International Socialists

Evan Poata-Smith looks at Leon Trotsky's remarkable contribution to the socialist tradition

 

 

Leon Trotsky was born in 1879 and became a revolutionary whilst still a teenager. By the age of just 26 he was Chairperson of the Petrograd Soviet, or workers' council, during the 1905 revolution. He became the most important leader, after Lenin, of the 1917 revolution, and organised and the led the Red Army against enormous odds to victory over the armies of two dozen imperial powers in the Civil War.

 

Perhaps his most enduring legacy today, apart from his theoretical innovations and practical leadership, is that during the terrible decades of the 1920s and 1930s when Stalin was committing barbarous crimes in the name of "socialism," and the brutal Nazi regime was committing atrocities in Germany, Leon Trotsky kept alive the tradition of socialism from below.

 

The working class movement has many martyrs, but Trotsky's position is unique. As Tony Cliff puts it, Trotsky "was murdered not once but time and time again." His entire family, then thousands of supporters, all fell victim to Stalin's murderous regime.

 

The Stalinist counter-revolution had destroyed socialism's democratic essence and established the most vicious mechanism of exploitation in order to accumulate capital. A new bureaucratic ruling class was to oversee the transformation of a poor and backward country into a modern power, whatever the cost in human terms. That such a perspective could be called "socialist" was a horrendous infamy. Against this background Trotsky's dissenting voice was a cry in the wilderness.

 

It was Trotsky's great virtue to insist against all odds that socialism was rooted in the struggle for human freedom.

 

Throughout the 1920s until his death at the hands of a Stalinist agent in 1940, Trotsky fought desperately to try and build a revolutionary socialist movement based on the principles of Marx and Lenin. At a time when Stalin's counter-revolution was reshaping Russia and the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini was sweeping across Europe, crushing workers' movements in its path, this was no mean task.

 

 

Internationalism

Against the nationalistic notion of "socialism in one country" Trotsky asserted that socialism could only come into being on a world scale:

 

The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent one in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our planet It is a reactionary, narrow dream, to try and achieve "socialism in one country."

 

In this Trotsky defended the uncompromising internationalism of Marx, Luxemburg and Lenin.

 

 

United Front

Trotsky provided a brilliant and original analysis of Nazism. With increasing urgency, he warned of the catastrophe which would follow the rise of the Nazis. A catastrophe which would threaten not only the German, but also the international working class. He repeatedly called for a united front of all labour movements and organisations to crush the fascists.

 

Stalin did everything to sabotage efforts to build a united front under fascism. Indeed, under Stalinist manipulation, Communist Parties all over Europe were instructed to reject any united front with Social Democrats (the equivalent in those days to Aotearoa's Labour and Alliance parties) against fascism. Social Democracy, dubbed "social fascism," was declared the main enemy, not the Nazis.

 

Tragically Trotsky's prophetic warnings and urgent calls were not heeded. If his analysis and proposals for action had been accepted it is almost certain that the Nazis would have been defeated.

 

Even if he had never developed the theory of permanent revolution, never played a leading role in the revolution of 1917, nor built the Red Army, Trotsky's contribution to keeping alive the socialist flame during the 1930s would have ensured him a place in the history of international socialism.

 

Trotsky claimed that, even during 1917 when he personally played a leading role second only to Lenin, his contribution to the socialist tradition was not indispensable.

 

But during the 1930s his contribution was absolutely indispensable. Trotsky battled against incredible odds to keep the real Marxist tradition of Marx and Engels, Luxemburg and Lenin, alive through an era dominated by Stalinism in the East and fascism in the West.

 

 

Permanent Revolution

Trotsky's greatest and most original contribution to Marxism was his theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky developed this theory at a time when practically all Marxists believed that socialist revolution was possible only in advanced industrial countries.

 

Russia's backwardness and belated development meant that it had entered the twentieth century without shaking off the middle ages, without passing through the stages that the West had already passed, like the Reformation and the bourgeois revolution, (for instance, England in the 1660s or the French Revolution). It was widely believed that in order to establish workers' power in backward countries such as Russia, they would have to experience exactly the same historical and technological developments that had already occurred in advanced countries. This meant that any revolutionary change in Russia would have to pass through a lengthy stage of "bourgeois" or liberal democracy, like Britain or France.

 

Trotsky rejected the view that Russia would have to conform to strict stages of  development before the working class would be mature enough to pose the question of socialist revolution. He argued that backward countries would be forced to skip a whole series of intermediate stages. In other words, backward countries would not take things in the same order. As Trotsky put it: "savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles at once, without travelling the road which lay between these two weapons in the past."

 

 

Class struggle

Thus a socialist revolution in Russia did not depend directly upon the state or on the productive forces, but upon the conditions of the class struggle, upon the international situation, and upon a series of subjective factors  tradition, initiative, readiness for struggle.

 

Trotsky argued that the bourgeoisie would be incapable of providing a consistent, democratic revolutionary solution to the problem posed by feudalism and imperialism. In this way, a consistent solution to Russia's problems would necessitate moving beyond the bounds of bourgeois private property. As he put it "the democratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist, and thereby becomes a permanent revolution."

 

The 1917 Revolution in Russia proved all of Trotsky's assumptions right.

 

 

Conclusion

Unfortunately, during the 1930s, because of his isolation from the great workers' movements, Trotsky committed a serious theoretical error. Believing that Russia's nationalised economy represented a lasting gain from the revolution, he declared the USSR to be a "degenerated" workers' state. This position would cause enormous confusion amongst many revolutionary socialists in the years to come.

 

But there is no need to dwell on this mistake. Today, as we face the same terrifying realities of capitalism Trotsky described and analysed seventy years ago, his writings and deeds still provide a basis for building a democratic alternative to that system.