Leon Trotsky, “demon” of the revolution

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Com­rades, we love the sun that gives us light, but if the rich and the ag­gressors were to try to mono­pol­ize the sun, we should say: “Let the sun be ex­tin­guished, let dark­ness reign, etern­al night…”

— Le­on Trot­sky (Septem­ber 11, 1918)

То­ва­ри­щи, мы лю­бим солн­це, ко­то­рое да­ет нам жизнь, но если бы бо­га­чи и аг­рес­со­ры по­пы­та­лись за­хва­тить се­бе солн­це, мы бы ска­за­ли: «Пусть солн­це по­гас­нет, пусть во­ца­рит­ся тьма, веч­ная ночь…»

— Лев Троц­кий (11 сен­тяб­ря 1918 г.)

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Dmitrii Volko­gonov, former court his­tor­i­an of Sta­lin­ism turned ra­bid an­ti­com­mun­ist, fam­ously dubbed Trot­sky the “de­mon” of the Oc­to­ber Re­volu­tion. When he com­manded the Red Army, dur­ing the Civil War, this was in­deed the im­age en­emies of the So­viet Uni­on had of him. He would ap­pear in Theodor Ad­orno’s dreams, and Wal­ter Ben­jamin de­voured his auto­bi­o­graphy and His­tory of the Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion. The psy­cho­ana­lyst Helmut Dah­mer, a stu­dent of Ad­orno, has writ­ten on the vari­ous in­tel­lec­tu­al res­on­ances and par­al­lels between Trot­sky’s Left Op­pos­i­tion and Horkheimer’s In­sti­tute of So­cial Re­search. I’ve poin­ted out both the ten­sions and con­nec­tions of Trot­sky with the Itali­an com­mun­ist lead­er Amedeo Bor­diga, if not Trot­sky­ism and Bor­di­gism (which are much fur­ther apart than their re­spect­ive founders).

Some of his works could already be found in a pre­vi­ous post, but here are a few more titles:

1. Le­on Trot­sky, 1905 (1907)
2. Le­on Trot­sky, Ter­ror­ism and Com­mun­ism: A Reply to Karl Kaut­sky (1920)
3. Le­on Trot­sky, Mil­it­ary Writ­ings, 1920-1923
4. Le­on Trot­sky, Lit­er­at­ure and Re­volu­tion (1923)
5. Le­on Trot­sky, The Chal­lenge of the Left Op­pos­i­tion: Writ­ings, 1923-1925
6. Le­on Trot­sky, My Life (1928)
7. Le­on Trot­sky, The Third In­ter­na­tion­al After Len­in (1928)
8. Le­on Trot­sky, His­tory of the Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion, Volume 1: The Over­throw of Tsar­ism (1929)
9. Le­on Trot­sky, His­tory of the Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion, Volume 2: At­tempt at Coun­ter­re­volu­tion (1930)
10. Le­on Trot­sky, His­tory of the Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion, Volume 3: The Tri­umph of the So­vi­ets (1931)

Here are some bio­graph­ies and mem­oirs by his friends, as well:

1. Vic­tor Serge and Nat­alia Se­dova, Life and Death of Le­on Trot­sky (1946)
2. Jean van Heijenoort, With Trot­sky in Ex­ile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacán (1978)
3. Dmitrii Volko­gonov, Trot­sky: The Etern­al Re­volu­tion­ary (1992)
4. Ian D. Thatch­er, Trot­sky (2002)
5. Joshua Ruben­stein, Le­on Trot­sky: A Re­volu­tion­ary’s Life (2011)

More be­low.

Dialectic wants YOU

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After Len­in, Trot­sky was per­haps the one re­volu­tion­ary best able to grasp the fraught dia­lect­ic­al unity of the­ory and prac­tice in his time. “Life has beaten ra­tion­al­ism out of me and taught me the in­ner work­ings of dia­lectic,” he re­called in My Life. Of course, in say­ing this Trot­sky was in no way es­chew­ing ra­tion­al ar­gu­ments or es­pous­ing ir­ra­tion­al­ism. Rather, “ra­tion­al­ism” for him meant the idea that all we have to do is ap­peal to in­di­vidu­als’ ra­tion­al self-in­terest in or­der to bring about so­cial­ism. Fol­low­ing Hegel’s philo­sophy of his­tory in this re­spect, Trot­sky be­lieved that reas­on mani­fes­ted it­self “be­hind the backs” of in­di­vidu­al agents who were in the mean­time busy pur­su­ing private, ir­ra­tion­al ends. “You may not be in­ter­ested in the dia­lectic,” he once re­portedly snapped at James Burnham. “But the dia­lectic is in­ter­ested in you.”

Georg Lukács wrote in his 1967 pre­face to the re­is­sue of His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness that he “al­ways re­jec­ted” Trot­sky­ite po­s­i­tions. Sev­er­al years later he told Perry An­der­son that he dis­liked Trot­sky im­me­di­ately upon their meet­ing in 1920, strik­ing him as a “pos­eur.” If one goes back to the ori­gin­al ver­sion of Lukács’ es­say “What is Or­tho­dox Marx­ism?” pub­lished in 1919, one reads: “As truly or­tho­dox, dia­lect­ic­al Marx­ists, Len­in and Trot­sky paid little at­ten­tion to the so-called ‘facts’… Len­in and Trot­sky un­der­stood the true real­ity, the ne­ces­sary ma­ter­i­al­iz­a­tion of the world re­volu­tion; it was to this real­ity, not to the ‘facts,’ that they ad­jus­ted their ac­tions. It was they who were vin­dic­ated by real­ity, and not the apostles of Real­politik… sway­ing to and fro like reeds in the wind.”

“What does this ter­rible word ‘dia­lectics’ mean?” Trot­sky rhet­or­ic­ally asked in 1940. Re­spond­ing to Hook, East­man, and oth­er Amer­ic­an skep­tic­al of Marx’s dia­lect­ic­al meth­od, he answered: “Dia­lectics means to con­sider things in their de­vel­op­ment, not in their stat­ic situ­ation.” He at­trib­uted this fail­ing to Anglo-Sax­on habits of thought, which had be­come en­am­ored of Wil­li­am James and John Dewey. “Prag­mat­ism, a mix­ture of ra­tion­al­ism and em­pir­i­cism, be­came the na­tion­al philo­sophy of the United States.” Be­cause it re­fused to grapple with real so­cial ant­ag­on­isms, this philo­sophy was “least of all use­ful suited to un­der­stand re­volu­tion­ary crises.” (Com­pare Trot­sky’s scattered cri­ti­cisms of the prag­mat­ists with Max Horkheimer’s more thor­oughgo­ing cri­tique in The Ec­lipse of Reas­on).

Lukács af­firmed in the up­dated 1923 ver­sion of “What is Or­tho­dox Marx­ism?” that “ma­ter­i­al­ist dia­lectic is re­volu­tion­ary dia­lectic,” and goes on to state that “the is­sue turns on the ques­tion of the­ory and prac­tice. And this not merely in the sense giv­en it by Marx when he says in his first cri­tique of Hegel that ‘the­ory be­comes a ma­ter­i­al force when it grips the masses.’ Even more to the point is the need to dis­cov­er those fea­tures and defin­i­tions both of the the­ory and ways of grip­ping the masses which con­vert the the­ory, the dia­lect­ic­al meth­od, in­to a vehicle of re­volu­tion.” The crux of the mat­ter was thus class con­scious­ness, or how to unite re­volu­tion­ary the­ory with pro­let­ari­an prac­tice in seiz­ing the pro­pi­tious mo­ment. For Trot­sky, it was posed as fol­lows:

Marx­ism con­siders it­self the con­scious ex­pres­sion of un­con­scious his­tor­ic­al pro­cesses. But these “un­con­scious” pro­cesses, in the his­torico-philo­soph­ic­al sense of the term — not the psy­cho­lo­gic­al — co­in­cide with its con­scious ex­pres­sion only at its highest point, when the masses, by sheer ele­ment­al pres­sure, break through the so­cial routine and give vic­tori­ous ex­pres­sion to the deep­est needs of his­tor­ic­al de­vel­op­ment. And at such mo­ments the highest the­or­et­ic­al con­scious­ness of the epoch merges with the im­me­di­ate ac­tion of those op­pressed masses, who are farthest away from the­ory. The cre­at­ive uni­on of the con­scious with the un­con­scious is what one usu­ally calls “in­spir­a­tion.” Re­volu­tion is the in­spired frenzy of his­tory.

In Trot­sky’s view dia­lectics formed the “spring” of Marx­ist sci­ence, strong but flex­ible. “Dia­lect­ic­al thought is like a spring,” he ana­lo­gized in 1923. “Springs are made from tempered steel.” Re­flect­ing on his self-edu­ca­tion in Marxi­an dia­lectics, Trot­sky con­fessed that he “did not ab­sorb his­tor­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism at once, dog­mat­ic­ally.” He con­tin­ued to state that “the dia­lectic meth­od re­vealed it­self to me for the first time not as ab­stract defin­i­tions but as a liv­ing spring which I’d found in the his­tor­ic­al pro­cess as I tried to un­der­stand it.” Against cer­tain of his dis­ciples who ex­pressed re­ser­va­tions about this meth­od of thought, he wrote “it is ab­so­lutely ne­ces­sary to ex­plain why Amer­ic­an ‘rad­ic­al’ in­tel­lec­tu­als ac­cept Marx­ism without the dia­lectic (a clock without a spring).” Like any Marx­ist, Trot­sky sought the an­swer to this in so­cial con­di­tions:

The secret is simple. In no oth­er coun­try has there been such re­jec­tion of class struggle as the land of “un­lim­ited op­por­tun­ity.” Deni­al of so­cial con­tra­dic­tions as the mov­ing force of de­vel­op­ment led to the deni­al of the dia­lectic as the lo­gic of con­tra­dic­tions in the do­main of the­or­et­ic­al thought. Just as in the sphere of polit­ics it was thought pos­sible every­body could be con­vinced of the cor­rect­ness of a “just” pro­gram by means of clev­er syl­lo­gisms and so­ci­ety could be re­con­struc­ted through “ra­tion­al” meas­ures, so in the sphere of the­ory it was ac­cep­ted as proved that Ar­is­toteli­an lo­gic, lowered to the level of “com­mon sense,” was suf­fi­cient for the solu­tion of all ques­tions.

To see just how de­cis­ive this meth­od­o­logy was in in­form­ing Trot­sky’s re­volu­tion­ary out­look, we must ex­am­ine an­oth­er is­sue, one which he did not ex­pli­citly them­at­ize: re­ific­a­tion.

Reification and revolution

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Karl Korsch did not trust Trot­sky when the Bolshev­ik Re­volu­tion first broke out. By the mid-1920s, however, after his con­ver­sion to Len­in­ism — short-lived though this would prove to be — Korsch had come to fa­vor Bron­shtein’s po­s­i­tion with­in the Comin­tern over that of Zinoviev. His com­rade with­in the Itali­an party, Bor­diga, thus wrote to him in 1926: “You, who used to be highly sus­pi­cious of Trot­sky, have im­me­di­ately sub­scribed to the pro­gram of un­con­di­tion­al solid­ar­ity with the Rus­si­an op­pos­i­tion, bet­ting on Trot­sky rather than on Zinoviev (a pref­er­ence I share).” Sub­sequently Korsch would dis­avow Trot­sky and Len­in­ism tout court as the dec­ade drew to a close, as Trot­sky in turn wrote in 1929 that “Korschist tend­en­cies must be mer­ci­lessly con­demned.” Even if it did not last long, however, their con­flu­ence dur­ing this peri­od is sig­ni­fic­ant.

Lukács’ ap­pre­ci­ation of Trot­sky around this time ran even deep­er, des­pite his later re­cant­a­tions: “[Op­por­tun­ists] re­ject as im­possible the emer­gence of any­thing that is rad­ic­ally new of which we can have no ‘ex­per­i­ence’. It was Trot­sky in his po­lem­ics against Kaut­sky who brought out this dis­tinc­tion most clearly, al­though it had been touched upon in the de­bates on the war: ‘For the fun­da­ment­al Bolshev­ist pre­ju­dice con­sists pre­cisely in the idea that one can only learn to ride when one is sit­ting firmly on a horse’.” In the foot­note ap­pen­ded to this state­ment, Lukács went a step fur­ther. Trot­sky’s line of ar­gu­ment in Ter­ror­ism and Com­mun­ism ap­prox­im­ated Hegel’s epi­stem­o­lo­gic­al ar­gu­ment, where­as Kaut­sky’s ar­gu­ment was ef­fect­ively ana­log­ous to the ag­nost­ic at­ti­tude of Kant:

I hold it to be no mere co­in­cid­ence that Trot­sky’s po­lem­ic against Kaut­sky in the sphere of polit­ics should have re­peated the es­sen­tial ar­gu­ment ad­duced by Hegel in his at­tack on Kant’s the­ory of know­ledge (there is of course no philo­lo­gic­al con­nec­tion). Kaut­sky, in­cid­ent­ally, later claimed that the laws of cap­it­al­ism were un­con­di­tion­ally val­id for the fu­ture [i.e., like nat­ur­al laws], even though it was not pos­sible to at­tain to a con­crete know­ledge of the ac­tu­al trends.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, this is con­son­ant with Lukács’ ar­gu­ment throughout His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness that Kaut­sky had suc­cumbed to the re­ific­a­tion of so­cial re­la­tions that took place un­der cap­it­al­ism, sta­bil­iz­ing and pet­ri­fy­ing that which is his­tor­ic­ally vari­able and flu­id. What was it in Trot­sky’s ar­gu­ment against Kaut­sky that so re­minded Lukács of Hegel’s ar­gu­ment against Kant? “The the­or­et­ic­al apostasy of Kaut­sky lies just in this point,” Trot­sky wrote in Ter­ror­ism and Com­mun­ism. “Hav­ing re­cog­nized the prin­ciple of demo­cracy as ab­so­lute and etern­al, he has stepped back from ma­ter­i­al­ist dia­lectics to nat­ur­al law.” (No won­der Bor­diga was so fond of this book by Trot­sky, we may note, as he like­wise re­fused to el­ev­ate demo­cracy to a time­less ideal stand­ing above class re­la­tions, “the demo­crat­ic prin­ciple in its ap­plic­a­tion to the bour­geois state, which claims to em­brace all classes.”)

Trot­sky, like Len­in and En­gels and even oc­ca­sion­ally Marx him­self, did oc­ca­sion­ally seek to vin­dic­ate dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism as a meth­od ap­plic­able to so­cial and nat­ur­al sci­ence in equal meas­ure. Yet this was just as of­ten not the case, as these thinkers re­jec­ted the no­tion that so­cial dy­nam­ics be­haved in a man­ner as con­stant as nat­ur­al law. It has be­come very com­mon among young ad­epts of more soph­ist­ic­ated read­ings of Cap­it­al that Marx did not pro­pose a new polit­ic­al eco­nomy in place of the old one, but rather a cri­tique of polit­ic­al eco­nomy. Al­legedly, this was a sub­tlety lost on sub­sequent gen­er­a­tions of Marx­ists, who sought to es­tab­lish Marx­ism as a pos­it­ive sci­ence cap­able of ex­plain­ing and pre­dict­ing every phe­nomen­on. However, this ca­ri­ca­ture does not hold up when one con­siders pas­sages like the fol­low­ing from Trot­sky:

Marx­ist polit­ic­al eco­nomy is an in­con­test­able sci­ence; but it is not a sci­ence of how to man­age a busi­ness, or how to com­pete on the mar­ket, or how to build trusts. It is the sci­ence of how in a cer­tain epoch cer­tain eco­nom­ic re­la­tions (cap­it­al­ist) took shape, and what con­di­tions these re­la­tions in­tern­ally, and con­sti­tutes their law­ful­ness. Eco­nom­ic laws es­tab­lished by Marx are not etern­al truths but char­ac­ter­ist­ic only of a spe­cif­ic epoch of man­kind’s eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment; and, in any case, they are not etern­al prin­ciples as is rep­res­en­ted by the bour­geois Manchester school, ac­cord­ing to which private own­er­ship of the means of pro­duc­tion, buy­ing and selling, com­pet­i­tion, and the rest are etern­al prin­ciples of eco­nomy, de­riv­ing from hu­man nature (about which, however, there is ab­so­lutely noth­ing etern­al).

In his 1937 in­tro­duc­tion to the quint­es­sen­tial works of Karl Marx, Trot­sky re­it­er­ated this point, re­cog­niz­ing that it was ana­chron­ist­ic to speak of “polit­ic­al eco­nomy” in pre­cap­it­al­ist epochs. Polit­ic­al-eco­nom­ic cat­egor­ies could only be ret­ro­act­ively ap­plied to such so­ci­et­ies, since polit­ic­al eco­nomy it­self was an ar­ti­fact of bour­geois mod­ern­ity:

It was not Marx’s aim to dis­cov­er the “etern­al laws” of eco­nomy. He denied the ex­ist­ence of such laws. The his­tory of the de­vel­op­ment of hu­man so­ci­ety is the his­tory of the suc­ces­sion of vari­ous sys­tems of eco­nomy, each op­er­at­ing in ac­cord­ance with its own laws. The trans­ition from one sys­tem to an­oth­er was al­ways de­term­ined by the growth of the pro­duct­ive forces, i.e., of tech­nique and the or­gan­iz­a­tion of labor. Up to a cer­tain point, so­cial changes are quant­it­at­ive in char­ac­ter and do not al­ter the found­a­tions of so­ci­ety, i.e., the pre­val­ent forms of prop­erty. But a point is reached when the ma­tured pro­duct­ive forces can no longer con­tain them­selves with­in the old forms of prop­erty; then fol­lows a rad­ic­al change in the so­cial or­der, ac­com­pan­ied by shocks. The prim­it­ive com­mune was either su­per­seded or sup­ple­men­ted by slavery; slavery was suc­ceeded by serf­dom with its feud­al su­per­struc­ture; the com­mer­cial de­vel­op­ment of cit­ies brought Europe in the six­teenth cen­tury to the cap­it­al­ist or­der, which thereupon passed through sev­er­al stages. In his Cap­it­al Marx does not study eco­nomy in gen­er­al, but cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy, which has its own spe­cif­ic laws. Only in passing does he refer to oth­er eco­nom­ic sys­tems, to elu­cid­ate the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of cap­it­al­ism.

The self-suf­fi­cient eco­nomy of the prim­it­ive peas­ant fam­ily has no need of a “polit­ic­al eco­nomy,” for it is dom­in­ated on the one hand by the forces of nature and on the oth­er by the forces of tra­di­tion. The self-con­tained nat­ur­al eco­nomy of the Greeks or the Ro­mans, foun­ded on slave labor, was ruled by the will of the slave-own­er, whose “plan” in turn was dir­ectly de­term­ined by the laws of nature and routine. The same might also be said about the me­di­ev­al es­tate with its peas­ant serfs. In all these in­stances eco­nom­ic re­la­tions were clear and trans­par­ent in their prim­it­ive crudity. But the case of con­tem­por­ary so­ci­ety is al­to­geth­er dif­fer­ent. It des­troyed the old self-con­tained con­nec­tions and the in­her­ited modes of labor. The new eco­nom­ic re­la­tions have linked cit­ies and vil­lages, provinces and na­tions. Di­vi­sion of labor has en­com­passed the plan­et. Hav­ing shattered tra­di­tion and routine, these bonds have not com­posed them­selves ac­cord­ing to some def­in­ite plan, but rather apart from hu­man con­scious­ness and foresight. The in­ter­de­pend­ence of men, groups, classes, na­tions, which fol­lows from di­vi­sion of labor, is not dir­ec­ted by any­one. People work for each oth­er without know­ing each oth­er, without in­quir­ing about one an­oth­er’s needs, in the hope, and even with the as­sur­ance, that their re­la­tions will some­how reg­u­late them­selves. And by and large they do, or rather, were wont to.

So much for the al­leged vul­gar­ity of “tra­di­tion­al Marx­ism” as a whole. One might take is­sue with Trot­sky’s off­hand re­mark about com­mer­cial­iz­a­tion lead­ing straight­away, on its own, to cap­it­al­ist so­cial re­la­tions, but this is a minor point quickly glossed over.