Trotsky?

Writing about Trotsky is risky, Tony Blair loves not only Cliff Richards, George Bush and nuclear power but has claimed to be a fan of Deutscher's biography. I guess there are a minority of Greens who believe that ecosocialists like me belong to some kind of 'sect', writing about Trotsky will also fuel David Icke conspiracy links between me and the Bilderbergs but here goes, these are my thoughts on Trotsky, a version of this went into red pepper.

I think perhaps lamely that while he was an advance on Stalin, he was far from grassroots democratic....I am unaware of anything environmental from his pen, Marx and Engels were great generally on ecology and even Lenin supported wildlife parks, Trotsky I may be wrong but I don't think he was even the slightest shade of green





The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast. Isaac Deutscher 2004 (1963) Verso. London.

I must admit that I have been fascinated by Marxism for twenty years but never read more than a line of Trotsky. I will read anything by Marx, I even have volume forty two of Marx Engels Collected Work in my bathroom. Marx was sharply interested in ecology, philosophy, history, economics and refreshingly rude to opponents. His shopping lists reveal the mysterious world of the late Victorian off license. Trotsky, well one thinks of 57 varieties of paper sellers, dry as dust meetings and tyrannical micro political sects, deformed workers states, Tony Cliff, paper sellers, ever more ornate and complex political ‘lines‘. Trotsky architect of the Russian Revolution, leader of the Red Army, founder of the Fourth International, crusader against first Czars and then Stalin seems almost forgotten today. Yet after Lenin he was probably the most important socialist leader and thinker of the 20th century. Deutscher's three volume biography which has recently been reissued by Verso should be read both because any attempt to promote radical social change will come up against the issues faced by Trotsky and because it’s a brilliant read, more like a novel than a political biography.
Deutscher keeps the pace up right up to the end when a slippery Stalinist agent kills Trotsky, exiled in Mexico, with an ice axe.
His skull smashed, his face gored, Trotsky jumped up, hurled at the murderer whatever object was at hand, books, inkpots, even the Dictaphone, and then threw himself at him […] During those moments a furious struggle went on in the study, Trotsky’s last struggle. He fought it like a tiger. He grappled with the murderer, bit his hand, and wrenched the ice-axe from him. The murderer was so confounded that he did not strike another blow and did not use pistol or dagger
Back on page 36 of volume one, its 1900 forty years before his violent death and the twenty one year old revolutionary has just married Alexandra Sokolovskaya his slightly older socialist feminist mentor in a Moscow prison. Soon they are exiled to Siberia, travelling with a bizarre religious sect of self-castrating gnostics who normally only make a walk in appearance in the most poorly of researched books by Dan Brown or David Icke:
The Bronsteins were sent down the Lena river on a large barge, which was crowded with Skoptsy, dressed in white clothes, chanting prayers, and dancing wildly. The Bronsteins were ordered to disembark in the village of Ust-Kut, which during the gold rush on the Lena had served as a base for east Siberian settlers. The gold-diggers had by now moved further east and north, and Ust-Kut was a god-forsaken place with about a hundred peasant huts, dirty and plagued by vermin and mosquitoes. The inhabitants, sick with unfulfilled dreams of wealth, were madly addicted to vodka. Here the Bronsteins stayed for a time, during which he studied Das Kapital, ‘brushing the cockroaches off the pages’ of Karl Marx. Later they obtained permission to move to another place, 150 miles further east, where he worked as book-keeper for an illiterate millionaire peasant-merchant. His employer conducted business over a vast area and was the uncrowned ruler of its Tunguz inhabitants. Bronstein watched this huge capitalist enterprise growing on virgin Siberian soil - he would cite it in the future as an illustration of that combination of backwardness and capitalist development which was characteristic of Russia
For me this blend of vivid storytelling plus strong theoretical content makes Deutscher’s three volumes an unputdownable winner. I am not alone on this point, Graham Greene wrote when originally published that it was ‘the most exciting reading of the year…Surely this must be counted among the greatest biographies in the English language’. The jacket covers list similar plaudits from Mike Davies, Sheila Rowbotham and A.J.P. Taylor . Isaac Deutscher was both sympathetic and critical of Trotsky. A member of the Polish Communist Party, he left because of his horror at the abuses of Stalinism but believed that Trotsky while a heroic figure was also flawed. Ironically if Deutscher had remained a member of the Polish Party he would have almost certainly been killed when Stalin invited their leadership to Moscow so he could execute them.
Born Lev Bronstein in 1879, Trotsky was the son unusually of a Jewish Ukrainian farmers. Russia was in turmoil, the serfs had only recently been liberated, the mass of the population lived in dire poverty and the Narodiks, anarchists romantically attached to rural socialism, were carrying out terrorist spectaculars culminating in the killing of Czar Alexander in 1881 with a bomb beneath his coach. In this teenage years Trotsky was drawn into the revolutionary movement and became a Marxist. A menshivik he rejected ‘orthadox’ Marxism, the Narodnik Social Revolutionaries and, at first, Lenin’s Bolshevism. The SRs believed that revolution was possible without industrial development and could be based on the peasant communism of the traditional Mir or collective village, a perspective discussed incidentally by Karl Marx. The ‘orthadox’ Marxists such as Kautsky believed that communism was impossible without industrialisation and an initial bourgeois revolution by the Russian middle class. To vulgarise a complex contribution Lenin believed that a class of revolutionaries could give history a shove and stressed the growth of the working class in Moscow. Trotsky combined three radical theoretical insights of combined and uneven development, soviet democracy and permanent revolution.
By combined and uneven development Trotsky meant that islands of advanced capitalism within the backward Russian countryside could provided the basis for a transition to communism. Marx broadly argued that capitalist development was a necessary precondition for communism because it provided a basis for prosperity rather than shared poverty as well as creating a working class who would make the revolution. For Trotsky it was unnecessary given pockets of capitalism to either argue for a return to peasant communism or to wait for a future middle class revolution, the struggle for liberation could begin immediately. This conclusion was consistent with Lenin’s approach but Trotsky feared that the Lenninist Party of professional revolutionaries could led to ‘substitutionism’. Prophetically he argued that the central committee would be a substitute for the working class and the central committee would eventually give way to a dictatorial leader.
Trotsky was inspired by the 1905 revolution and the growth of soviets, workers councils that directly and democratically fought for socialism. The power of the revolution might need to be channelled by a Party but for Trotsky it came from ordinary people. However to achieve a communist society in a largely undeveloped society like Russia, he borrowed Parvus’s concept of permanent revolution, which stated that continous struggle would be necessary to achieve social transformation.
The twists and turns of the story are not easily summarised but Trotsky was reconciled with Lenin, he acted as the strategist for the revolution, energised the Red Army and with the storming of the winter palace in 1917, the Soviet state was born. Trotsky’s finest hours came with the war against the white forces when more than fifth teen countries invaded the Soviet Union to back up the Czarists. His bleakest came with his order to fire on the Kronstadt sailors, anarchist rebels who weeks before had been his close allies.
The weary descent into Stalinism is chronicled in volume two. The death of Lenin and the difficulties of achieving socialism without an expected revolution in more industrialised countries like Germany, piled the pressure on Trotsky. In an almost impossible situation, mistakes were made and the Bolshevik party fossilised. After a relatively pluralist start, opposition political parties were banned, internal party factions were shut down and the ability of ordinary people to input into the system stagnated. The tension in Trotsky and Lenin’s political thought is between ‘socialism from below’ and leadership. The correct combination is almost impossible to achieve, after all the transition to a non capitalist society is unlikely to be achieved without careful planning and preparation, yet the act of planning, ‘leadership’ can rob the masses of their ability to make revolution and build an alternative. Trotsky liberated Russian by catalysing the energies of the Soviets but signed his death warrant by disarming the grassroots who were gradually demobilised and unable to resist Stalin.
Trotsky was a fighter, a theorist, a literary figure, his legacy in opposing Stalin has been to provide some notion that socialism is not just a form of tyranny but a path to liberation. Trotsky’s tale is both an inspiration and a warning to those who seek a world beyond capitalism. Those who make half a revolution, it is said dig their own graves. The question of ecology is missing from Trotsky’s work, recent research by John Bellamy Foster has shown the green roots of Marx’s theory and Lenin, perhaps surprisingly, was very keen on wildlife conservation. Trotsky, in contrast, was a productivist above all, keen to dam rivers and grind down mountains. The most relevent outgrowth of Marx’s legacy, given the ecological and social pathologies of capitalism, are today to be found in Cuba rather than among the political descendents of Trotsky. Castro and to some extent Chavaz in Venzuela have began to build a socialism which deals with ecological issues, contests alienation and by strengthening the grassroots has the potential to endure and become democratic. So read Deutscher but fight Bush’s threat to actually existing revolutionary alternatives rather than join a sect or even a mass movement of tabloid sellers.

Derek Wall, teaches , a long standing ecosocialist, he is a member of the Green Party , his latest book Babylon and Beyond, on the economics of anti-capitalism will be published in October 2005.