The Baleful Last Days of Leon Trotsky
Saturday 27 March 2010 at 09:39 By the time that Leon Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 after nearly four years of exile in Mexico, the largest concentration of his followers was to be found in the US in the wake of the New Deal.
Why Did American Leftists Love Trotsky?
Why this should be so is partly derivative of the fact that interwar fascism and Stalinist aggression 'did for' most Trotskyists in Europe but it also represented something in the state of the American Far Left that drew it towards the Old Man (as he was called).
We might cite the anarcho-syndicalist legacy of the IWW, the collapse of Eugene Debs' democratic challenge to the system in 1918 and the fact that Roosevelt had created a form of socially aware liberal capitalism that made authoritarian communism a non-starter amongst the American working class.
From the beginning of American Trotskyism, we can see tension (present in all Left movements in the democratic West) between the horny-handed sons of soil, authoritarian, often mid-Western, quite prepared to put fists in the service of change and intellectuals telling them what to think and do.
The attraction of Trotskyism to cosmopolitan New York liberal and Jewish intellectuals lay in part in the fact that Trotsky could combine the attributes of proletarian war hero with ostensible free thinker and modernist for the libertarian and machismo culture of the American Left of the day.
It was, however, what Marx had referred to as an 'internal contradiction' of the first order and one whose eventual resolution reverberates down to our own day. Our budding Hemingways with a social conscience were not constitutionally fitted to bow to any authority in the long run.
Trotsky certainly had a remarkable ability to seem a tad more liberal than he actually was. Stalin's brutal and obviously manufactured war on the Russian Left Opposition (the Purges) made Trotsky the underdog. American 'bourgeois' progressive liberals made a career out of defending the underdog.
Meanwhile, operating in a milieu where surrealists and muralists found Trotskyism a more amenable artistic model than Stalin's simplistic socialist realism (essentially, offering art as mass propaganda), Trotsky's writings on art implied an openness to modernism (probably more apparent than real).
Bertrand M. Patenaude refers in his recent book (see below) to a certain snobbisme and orientalism that may be relevant - "[Trotsky was] the cultivated, Western, internationalist alternative to the peasant, Asiatic and nationalistic Stalin".
Trotsky - Flawed 'Hero'
Intellectuals like to have heroes that are reflections of themselves. Although you can certainly buy intellectuals with cash as the State Department discovered in the 1950s, flattery is much cheaper.
The illusion that you could be both free and Left in Trotsky's world (especially as news emerged of the growing repression within Russia itself and the vicious assault on the POUM in Catalonia by Communist operatives) drew in what can only be described as worshippers.
But let's make it clear - Trotsky was only a hero if a hero can be a narcissist of exceptional moral blindness who would probably have been a disaster for Russia, probably worse than Stalin if civil war and chaos in a peasant society are worse than internal tyranny and the gulag in an industrialising one.
The two men were two peas in a pod. Trotsky consistently lacked judgement during the revolutionary period despite his dynamism in the execution of policy (and of opponents) and he possessed an ego the size of the Kremlin.
The fact that a brutal choice lay between the Man of Steel and this over-intellectual egotist suggests just what a wrong turn the Bolshevik Revolution proved to be.
Kerensky's blind refusal to bring Russia out of the war and mobilise workers and peasants for democratic socialism led to an unnecessary revolution that gave Russia the eventual choice between two monsters.
Perhaps we only had the chance to consider Stalin the worse monster because Trotsky failed to get his chance to show what he could do with the full force of the State.
His treatment of the Kronstadt mutineers alone tells us what Russian workers, peasants and intellectuals had to fear from this man - a round of executions without trial to 'save the revolution'.
Trans-National Ideological Gang War
What we have though in Trotsky's last years is not a story of ideology and politics so much as one of trans-national gang warfare in which our hero is a defeated don, holed up in a near-fortress, with inexperienced young political hoodlums.
By 1940, this group was facing a direct murderous assault on its compound and, eventually, the most brutal and fanatic personal attack imaginable on the Old Man himself. Only in Mexico would a leading artist launch a murderous attack by an assault team on a political figure!
And only Soviet Communism could find a killer like Mercader to do the deed and take the rap in the way that he did - subsequently awarded great honours in the Soviet Union after many years in a Mexican jail.
The fact that this war was conducted over the supply of ideas and power rather than guns, contraband, drugs or prostitutes does not change the essential manner in which business was being conducted. Trotsky was just a less competent gangster than his rival.
What Stalin had was the massive reserves of Russian state power to ensure the eventual elimination of not only Trotsky but of any future leaders with his 'brand'.
Despite the existence of the Fourth International, Trotskyism effectively died with Trotsky in 1940 as anything more than an irritant and pot-stirrer to capitalists and communists alike. It is now just a convenenient bugaboo for the Right of the Left and natural 'splitter' amongst advocates of real change.
Ideology As Biological Dead-End
Having successfully disposed of one dynasty, the Romanovs, Stalin certainly seemed determined not to allow a new Soviet one to appear, the Trotskys - anyone connected to Trotsky within reach of Stalin simply disappeared.
Trotsky was proof positive of ideological obsession as a biological dead end as his gene pool was systematically wiped out by his opponent. At a human level, the story of the killing and disappearances of Trotsky's family is heart-rending and he was by no means immune to the pain of loss.
If we have sympathy it is rendered a little less likely to cause a sleepless night by the sure knowledge that he seems to have had few such nights himself over those he had murdered for equally valid reasons of state in the Civil War.
Perhaps Trotsky might only have survived if the US had permitted him entry. To murder a political opponent in Mexico is one thing, to do so within the rising superpower is another - poison would probably have had to have been substituted for an icepick.
However, the Old Man being an acquired taste for only a small section of American political society, there was no official interest in giving him sanctuary or creating a centre for revolutionary subversion to the Left of the New Deal settlement or unnecessary diplomatic problems at a time of global instability.
The Trajectory of American Trotskyism
But it is American Trotskyists who must interest us. Their numbers may have been small but the ideological squabbles of the late 1930s, taking place while the British Left was preoccupied with the very immediate threat of fascism, proved to have unintended consequences many decades later.
The hatred of Stalin and Communism within America may be associated with the American Right but it was often at its most virulent in the disappointed American Left. Communist bureaucratism deeply offended American values.
In Europe, the challenge of fascism was so immediate that it put many radical socialists firmly into the Communist camp despite repeated political monstrosities (the purge trials of the 1930s, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, later, the systematic colonisation of Eastern Europe).
In the US, a combination of free worker resentment of Communist practice and Trotskyist rage against Stalin placed much of the American Left in a position of an aggressive universalism which was to privilege the export of American values against the claims of what came to be called the 'evil empire'.
There may be another factor not often recognised. American East Coast WASP 'progressive bureaucratism' was resented by many working people and the claims that Roosevelt was moving towards 'capitalist' dictatorship appeared credible in the context of the time.
The American Left was operating (outside New York) in an inherited context of worker and small farmer populism and Feds tended to break strikes while characters like the wobbies and Al Capone could produce more social benefits than history often likes to record.
American federalism is a form of 'bureaucratic collectivism' (this term will become relevant in a moment) and it is a force that is felt oppressively in London today as the extraterritorial claims of the Department of Justice and Treasury.
To move from a critique of Soviet 'bureaucratic collectivism' to concerns about US 'bureaucratic collectivism' in a populist context may well be at the very core of the trajectory, so puzzling to Europeans, by which Far Left American intelligentsiya ended up as part of the Reaganite claque.
In Extremis - James Burnham and Anti-Sovietism
The key figure, of course, is James Burnham who argued as early as 1937 that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a caste (as Trotsky suggested) but a new exploiting class so that the Soviet Union was not a degenerate workers' state but represented this 'bureaucratic collectivism'.
He was almost certainly right but this revisionism, which caused major splits in the Movement, showed how Trotsky's use value in America was not as independent Marxist thinker at all but as an anti-Communist.
If you condemn bureaucratic collectivism, it soon gets to mean that you are inclined to prefer individualism and certainly free trades unions and pluralism - that is, if you cannot de-bureaucratise collectivism.
The trajectory to free market internationalism which is central to the post-war Western project was embedded even at this very early stage in the thinking of the American Marxist revisionists of the late 1930s.
Pragmatism And Dialectical Materialism
To understand the seeds of the shift, we have, regrettably, to revert to Marxist philosophy - in particular the inability of Trotsky's European followers to get Americans to take the philosophical core of Marxism, dialectical materialism (as developed by Engels), seriously.
Dialectical materialism, already intellectually under severe pressure to Trotsky's dismay during his last years amongst his US followers, crumbled quickly under liberal pressure and anti-Communist virulence in America.
Max Eastman represented the tendency, you might call it romantic-radical, to be moved deeply by the Russian Revolution itself but to hold great doubts not only about its results but about the German Idealist theory of dialectical materialism, especially that of Engels, that underpinned it.
As Trotsky understood things, there was no Marxist-Leninist revolution without dialectical materialism and perhaps that's why the Kronstadt mutineers had to be executed. But Eastman must be seen as operating in a different context, that of Dewey and American pragmatism and progressivism.
Trotsky intellectually feared American pragmatism with great justification. Trotsky was trying to be a better Communist than the Communists when history wanted him to be a better anti-Communist.
In the end, we have a problem for Trotsky that could not be resolved in his favour - the largest number of Trotskyists were in the US, Americans were indelibly pragmatist, ergo Trotskyism could either be dialectical materialist or it could be at the heart of the American Left but it could not be both.
The struggle went on for some years (most notably in the debates between Eastman and Sidney Hook) but, with dialectical materialism captured for the global Communist Party, Trotskyism did not stand a chance as a credible political movement in the American century.
In the end, Eastman, Hook, Burnham, Dewey, Wilson, Shachtman - all those leading thinkers of the American Left of Trotsky's last years who were opposed to the Stalinist capture of the Revolution from their different perspectives - rejected dialectical materialism as a credible philosophy.
End of game for Trotsky intellectually. The Old Man was past it!
Anti-Sovietism And Small Nations
The debates surrounding the purge trials, the invasion of Poland and Finland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact (and around Marxist philosophy), led to a Minority breakaway and to the eventual trajectory of key intellectuals all the way across to what would become the hardest form of Republican anti-Sovietism.
The support for petty nationalist rights against Soviet pretensions is not unimportant in this context because a key part of the Republican anti-Soviet model would come to be support for the often fascist-inclined small states of Europe and for the 'progressive' state of Israel.
Zionism entered into the American Left as a powerful force and thence across to the Republican Right because it 'felt right' as a counter to the Soviet imperial approach to the 'national question' on which Stalin was an expert.
This issue of nationalism and internationalism would require another full posting in itself but it is critical. Trotsky himself was highly 'cosmopolitan' - Jewish in origin but secular and with an anti-nationalist belief in the need to spread Marxism-Leninism as a universal creed.
Stalin was intent on building socialism in one country but not as a Russian nationalist - the sheer force of a strong super state could 'liberate' workers opportunistically from strength, relying on loyal blunt instruments in the Red Army and the Party rather than Napoleonic romanticism.
One can see more 'internal contradictions' immediately. The universalism of Trotsky must support Soviet external strategies despite Stalin. American Trotskyists, raised on wars of national liberation and migrant resentments and aspirations, could not.
In the end, as we shall see, the intellectual Trotskyists created a hybrid in which universal values included the rights to self-determination of small nations with, in the small print, the caveat that they must be 'progressive' (i.e. liberal or socialist) in their values.
The consonance of this hybridisation of American values and Trotskyist universalism with the ideology underpinning the hight point of the post-war American imperium is not accidental. Trotskyism logically led to liberal internationalism's alliance with neo-conservatism simply because of 'how it thought'.
Towards The Republican Right
Not all the 'Partisan Review' mob of the 1930s ceased to be socialists but the trajectory was clearly from late 1930s Trotskyism through Cold War Liberalism to the origins of neo-conservatism for many - and the common denominator in all these positions was anti-Stalinism and anti-'bad' nationalism.
If the ideology of the modern Anglo-American imperium was born to a surprising degree out of Trotsky's circle in those last years of his life, the key factor in this was the differentiation between types of nationalism.
True self-determination had elided from being a workers' state under the dictatorship of the proletariat to being a free workers' state and thence a democratic state. The point was that small nations (like Israel) that were progressive had greater rights of protection against tyranny than others.
James Burnham, for example, the most extreme example, moved from a central position in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party across to Reaganite groupie over thirty or forty years and the move seems, in retrospect, surprisingly natural.
Often but not always Jewish East Coast intellectuals, filled with righteous indignation at Stalin's crimes and replacing the inevitable victory of the proletariat with the inevitable victory of liberal capitalism and 'freedom', many on the Left moved sharply cross the political spectrum.
They influenced eventually, and alongside European conservative nationalists, the circles that eventually coalesced as neo-conservatism or became the base of a more moderate urban Democrat Right represented today by very conservative trades unions and by Senator Lieberman.
Ironically, the high point of that grim European Idealism in politics that started with the French Revolution was probably not the furthest extent of the Nazi or Soviet Empires but the furthest extent of the Anglo-American Imperial tradition in the post-invasion occupation of Iraq.
If you consider that Saddam Hussein consciously modelled his methods in Stalin, then the Iraq War might be regarded as the Marxist struggle of the 1930s replayed once again as both tragedy and farce! If you really are determined on black humour, you can see the funny side of this.
Two sides without the nonsensical philosophy of their ancestors playing radical internationalist and nationalist roles little different from those of Trotsky and Stalin during the struggle for policy and power in Russia in the 1920s. As before, so later - the one with the most firepower wins.
An American Story
But we should not exaggerate the importance of Anglo-Saxon intellectual Trotskyists as representatives of the international revolutionary Left globally. The numbers active in the Minority Trotskyist Movement were always very small. But, in American intellectual history, these were 'players'!
The opposing Majority Fourth International continues to this day with a strong base in France. The French Trotskyists, who hold to the faith, have inherited opportunities created by the collapse of Communism as ideological home for the left trades unions - but this is France.
The revolutionary vanguardism inherited from Lenin (which Trotsky had actually opposed at the time) and the intellectualism of the circle around the Partisan Review created a fairly vibrant politically active set who came to live their hates and anger.
They redirected their universalism and idealism into forms that were imbued with a typically American pragmatism.
The numbers of former Trotskyists who supported the Iraq adventure and who have underpinned the transformation of New Labour (a deeply transtlantic project) is far more than chance would permit. The mentality is consistent.
Trotsky himself gives us a clue to the origins of this thinking when he stubbornly insisted, against the evidence, that the Soviet Union was a progressive state, refusing to condemn the Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland and advocating full American support for Britain against the Nazi threat.
It would not have taken much, once Trotsky was murdered, for increasing numbers of former followers who disagreed with him on the Soviet invasions to shift that 'tide of history' commitment to a different state power as vector for global revolution - the United States.
And The Man?
Trotsky was a political Einstein in some respects - but this was not a man to be followed unless you were prepared for your bones to whiten on some far off plain.
This was a man, like Napoleon or Hitler, who saw other persons as adjuncts to his ideas, expendable in a cause in which he, supreme egotist, must live regardless of others because of the values and beliefs he embodied.
British intelligence agent Bruce Lockhart cruelly wrote of Trotsky in full-on revolutionary mode: "He strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it."
The surprise is not that people like him exist but that there are so many mugs in the world prepared to subsume themselves under such people.
It's much more than the banality of evil expressed in Milgram's depressing experiments, it is also about the determination of many people to embody their myth of the world in a person (whether Pope or dictator) to whom they will give up their autonomy as an act of 'heroic' self denial.
In the end, there is only one justification for such 'faith' - that the ultimate vision of salvation (or in this case liberation) permits the cracking of eggs to make the omelette. Again, the similarity with the thought patterns of hard line liberal internationalists is striking. Something must be done (strike pose)!
For a man to sentence his children (in effect) to death for his ideals will strike many as wilfully stupid or inhuman, while for fit young men and women to throw themselves, their labour value and their lives at the feet of others in the way that they did for Trotsky as just plain stupid.
But is it any more stupid than joining the military for patriotic reasons? There may be a marginally greater reason in dying and killing (from a certain perspective) for a better world than the profits of Wall Street - but the rest of us ought to beware of such people!
By 1937, though he fought on gallantly, clinging to his already outmoded beliefs, Trotsky was already an utter political failure whose death in 1940 possibly came at the right time to maintain his credibility for his remaining supporters.
By 1940, he was running out of money, increasingly politically irrelevant, with supporters who were beginning to walk away from ideas honed in the struggle against feudalism at the turn of the century.
Had he lived through to the late 1940s, his fate might have been to have been picked up by the anti-communists of the Cold War era and be turned into a political Vlasov - a convenient tool to goad Stalin and split the Left.
Trotsky as an old and weak king with a subsidised court, a Jacobite in a world of Hanoverians? Maybe it was best that he was forced to move on and died a martyr to his cause.
[With thanks to Bernard M. Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (London, 2009) for the background. The opinions and judgements are TPPR's not his throughout this Posting. However, the book does manage to bring the man to life and is recommended.
Patenaude is very good at interconnecting family concerns , the left-wing politics of Mexico, the distrust and espionage undermining the networks of Trotskyists in Europe and the often very young circles of workers and intellectuals in North America who provided money and muscle to his court in exile.]