with the absolute confidence in victory that he expresses elsewhere.

Trotsky did not admit the idea that capitalism might be capable of reforming itself. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ seemed to him a desperate and reactionary attempt, foredoomed to failure. He believed, moreover, that the United States, having reached the highest stage of technical development, was already ripe for Communism. (In an article of March 1935 he promised the Americans that when they did go Communist their production costs would be cut by eighty per cent, and in ‘The U.S.S.R. in Wartime’, written shortly before his death, he declared that with a planned economy they could soon raise their national income to 200 billion dollars a year, and so ensure prosperity for all.)

In The Revolution Betrayed we read that if anyone supposed that capitalism could thrive for more than a decade or two he must, by the same token, believe that socialism in the Soviet Union made no sense and that the Marxists had misjudged their historical moment, for the Russian revolution would in that case stand as a mere episodic experiment like the Paris Commune.

Conclusions: From the perspective of today, Trotsky’s literary and political activity in the 1930s gives an impression of extreme wishful thinking: it is an unhappy mixture of unfulfilled prophecies, fantastic illusions, false diagnoses, and unfounded hopes.

Of course it is not of the first importance that Trotsky failed to foresee the course of the war: many people in those days made predictions, most of which were belied by events. What is important and characteristic, however, is that he invariably presented his speculations as scientifically exact prognoses, based on a profound dialectic and understanding of great historical processes. In fact his prophecies were partly founded on hopes that history would vindicate his judgement, and partly on doctrinaire deductions from supposed historical laws which he believed must come into play sooner rather than later.

One wonders what would have happened if Stalin had foreseen the outcome of the war and had taken his revenge on Trotsky not by killing him but by letting him live to see the collapse of all his hopes and prophecies, not a single one of which came true. The war was an anti-Fascist war; no proletarian revolution took place in Europe or America, apart from the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe; the Stalinist bureaucracy was not swept away, but became immeasurably stronger, as did Stalin himself; democracy survived, and was restored in West Germany and Italy; most of the colonial territories gained their independence without a proletarian revolution; and the Fourth International remained an impotent sect.

If Trotsky had seen all this, would he have admitted that his pessimistic hypothesis had proved to be the right one and that Marxism was an illusion? We cannot tell, of course, but his mentality would probably not have allowed him to draw such an inference; he would no doubt simply have noted that the operation of the laws of history had again been somewhat delayed, but would have remained firm in his belief that the great moment was at hand.

Trotsky, as a true doctrinaire, was insensitive to everything that was happening around him. Of course he followed events closely and commented on them, and did his best to obtain accurate information about the Soviet Union and world politics. But the essence of a doctrinaire is not that he does not read newspapers or collect facts: it consists in adhering to a system of interpretation that is impervious to empirical data, or is so nebulous that any and every fact can be used to confirm it. Trotsky had no need to fear that any event might cause him to change his mind, as his basic premisses were always in the form ‘on the one hand … on the other hand’, or ‘admittedly … but nevertheless’.

If Communists suffered a set-back anywhere in the world, it confirmed his diagnosis that the Stalinist bureaucracy (as he had always said) was leading the movement to ruin.

If there was a Communist success it also confirmed his diagnosis: the working class had shown, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy, that it was still full (as he had always said) of revolutionary spirit.

If Stalin made a ‘rightist’ move it was a triumph for Trotsky’s analysis: he had always predicted that the Soviet bureaucracy would degenerate into reaction.

But if Stalin made a swing to the left it was also a triumph for Trotsky, who had always declared that the revolutionary vanguard in Russia was so strong that the bureaucracy must take account of its wishes.

If a Trotskyist group in some country increased its membership, that was of course a good sign: the best elements were beginning to understand that true Leninism was the right policy.

If, on the other hand, a group dwindled in size or underwent a split, this too confirmed the Marxist analysis: the Stalinist bureaucracy was stifling the consciousness of the masses, and in a revolutionary era unstable elements always desert the battlefield.

If Soviet Russia scored economic success it confirmed Trotsky’s argument: socialism, supported by the consciousness of the proletariat, was gaining ground in spite of the bureaucracy.

If there were economic set-backs or disasters, Trotsky was right again: the bureaucracy, as he had always said, was incompetent and lacked the support of the masses.

A mental system of this kind is watertight and immune from correction by the facts. Obviously, various forces and conflicting tendencies are at work in society, and different ones prevail at different times; if this commonplace truth is erected into a philosophy, there is no danger of its being empirically refuted. Trotsky, however, like many other Marxists, imagined that he was conducting scientific observations with the aid of an infallible dialectical method.

Trotsky’s attitude to the Soviet state is psychologically understandable: it was to a large extent his own creation, and it is not surprising that he could not admit the idea that his offspring had degenerated beyond recall. Hence the extraordinary paradox which he repeated incessantly and which, in the end, even faithful Trotskyists found hard to swallow: the working class had been politically expropriated, robbed of all its rights, enslaved and trampled on, but the Soviet Union was still a working-class dictatorship, since the land and factories were the property of the state.

As time went on, more and more of Trotsky’s adherents left him on account of this dogma. Some, noting the obvious analogies between Soviet Communism and Nazism, had pessimistic forebodings as to the inevitability of totalitarian systems throughout the world. The German Trotskyist Hugo Urbahns concluded that state capitalism would become universal in one form or another. Bruno Rizzi, an Italian Trotskyist who in 1939 published a book in French on ‘world bureaucratization’, held that the world was moving towards a new form of class society, in which individual ownership was replaced by collective ownership vested in a bureaucracy, as exemplified by the Fascist states and the Soviet Union.

Trotsky opposed such ideas furiously: it was nonsense to suggest that Fascism, the organ of the bourgeoisie, could expropriate its own class in favour of a political bureaucracy. Similarly, Trotsky broke with Burnham and Shachtman when they came to the conclusion that it no longer made any discernible sense to call the Soviet Union a ‘workers’ state‘. Shachtman pointed out that under capitalism economic and political power could be separate, but that this was impossible in the Soviet Union, where property relations and the proletariat’s participation in political power were dependent on each other; the proletariat could not lose political power and continue to exercise an economic dictatorship. The political expropriation of the proletariat meant the end of its rule in every other sense, and it was therefore absurd to maintain that Russia was still a workers’ state; the ruling bureaucracy was a ‘class’ in the true meaning of the term.

Trotsky to the end firmly opposed this conclusion, reiterating his single argument that the implements of production in the Soviet Union belonged to the state. This, of course, no one denied. The dispute was psychological rather than one of theory: to recognize that Russia had created a new form of class society and exploitation would have meant admitting that Trotsky’s life-work had been in vain, and that he himself had helped to bring about the exact opposite of what he intended. This is a kind of inference that few are prepared to draw.

For the same reason Trotsky maintained tooth and nail that when he was in power the Soviet Union and the Comintern had been above reproach in every way: it was a true dictatorship of the proletariat, a true proletarian democracy, with genuine support from the working masses. All repressions, cruelties, armed invasions, etc. were justified if they were in the interest of the working class, but this had nothing to do with Stalin’s later measures. (In exile Trotsky maintained that there was no religious persecution in Russia—the Orthodox Church had simply been deprived of its monopoly power, which was right and proper. On this point he was obliged to defend the Stalinist regime, as it had not deviated in any way from Lenin’s policy.)

Trotsky never suggested that the armed incursions carried out by the new-born Soviet state in Lenin’s day might have been wrongful. On the contrary, he repeated many times that the revolution could not alter geography; in other words, the Tsarist frontiers ought to be preserved or restored, and the Soviet regime had every right to ‘liberate’ Poland, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, and the other border states. He maintained that if it had not been for bureaucratic degeneration the Red Army in 1939 would have been welcomed as a liberator by the working masses of Finland; but he did not ask himself why in that case, when he was in power and there was no ‘degeneration’, the working masses of Finland, Poland, or Georgia had failed to greet their liberators with enthusiasm in accordance with the laws of history.

Trotsky did not concern himself with philosophical questions. (Towards the end of his life he did try to expound his views on dialectics and formal logic, but it was clear that all the logic he knew consisted of fragments recollected from high school and from youthful studies of Plekhanov, all of whose absurdities he repeated. Burnham advised Trotsky to drop the subject, pointing out that he knew nothing of modern logic.) Nor did he attempt any theoretical analysis of the foundations of Marxism. It was sufficient for him that Marx had shown that the decisive feature of the modern world was the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and that this was bound to end in the victory of the proletariat, a worldwide socialist state, and a classless society. He did not concern himself to discover on what these prophecies were based. Being convinced of their truth, however, and of the fact that he as a politician embodied the interests of the proletariat and the deep-seated trend of history, he maintained unswervingly his faith in the final outcome.

At this point we should answer an objection. It may be said that the complete inefficacy of Trotsky’s efforts and of his International do not invalidate his analysis, since a man may be right even if most or all of his fellows disagree with him, and force majeure is not an argument. Here, however, we may recall Oscar Wilde’s remark that whether force is an argument depends on what one wants to prove; and we may add, in the same line of thought, that force is an argument if the point at issue is whether one is strong or not.

The fact that a theory is rejected by everyone or almost everyone, as has happened more than once in the history of science, does not prove that it is wrong. But it is a different matter with theories that have an inbuilt self-interpretation to the effect that they are an ‘expression’ of great historical tendencies (or of the will of Providence); that they embody the true consciousness of the class which is destined soon to triumph, or that they constitute a revelation of truth, and that therefore, simply as theories (or as ‘theoretical consciousness’), they must inevitably prevail over all others.

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 necessarily an argument in its favour. The early victories of Islam were not a proof that the Koran was true, but a proof that the faith inspired by it was a powerful rallying-point because it corresponded to essential social needs; in the same way, Stalin’s successes did not prove that he was ‘right’ as a theorist.) For this reason the failure of Trotskyism in practice, unlike the rejection of a scientific hypothesis, is also a theoretical failure, that is to say a proof that the theory as Trotsky conceived it was wrong.

Trotsky, with his dogmatic cast of mind, did not contribute to the theoretical elucidation of any point of Marxist doctrine. But he was an outstanding personality, endowed with immense courage, will-power, and endurance. Covered with obloquy by Stalin and his henchmen in all countries, persecuted by the most powerful police and propaganda machine in the world, he never faltered or gave up the fight. His children were murdered, he was driven out of his country and hunted down like an animal, and was finally done to death. His amazing resistance to every trial was the result of his faith and by no means conflicted—on the contrary-with his unshakeable dogmatism and inflexibility of mind. 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.

Deutscher says in his monograph that Trotsky’s life was ‘the tragedy of the precursor’; but there is no good reason to maintain this, and it is not clear what he is supposed to have been the precursor of. He contributed, of course, to unmasking the forgeries of Stalinist historiography, and to refuting the lies of Soviet propaganda concerning conditions in the new society. But all his predictions as to the future of that society and of the world turned out to be wrong.

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 but only to its ultimate aims, which he diagnosed on ideological principles. The opposition that has found expression in Communist countries since Stalin’s death has no connection with Trotsky’s writings or thoughts, either factually or in the minds of the critics themselves. His ideas play no part at all in the ‘dissident’ movement in those countries, even among the dwindling band of those who attack the Soviet system from a Communist viewpoint.

Trotsky did not offer any alternative form of Communism or any doctrine different from Stalin’s. The main thrust of his attack, against ‘socialism in one country’, was merely an attempt to continue a certain tactical line which had become unfeasible for reasons that had nothing to do with Stalin. Trotsky was not a ‘forerunner’ but an offshoot of the revolution, thrown off at a tangent to the course which it followed in 1917–21, but which it subsequently had to abandon for both internal and external reasons.

It would be more exact to call his life the tragedy of an epigone, rather than that of a forerunner; but this is not an adequate description either. The Russian revolution changed course in certain respects, but not in all. 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.

However, the Soviet state was obliged by events to alter course on this point, and Trotsky did not cease to upbraid its leaders on that account. As far as the internal regime was concerned, however, 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 not merely the tragedy of an epigone, but that of a revolutionary despot entangled in a snare of his own making. There was never any such thing as a Trotskyist theory—only a deposed leader who tried desperately to recover his role, who could not realize that his efforts were vain, and who would not accept responsibility for a state of affairs which he regarded as a strange degeneration, but 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.

LINK: <https://archive.org/details/maincurrentsofma00kola>

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READING: Leszek Kolakowski: On Trotsky in Exile

Tough but fair. From "Main Currents in Marxism: Volume 3: Breakdown"

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