Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism

Peter Beilharz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1987. Trotskyists have long dominated the revolutionary tradition on the Western left. Written from a critical socialist standpoint, this book provides an analysis of Trotskyism and argues that Trotskyism is increasingly irrelevant as a means of achieving socialism. It argues that, as the realisation grows that the revolutionary tradition and the authoritarianism which necessarily result from it are wrong, the importance of the problem of the transition to socialism increases. It argues that on this point Trotskyism is weak; that Trotskyism's proposals for socialist transition are largely rhetorical; and that its democratic impulse is weak. It supports this argument by showing that Trotsky's philosophy of history, implicit in his writings, which the author characterises as evolutionary and necessitarian, coupled with a failure to grasp the moral basis of the socialist case, has a disabling effect on Trotsky's account of the transition to socialism and on his explanation of Stalinism. Moreover, it argues that Trotsky's intellectual and political heirs have been unable to escape from the contradictions inherent in his thought.

Part One

Trotsky: the Source

1

Introduction:
Trotsky and the Jacobin Legacy

‘Good and bad citizens’

Leon Trotsky has passed into popular imagination as the Man of October, the hyperbolshevik, and later as the romantic in exile, spurned equally by the regime which he had helped to create and by the capitalist societies which he vilified. But there is another, forgotten Trotsky, who began his political life differently. Before October Trotsky shared in the political culture of the Second International; he imbibed its cosmopolitanism, its enthusiasm for education and enlightenment. This was a world in which socialism was seen to be inevitable, in which marxism was a science no less than Darwinism, a world where progress was believed to forge onward unabated, where the mass was seen as being the party, where a whole growing socialist community would exist within the bowels of bourgeois society, debating in Die Neue Zeit, reading anthropology, awaiting the carcass of capitalist civilisation to rot, arguing about the necessity or irrelevance of the general strike to finishing the process. Trotsky’s politics, in this milieu, were spontaneist; his self-conception was that of the revolutionary intellectual rather than the professional revolutionary. Like Rosa Luxemburg he stood apart from others, not least of all because of his concern with prefigurative politics.¹ Most significantly, the young Trotsky was a democrat, a vehement opponent of Jacobinism, that very tradition which he was later so brilliantly to extend.

Ironically, then, given the accepted images of Trotsky, his political career began with the vilification of Bolshevism. The central vehicle of his polemic against Lenin, the 1904 missal Our Political Tasks, still awaits an English translation; one can understand why. Our Political Tasks is as vitriolic and penetrating as any polemic to come from the pen of the later Trotsky; only its object is the very politics which he later came to make canon. Trotsky here severed Lenin’s claim that Jacobinism and Social Democracy could be amalgamated; Jacobinism was a specific historical product, he claimed, which had no substantial compatibility with the socialist project as he then identified it.² Trotsky repeated earlier allegations that Lenin was Robespierre, caricatured. Jacobinism represented the acme of bourgeois radicalism: in theory, the rights of man and citizen, in practice, the guillotine.³ Bolshevism had a decapitationist logic; according to Trotsky, Robespierre’s maxim – ‘I know only of two parties, good and bad citizens’ — was inscribed on Lenin’s heart.⁴ The Bolsheviks consequently represented disaster for Russian Social Democracy: presenting themselves as agents of proletarian liberation, they would produce rather dictatorship over the proletariat.⁵

Who, after October, would recognise Trotsky in these words? Certainly not the Trotskyist tradition, which reduced Our Political Tasks to its much celebrated qualms about ‘substitutionism’, which Trotsky intended against Lenin but could now be directed, retrospectively, against the demonic Stalin. For Trotsky’s own trajectory into Bolshevism saw him elevate just this maxim of Robespierre — ‘good and bad citizens’ — into a marxist cosmology, adding the signifiers ‘proletarian’ to good and ‘bourgeois’ to bad credentials respectively. This lapse into Jacobinism can be witnessed in Trotsky, however, not only in the perilous period of war communism but also through the thirties. It becomes a permanent motif in the Trotskyist tradition because it is a lasting feature of Trotsky’s Bolshevism; even the later Trotsky’s few doubts about this tradition never became substantial.⁶

Trotsky’s Jacobin credentials are evident not only in Terrorism and Communism but also, later, in Their Morals and Ours and In Defense of Marxism. Terrorism and Communism remains a fascinating work, as H. N. Brailsford put it, ‘by far the most typical expression of the Bolshevik temperament which the revolution has produced’.⁷ Max Shachtman concurs: it is a High Bolshevik text, but importantly not an aberrant one compared to Trotsky’s later thought.⁸ In it Trotsky rebuts Kautsky’s work of the same name. He denounces the idea he had earlier advocated, that Bolshevism viewed itself as the sole repository of the Truth.⁹ He lambasts the idea of democracy, itself so central to Our Political Tasks; he denies the substitutionism thesis.¹⁰ Trotsky’s defence of revolutionary terror in the Russian Revolution introduces the notion of…good and bad citizens, or at least good and bad classes; terrorism directed toward the latter is historically and politically necessary, therefore proper.¹¹ Similarly Trotsky decrees that there are good and bad newspapers, good and bad Taylorism, good and bad armies.¹² Here the dualisms of the Enlightenment are refracted into public life, via state power.¹³ The language used by Trotsky to put his case is that of Jacobinism, though it also has other connotations for denizens of the twentieth century: ‘To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.’¹⁴ The language decisively expelled from argument by the early Trotsky has returned with a vengeance, as the Bolshevism which the young Trotsky declared degenerate is now alleged to be amalgamated with the Russian proletariat.¹⁵

Trotsky’s Jacobinism may be especially vociferous in the period of war communism, but it is by no means limited to it. In Their Morals and Ours (1938) the same dualisms are introduced — morality has a class character, there are only bad and good citizens; them, and us…¹⁶ Morality is a closed matter — it lies with the proletariat, and, by historic delegation, with the Party. In Defense of Marxism reveals a similar logic — Trotsky’s dualistic approach to morals is here taken to its logical conclusion. The opposition within the Party must have a class basis for its mistaken views; it is found to be that of the petty-bourgeoisie, the declining class which must now choose whether to affiliate with the good or bad citizens. Uncertainty and disagreement: here are petty-bourgeoisie traits; for the disappearing class must surely have vacillating positions, such as:

… a disdainful attitude toward theory [!] and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organisation; anxiety for personal ‘independence’ at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility toward it…¹⁷

all in contrast to proletarian dialectics. Dialectics had by now come to mean the apologetic hat tricks for which Trotsky already had some weakness; in Terrorism and Communism, for example, he had put the later notorious case that the proletarian state withered and intensified at the same time.¹⁸

Yet within the space of years Trotsky’s Jacobin image of man as a lazy animal needing coercion is supplanted by the idyll of Olympian self-perfection in Literature and Revolution.¹⁹ Here Trotsky posits the developmental face of jacobinism, his image of perfection from above, introduced by the cultural superman of socialism, the Faustian technologist carving up nature, rationalising and planning everything which moves as well as nature’s inert being.²⁰ Trotsky’s is a vision of ultramodernism very much contiguous with that analysed by Berman in his book, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; Trotsky shares with Faust even the commitment to militarisation of labour, so that the Will to Reason might finally come to temporal fruition.²¹ Trotsky’s messianism, ironically, grows inversely as the Soviet situation deteriorates. When Trotsky had been completely routed, among his last words to the Central Committee were these: ‘Expel me, but you will not prevent the victory of the opposition!’²² Trotsky could not conceive that history was not on his side, and so in a period of decay and defeat could nevertheless let his imagination soar to utopian heights. Supermen socialists were therefore concocted by Trotsky in an environment where even a decade later, ‘you can’t find decent buttons’ and where ‘on our most important highway…automobiles can make only ten kilometres an hour’.²³ Yet Trotsky assures the reader that these supermen will be ‘stronger, wiser and subtler’, more musical in style and voice, excelling even Aristotle, Goethe and Marx.²⁴ Heroic individuals populate his mind, while the masses toiled on for their bread: the conception of history here in Trotsky was aristocratic.

Trotsky and the French Revolution

Trotsky’s post-October arguments have a direct relation to the French Revolution, or at least to the Bolshevik conception of it. As we have seen, the young Trotsky had nothing but contempt for Jacobin Social Democracy, and made this judgement on moral and historiographical grounds alike. In a contemporaneous text, Results and Prospects (1905), Trotsky elaborated his historiographical principles and detailed his reservations about unversalising the French Revolution as though it were a general typology. He argued, rather, for the unique specificity of experiences like those which occurred in 1789, 1848 and 1905.²⁵ After his conversion to Bolshevism, and in response to the attack on his own Bolshevik credentials, Trotsky however openly embraced this notion of the universality of the great French experience. As is well known, he came to parallel the entire process of Soviet ‘degeneration’ with the alleged masterplan of the French Revolution, popularising notions like Thermidor to explain his own political defeat. This language had awkward resonances, for Trotsky himself had of course earlier been cast as an aspiring Bonaparte.²⁶

By 1926 Trotsky was prepared to justify his own record before the Central Control Commission in precisely Jacobin terms. Trotsky now finally recognised the real affinity between Jacobinism and Bolshevism, though at the historiographical expense of collapsing their two Revolutions. He argued that the history of the French Revolution ought now be mandatory reading for Party members, as the Russian Revolution had followed in its path. The crucial thing, Trotsky argued against Comrade Soltz, was that like the French Revolution the Russian, too, was divided into two chapters, one of ascendancy, followed by another of decline. ‘None of us is scared by firing squads…But the thing is to know whom to shoot and in accordance with which chapter.’²⁷ Shooting enemies of the Revolution in the chapter of ascent was quite normal and in accordance with history’s general plot. Trotsky’s defence is intriguing, but its significance may ha...