Trotsky, Leon
Trotsky, Leon
Critique of Soviet bureaucracy
Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) was born in the Ukraine in 1879 and assassinated in Mexico in 1940. Trotsky was not only a leader of the October revolution of 1917, commissar of foreign affairs in the first Soviet government, founder of the Red Army and commissar of war from 1918 to 1925, cofounder of the Communist International, member of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist party from 1918 to 1927, and Stalin’s chief antagonist and critic; he was also an outstanding thinker and original theorist of Marxism, whose ideas strongly influenced socialism and communism in the first four decades of this century.
Permanent revolution
The theory of permanent revolution is Trotsky’s principal contribution to Marxism and the leitmotiv of his political activities. He first formulated that theory in a treatise called Results and Prospects, written and published in 1906, while he was in prison awaiting trial by a tsarist court for his leading role in the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet. The origins of the theory can be traced back to the writings of Karl Marx, and it was also influenced by A. L. Helphand-Parvus, a Russo-German Marxist of note. But its actual formulation and application to the revolution of the twentieth century, and to Russian circumstances, was Trotsky’s own work.
Trotsky viewed the transition of society from capitalism to socialism, postulated by Marxism, as an immense succession of socioeconomic and political upheavals leading to the establishment of an international classless and stateless society. No single phase of this revolution, whatever its social character or geographic limitation, can be regarded as self-contained or self-sufficient. The process of society’s transformation is in the nature of a chain reaction that cannot be arbitrarily interrupted or arrested. The revolution develops intensively, by “deepening” and affecting the whole structure of society, and extensively, by assuming international scope.
From these general premises Trotsky developed a specific, prognostic analysis of the character of the Russian revolution. He rejected the view, which had been generally accepted by Marxists, that the Russian revolution would have to be bourgeois in character, as the French revolution of 1789-1793 had been. In this traditional Marxist view, the “task” of the revolution was to overthrow tsardom, sweep away obsolete semifeudal relationships and institutions, and establish a parliamentary democratic republic, under which Russia’s productive forces would be free to develop on a capitalist basis and its working class free to wage its class struggles until such time as Russian society became sufficiently “mature” for socialism. Up to World War I even Lenin and the Bolsheviks adhered to this view, although Lenin occasionally deviated from it.
The differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks centered at that time on the question of which social class, the bourgeoisie or the workers, should exercise leadership in the revolution. The Mensheviks maintained that since the revolution was bourgeois, the bourgeoisie should lead it, while the workers should lend the bourgeoisie their critical support. Lenin argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was frightened of revolution and willing to compromise with tsardom; consequently, only the working class, with the support of the peasantry, could accomplish this bourgeois revolution—despite and against the bourgeoisie. Trotsky agreed with Lenin’s view that the industrial workers were the chief motive power of the upheaval, but he pointed out that precisely because of this the revolution could not remain bourgeois. He asserted that it would be driven by its own momentum beyond the limits set to it a priori by the traditionalist theory and that it would present a peculiar combination of two revolutions, a bourgeois one and a socialist one. Once the proletariat had assumed the leading role, it would be compelled by the logic of its own class interest to turn against the capitalists as well as against tsardom and the landlords; and it would proceed to establish its own dictatorship and to socialize the means of production. Russia, Trotsky predicted, would be the first country to set up a proletarian dictatorship. This was a startling and hotly contested conclusion: all Marxists, including the Leninists, still held that such a dictatorship could first be established only in one of the advanced industrial countries of the West.
Trotsky went on to point out that because of its industrial and cultural backwardness and poverty, Russia could only begin the socialist revolution (or the building of socialism) but could not achieve or complete it except in association and cooperation with the industrial countries of the West. Indeed, the Russian revolution would not be a purely national phenomenon; it would be the prelude to European or global revolution. Just as the revolution would not be contained within its bourgeois stage, so it could not be brought to a halt within any national boundaries. Internationally as well as nationally the revolution would be “permanent.”
As author of this theory, Trotsky linked up with the classical Marxist tradition, but he also departed from it. He was the first Marxist to proclaim that the initiative for the anticapitalist revolution of this century would come from the underdeveloped part of the world rather than from the West. But he remained within the classical Marxist tradition insofar as he continued to see in the industrialized countries of the West the terra firma of socialism, its decisive domain, its chief potential center. A backward country like Russia could and would have the lead in revolutionary initiative, but the lead in the actual establishment of socialism would still belong to the West.
Shortly before 1917 Lenin arrived independently at the same conclusion, and this induced Trotsky to join the Bolshevik party. The idea of permanent revolution was embodied in the programmatic statements of the Communist International during the time that Lenin and Trotsky were its leading lights. It should be added that Trotsky did not favor coups or putsches staged by revolutionary minorities unsupported by the mass of the workers and that he was categorically opposed to “carrying revolution abroad on the point of bayonets.” Permanent revolution, as he saw it, was an organic historic process, inherent in the logic of the class struggles and political conflicts of the age.
The most dramatic implication of Trotsky’s theory emerged in the 1920s, at the time of his conflict with Stalin. The great ideological controversy in the Bolshevik party after Lenin centered on the doctrinal opposition between two theories: Trotsky’s permanent revolution and Stalin’s socialism in a single country. Stalin asserted the self-sufficiency of the Russian revolution; and, at least up to World War Ii, his doctrine was manifest in a policy of Soviet isolationism and self-containment. As such it was necessarily antagonistic to the idea of permanent revolution. Trotsky proceeded to demonstrate theoretically the impossibility of an autarchic socialism, of a socialism confined to any single country, especially to a backward country in which the small-holding peasantry formed the majority of the population. He characterized the Soviet regime as a transitional social order, combining socialist and capitalist (and even precapitalist) elements; but he refused to recognize it as genuinely socialist. He viewed the isolation of Bolshevism within Russia’s boundaries as a mere interval between two acts, as it were, of permanent revolution, an interval unduly prolonged by Stalinist errors and opportunism, but not a definite interruption of the revolutionary process. (Trotsky probably would have regarded the revolutionary aftermath of World War n, culminating in the Chinese revolution, as a continuation of the process begun in Russia in 1917, the long overdue new phase of permanent revolution.)
Critique of Soviet bureaucracy
Among Trotsky’s many contributions to Marxist thinking, the one next in importance to his theory of permanent revolution is his critique of the Soviet bureaucracy. He was, with Lenin, an uncompromising advocate of proletarian dictatorship, and, again like Lenin, he held that this dictatorship ought to be based on “proletarian, or Soviet, democracy.” Its purpose was to consolidate the conquests of the revolution, to suppress the resistance of the former possessing classes, and to guarantee the social and political supremacy of the working class. This aim could not be achieved unless the workers, the poor peasants, and the social groups close to them enjoyed full freedom of expression and association. During the civil war such freedom was severely curtailed; and in the early 1920s the single-party system was established. Trotsky at first treated this as a kind of emergency measure and refrained from elevating the practice of the single-party system to a principle. Presently, he came into conflict with the practice. As early as 1923 he had diagnosed the onset of a postrevolutionary reaction and the incipient “degeneration” of the Bolshevik party; and he had protested against the growing preponderance and arbitrary behavior of the party’s bureaucracy. Between 1926 and 1928, characteristically invoking various precedents from the French Revolution, he warned of the dangers of a Russian Thermidor, Bonapartism, and Restoration. (Later still, in the 1930s, he maintained that Thermidor and Bonapartism were no longer dangers threatening the revolution but accomplished facts.)
Trotsky saw the bureaucracy and the managerial groups of the Soviet Union as the new privileged strata who had usurped the fruits of the revolution and deprived the working class of its rights; he attacked Stalinism as the ideology of the new privileged strata. Up to 1934-1935 he advocated a reform of the Soviet Union, aiming at the revival of Soviet democracy; but in his last years he called for the overthrow of the bureaucratic dictatorship and of Stalin’s personal rule by means of revolution. However, he insisted that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a new and independent social class, exploiting other classes, but a “cancerous growth on the body of the working class” that the Soviet Union was, even under Stalin, a “workers’ state,” although a “degenerate” one; and that Marxists were obliged to defend the Soviet state “unconditionally” against its capitalist-imperialist enemies. He advocated a revolution against Stalinism that, as he explained, was to be political, not social: its aim was to do away with Stalin’s oppressive government, to reduce the new inequality, to abolish the single-party system and the “leader cult,” and to bring the state under workers’ control. But the revolution was not to change anything in the basic system of social ownership of the means of production; on the contrary, it was to preserve that system and revitalize it. These views aroused vehement controversy among Trotsky’s adherents, some of whom (like James Burnham and others) considered the Soviet bureaucracy to be a new exploiting class and Soviet society a “managerial society,” not different in kind from the German society under Hitler or the Italian under Mussolini. (In consequence they renounced all political solidarity with the U.S.S.R. and broke with Trotsky.)
Other contributions
While the ideas just summarized are at the core of so-called Trotskyism, the importance of Trotsky’s contribution to the strategy and tactics of the Communist International should also be stressed. Trotsky was in 1921-1922 one of the chief initiators of the policy of the “united front” and in his later critique of the Stalinized Comintern his analysis of the rise of Nazism was most remarkable. He was the first, if not the only, Marxist to grasp clearly the totalitarian character, the destructive explosiveness, and the imperialist fury of Nazism. While Stalin and his followers underrated Nazism, treating it as a more or less conventional form of reaction (“one of the agencies of finance-capitalism”), Trotsky, as early as 1929-1930, diagnosed it as a new plebeian form of counterrevolution, drawing its dynamic force from the despair of the petty-bourgeois and lumpenproletarian masses faced with the unemployment and misery of the great slump of 1929-1932. He advocated, in vain, joint socialist-communist action to prevent the seizure of power by Hitler and the new world war Hitler’s victory could bring. In 1935-1936 he criticized as opportunistic and defeatist the Stalinist “popular front” policies, especially as applied in France and Spain. In subsequent years he exposed the great purges and the Moscow trials by which Stalin exterminated all his communist critics and opponents; and he founded the Fourth International.
Trotsky was a many-sided personality, a man of action as well as a theorist, a prolific author and an orator of genius. He was unrivaled as a Marxist writer on military theory. While Clausewitz treated war as a “continuation of politics by different means,” Trotsky showed it to be a continuation also of economics, class struggle, and social psychology. He was a historian of the highest order; his History of the Russian Revolution (1931-1933) is a huge artistic canvas depicting the events of 1917 as well as a theoretical interpretation. His biographical gifts are evident in My Life (1930a), in his various writings on Lenin, and to a lesser extent in his Stalin (1941). He was outstanding also as a literary critic. His use of Marxism as a tool of artistic criticism was free from dogma; and he was uncompromisingly opposed to the manufacturing of any “proletarian culture” or “proletarian literature” and to any form of party tutelage over the sciences and the arts. He defended Freudian psychoanalysis against Bolshevik and Pavlovian critics; and in one of his popularizations of dialectical materialism he confidently predicted, in the year 1926, the advent of the atomic age and forecast that the new technological revolution would coincide with and accelerate the social revolution of this century.
He was defeated in his lifetime, slandered, and assassinated. His works and memory were still banned from his native country even in the 1960s, well after the collapse of the Stalin cult. But his ideas—his views on capitalist society, his critique of postrevolutionary bureaucratic privilege and of nationalist (Stalinist and Social Democratic) distortions of socialism—remain relevant to the issues agitating the communist camp and the world at large in the second half of this century.
Isaac Deutscher
[For the historical context of Trotsky’s work, see Communism; Marxism; Socialism; and the biographies of Leninand Marx.]
WORKS BY TROTSKY
1904 Nashi politicheskiia zadachi: Takticheskie i organizatsionnye voprosy (Our Political Tasks: Tactical and Organizational Questions). Geneva: Rossiiskaia Sotsialdemokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia, Tipografiia Partii.
(1906) 1965 Results and Prospects. New York: Pioneer. ? First published in Russian. The 1965 edition is bound together with Trotsky 1930b.
1918 Our Revolution; Essays on Working-class and International Revolution: 1904-1917. New York: Holt. ? A collection of essays first published separately in Russian.
(1920) 1935 Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. New ed. London: Allen & Unwin. ? First published in Russian. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by the University of Michigan Press.
1922 Between Red and White. London: Communist Party of Great Britain.
1923-1925 Kak vooruzhalas revolutsiia (How the Revolution Armed Itself). 3 vols. Moscow: Vysshii Voennyi Redaktsionnyi Sovet. ? A collection of Trotsky’s military writings, orders of the day, and speeches.
(1924) 1959 Lenin. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books. ? A collection of character sketches about Lenin, first published in Russian.
1925-1927 Sochineniia (Works). Vols. 2-21. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo. ? A projected complete edition of Trotsky’s works; its publication was discontinued in 1927, at the time of Trotsky’s expulsion from the party.
(1930a) 1960 My Life. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. ? First published in Berlin in two volumes as Moia zhizn’.
(1930b) 1965 Permanent Revolution. New York: Pioneer. ? First published in Russian. The 1965 edition is bound together with Trotsky 1906.
(1930c) 1957 The Third International After Lenin. New York: Pioneer. ? First published in French.
(1931-1933) 1957 The History of the Russian Revolution. 3 vols. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. ? First published in Russian.
(1932) 1962 The Stalin School of Falsification. 2d ed. New York: Pioneer. ? First published in Russian.
(1937) 1957 The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? New York: Pioneer. ? First published in English.
(1941) 1958 Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. ? First published in English.
The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology. Edited with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher. New York: Dell, 1964.
Basic Writings. Edited and introduced by Irving Howe. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1964. ? A paperback edition was published by Random House in 1965.
Diary in Exile, 1935. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958.
The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922. Edited and annotated by Jan M. Meijer. Vols. 1—. The Hague: Mouton, 1964—.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Deutscher, Isaac 1954 The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Deutscher, Isaac 1959 The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929. London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Deutscher, Isaac 1963 The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940. London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Eastman, Max 1925 Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth. New York: Greenberg.
Harvard University, Library 1959 Guide to the Papers of Leon Trotsky and Related Collections in the Harvard College Library. Unpublished manuscript.
Levine, Isaac D. 1959 The Mind of an Assassin. New York: Farrar.
Wolfe, Bertram D. (1948) 1964 Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History. 4th rev. ed. New York: Dial.