Leon Trotsky
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Author : Paul Mattick

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Source: Living Marxism, Fall 1940; Transcribed: by Adam Buick; Proofed: and corrected by Geoff Traugh, August 2005.

With Leon Trotsky there passed away the last of the great
leaders of bolshevism. It was his activity during the last fifteen years that
kept alive some of the original content of the Bolshevik ideology — the
great weapon for transforming backward Russia into its present
state-capitalistic form.

As all men are wiser in practice than in theory, so also Trotsky by his
accomplishments achieves far greater importance than through his
rationalizations that accompanied them. Next to Lenin, he was without doubt the
greatest figure of the Russian Revolution. However, the need for leaders like
Lenin and Trotsky, and the effect these leaders had, brings to light the utter
helplessness of the proletarian masses to solve their own real needs in face of
a merciless unripe historical situation.

The masses had to be led; but the leaders could lead only in accordance with
their own necessities. The need for leadership of the kind practiced by
bolshevism finally indicates nothing else than the need to discipline and
terrorize the masses, so that they may work and live in harmony with the plans
of the ruling social group. This kind of leadership in itself demonstrates the
existence of class relations, class politics and economics, and an
irreconcilable opposition between the leaders and the led. The over-towering
personality of Leon Trotsky reveals the non-proletarian character of the
Bolshevik Revolution just as well as the mummified and deified Lenin in the
Moscow Mausoleum.

In order that some may lead, others must be powerless. To be the vanguard of
the workers, the elite has to usurp all social key positions. Like the
bourgeoisie of old, the new leaders had to seize and control all means of
production and destruction. To hold their control and keep it effective, the
leaders must constantly strengthen themselves by bureaucratic expansion, and
continually divide the ruled. Only masters can be leaders.

Trotsky was such a master. At first he was the masterly propagandist, the
great and never tiring orator, establishing his leading position in the
revolution. Then he became the creator and master of the Red Army, fighting
against the Right and the Left, fighting for bolshevism,
which he hoped to master too. But here he failed. When leaders make history,
those who are led no longer count; but neither do they disappear. Trusting in
the force of grand historical spectacles, Trotsky neglected to be the efficient
opportunist behind the scenes of bureaucratic development that he was in the
spotlight of world history.

Today, great men are no longer necessary. Modern propaganda instruments can
transform any fraud into a hero, any mediocre personality into an
all-comprehending genius. Propaganda actually transforms through its collective
efforts any average, if not stupid, leader, like Hitler and Stalin, into a
great man. The leaders become symbols of an organized, collective, and really
intelligent will to maintain given social institutions. Outside of Russia,
Trotsky was soon reduced to the master of a small sect of professional
revolutionists and their providers. He was “the Old Man,” the
indisputable authority of an artificial growth upon the political scene,
destined to end in absurdity. To become the master of a Fourth
International, as his adversary Stalin was master of the Third,
remained the illusion with which he died.

There is here no need to re-trace Trotsky’s individual development;
his autobiography suffices. Neither is it necessary to stress his many
qualifications, literary and otherwise. His works, and most of all his
History of the Russian Revolution, will immortalize his name as a
writer and politician. But there is a real need to oppose the development of
the Trotsky legend which will make out of this leader of the Russian state
capitalist revolution a martyr of the international working class — a
legend which must be rejected together with all other postulates and aspects of
bolshevism.

Louis Ferdinand Céline has said that revolutions should be judged
twenty years later. And in doing so, he found only words of condemnation for
bolshevism. To us, however, it seems that a present-day reevaluation of
bolshevism could well do without any kind of moralizing. In retrospect it is
quite easy to see in bolshevism the beginning of a new phase of capitalist
development, which was initiated by the first World War. No doubt, in 1917,
Russia was the weakest link in the capitalist world structure. But the whole of
capitalism in its private property form was already on the verge of stagnation.
To erect and expand a workable economic system of the laissez-faire type was no
longer possible. Only the force of complete centralism, of dictatorial rule
over the whole of society, could guarantee the establishment of an exploitative
social order capable of expanding production despite the declining
world-capitalism.

There can be no doubt that the Bolshevik leaders by creating their
state-capitalistic structure — which has, within twenty years, become the
example for the further evolution of the whole of the capitalist world —
were deeply convinced that their construction conformed to the needs and
desires of their own and the world proletariat. Even when they found that they
could not alter the fact that their society continued to be based on the
exploitation of labor, they sought to alter the meaning of this fact by
offering in excuse a theory that identified the rule of the leaders with the
interests of the led. The motive force of social development in class society
— the class struggle — theoretically was done away with; but
practically, an authoritarian regime had to be developed masked as the
dictatorship of the proletariat. In the creation of this regime, and in the
attempt to camouflage it, Trotsky won most of his laurels. He rested on those
laurels to the very last. It is only necessary to reflect on the paramount role
which Trotsky played in the first thundering years of Bolshevik Russia to
understand why he could not admit that the Bolshevik revolution was able only
to change the form of capitalism but was not able to do away with the
capitalistic form of exploitation. It was the shadow of that period that
darkened his understanding.

In the general backwardness that prevailed in Czarist Russia, the
intelligentsia had little opportunity to improve its position. The talent and
capacities of the educated middle classes found no realization in this
stagnating society. Later this situation found its parallel in the middle class
conditions in Italy and Germany after Versailles and in the wake of the
following world crisis. In all three countries, and in both situations, the
intelligentsia and large layers of the middle classes became politicized and
counter-poised to the declining economic system. In the search for ideologies
useful as weapons, and in the search for allies, all had to appeal to the
proletarian layer of society, and to all other dissatisfied elements. The
leadership of the Bolshevik as well as of the fascist movements was not
proletarian, but middle class: the result of the frustration of intellectuals
under conditions of economic stagnation and atrophy.

In Russia, before 1917, a revolutionary ideology was developed with the help
of western socialism — with Marxism. But the ideology served only the act
of revolution, nothing more. It had to be altered continuously and re-fitted to
serve the developing needs of the state-capitalist revolution and its
profiteers. Finally, this ideology lost all connection with reality and served
as religion, a weapon to maintain the new ruling class.

With this ideology, the Russian intelligentsia, supported by ambitious
workers, were able to seize power and to hold it because of the disintegration
of Czarist society, the wide social gap between peasants and workers, the
undeveloped proletarian consciousness, and the general weakness of
international capitalism after the war. Coming to power with the help of a
russified Marxian ideology, Trotsky, after he lost power, had no choice but to
maintain the revolutionary ideology in its original form against the
degeneration of Marxism indulged in by the Stalinists. He could afford this
luxury, for he had escaped the iron consequences of the social system he had
helped to bring about. Now he could lead a life of dignity, that is, a life of
opposition. But had he suddenly been brought back to power, his actions could
have been none other than those of Stalin’s which he so despised. After
all, the latter is himself no more than the creature of Lenin’s and
Trotsky’s policies. As a matter of fact, “Stalinists” as a
particular type are, so long as they are controllable, just that type of men
which leaders like Lenin and Trotsky need and love most. But sometimes the worm
turns. Those Bolshevik underlings elevated into power positions understand to
the fullest that the only insurance for security lies in imprisonment, exile,
and murder.

In 1925 oppressive methods were not far enough advanced to secure absolute
power for the great leader. The dictatorial instruments were still hampered by
the traditions of democratic capitalism. Leadership remained after
Lenin’s death; there was not yet the Leader. Though Trotsky was forced
into exile, the unripeness of the authoritarian form of government spared his
life for fifteen years. Soon both old and new oppositions to Stalin’s
rule could easily be destroyed. Hitler’s overwhelming success in the
“night of the long knives,” when he killed off with one bold stroke
the whole of the effective opposition against him, showed Stalin the way to
handle his own problems. Whoever was suspected of having at one time or another
entertained ideas unpleasant to Stalin’s taste and absolute rule, whoever
because of his critical capacities was suspected of being able in the future to
reach the willing ears of the underdogs and disappointed bureaucrats, was
eliminated. This was done not in the Nibelungen manner in which the German
fascists got rid of Rehm, Strasser and their following, but in the hidden,
scheming, cynical manner of the Moscow Trials, to exploit even the death of the
potential oppositionists for the greater glory of the all-embracing and beloved
leader, Stalin. The applause of those taking the offices emptied by the
murdered was assured. To make the broad masses happily accept the miserable end
of the “old Bolsheviks” was merely a job for the minister of
propaganda. Thus the whole of Russia, not only the leading bureaucratic group,
finished off the “traitors to the fatherland of the workers.”

Though secretly celebrating Trotsky’s death at studio parties, the
defenders of Stalinism, affecting naïveté, will ask why Stalin
should be interested in doing away with Trotsky. After all, what harm could
Trotsky do to the mighty Stalin and his great Russia? However; a bureaucracy
capable of destroying thousands of books because they contain Trotsky’s
name, re-writing and again re-writing history to erase every accomplishment of
the murdered opposition, a bureaucracy able to stage the Moscow Trials, is
certainly also capable of hiring a murderer, or finding a volunteer to silence
the one discordant voice in an otherwise perfect harmony of praise for the new
ruling class in Russia. The self-exalting identification with his leader of the
last pariah within the Communist Party, the idiotic fanaticism displayed by
these people when the mirror of truth is held before their eyes, permits no
surprise at Trotsky’s murder. It is surprising only that he was not
murdered sooner. To understand the assassination of Trotsky, it is only
necessary to look at the mechanism and the spirit of any Bolshevik
organization, Trotsky’s included.

What harm could Trotsky do? Precisely because he was not out to harm his
Russia and his workers’ state was he so intensely hated by the ruling
Bolshevik bureaucracy. For the very reason that the Trotskyites in countries
where they had a foothold were not out to change in the least the party
instrument devised by Lenin, that their spirit remained the spirit of
bolshevism, they were hated by the proprietors of the separate Communist
Parties.

The swift steps of history make possible any apparent impossibility. Russia
is not immune to the vast changes the present world experiences. In a tottering
world, all governments become insecure. No one knows where the hurricane will
strike next. Each one has to reckon with all eventualities. Because Trotsky
insisted on defending the heritage of 1917, because he remained the Bolshevik
who saw in state capitalism the basis for socialism and in the rule of the
party the rule of the workers, because he wanted nothing but the replacement of
Stalin and the Stalin-supporting bureaucracy, he was really dangerous to the
latter.

That he had other arguments, such as that of the “permanent
revolution” against the slogan of “socialism in one country,”
etc., is rather meaningless, because the permanence of the revolution as well
as the isolation of Russia, is dependent not upon slogans and political
decisions, but on realities over which even the most powerful party has no
control. Such arguments serve only to disguise the quite ordinary interests for
which political parties struggle.

It was the non-revolutionary character of Trotsky’s policies with
regard to the Russian scene that made him so dangerous. The Russian bureaucracy
knows quite well that the present world situation is not given to revolutionary
changes in the interests of the world proletariat. Dictators and bureaucrats
think in terms of dictatorship and bureaucracy. It is pretenders to the throne
they fear, not the rabble of the street. Napoleon found it easy to control any
insurrectionary crowd; he found it far more difficult to deal with the
machinations of Fouché and Talleyrand. A Trotsky, living, could be
recalled with the help of the lower layers of the Russian bureaucracy whenever
an opportune moment arose. The chance to replace Stalin, to triumph finally,
depended on Trotsky’s restricting his criticism to Stalin’s
individual, brutal moroseness, to the sickening, newly-rich attitudes of the
Stalin satellites. He realized that he could return to power only with the help
of the greater part of the bureaucracy, that he could take his seat in the
Kremlin again only in the wake of a palace revolution, or a successful Rehm
putsch. He was too much of a realist — despite all the convenient
mysticism of his political program — not to realize the silliness of an
appeal to the Russian workers, those workers who must have learned by now to
see in their new masters their new exploiters, and to tolerate them out of fear
and necessity. Not to tolerate, and not to approve the new situation means to
surrender the chance to improve one’s own situation; and as long as
Russian economy is expanding, individual ambitions and individual apologia will
rule individuals. The suckers make the best of a situation which they feel is
beyond their power to alter. Precisely because Trotsky was not a revolutionary,
but merely a competitor for leadership under existing Russian conditions
— ever ready to follow the call of a bureaucracy in re-organization
should a national crises demand the abdication of Stalin — he became
increasingly more dangerous to the present ruling clique engaged, as it is, in
new, vast imperialistic adventures. Trotsky’s murder is one of the many
consequences of the re-birth of Russian imperialism.

Today Bolshevism stands revealed as the initial phase of a great movement
which, expected to perpetuate capitalistic exploitation, is slowly but surely
embracing the whole world and changing the no longer functioning private
property economy into greater state capitalistic units. The rule of the
bolshevist commissar finds its logical conclusion in fascistic dictatorships
spreading over the globe. Just as little as Lenin and Trotsky knew what they
were actually doing when they were fighting for socialism, just as little do
Hitler and Mussolini know today what they are doing in fighting for a greater
Germany and the Roman Empire. In the world as it is, there is a wide difference
between what men want to do, and what they are actually doing. Men, however
great, are very small before history, which steps beyond them and surprises
them always anew with the results of their own surprising schemes.

In 1917, Trotsky knew as little as we ourselves knew that the Bolshevik
revolution would have to end in an international fascistic movement and in the
preparation and execution of another world war. If he had known the trend of
development, he would either have been murdered twenty years ago, or today he
would occupy Stalin’s place. As it is, he ended as a victim of the
fascist counter-revolution against the international working class and the
peace of the world.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that Stalin murdered Trotsky, despite the
displacement of all forms of bolshevism by fascism, a final evaluation of
Trotsky’s historical role will have to place him in line with Lenin,
Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler as one of the great leaders of a world-wide
movement attempting, knowingly and unknowingly, to prolong the capitalist
exploitation system with methods first devised by bolshevism, then completed by
German fascism, and finally glorified in the general butchery which we are now
experiencing. After that — the labor movement may begin.


     From : Marxists.org

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     Leon Trotsky -- Added : March 02, 2021

     Leon Trotsky -- Updated : January 08, 2022

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