The Next Revolution Will Read Trotsky. posted by Richard Seymour

Via Bat , an unexpectedly strong article on Deutcher and Trotsky by Neal Ascherson . I didn't know any of the background of Ascherson's politics that Bat brings up, but I do remember reading in a collection of essays his observation that the Russian Revolution would be repeated at some point in the future because it was too good an idea not to be. To discover that he's a Liberal Democrat with a history of right-wing Labourism is a surprise to say the least.

Still, here's some highlights:

Again, interpretations of 1917 and its aftermath have changed almost out of recognition. Most contemporary readers of history probably agree that the ‘real’ revolution was that of February 1917, and that the October power seizure by the Bolsheviks was little more than an opportunistic coup d’état. History has also taken an increasingly nasty view of Lenin. For so many decades, oppositional Communists and post-Stalinist leaders of the Soviet Union would condemn abuses of power by describing them as ‘departures from Leninist norms’. Now, however, the fashion is to dismiss this approach as intellectual comfort-fodder. Lenin, it’s said, in no way offered an alternative to Stalinism. In fact, it was Lenin who created the machinery of inhuman oppression which Stalin merely continued – admittedly, on a vaster scale – to operate in the way that it was designed to operate. It was Lenin who established the Bolshevik monopoly of political power, who set the precedent for denouncing all critics of that monopoly as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, who locked the Bolsheviks into the fatal claim of ‘substituting’ for a working class which by 1921 had almost ceased to exist. It was Lenin during the Civil War who licensed the Red Terror – executions, family hostage-taking – against the class enemy.

My own feeling is that this approach is too crude to last. The Bolshevik Revolution was more ‘authentic’ and popular than we currently admit; to see Soviet history merely as inherited homicide is an excuse for not thinking about it. But while these versions last, their sting affects Trotsky too. And there’s worse: the suggestion that Trotsky has become irrelevant. If Lenin had set up a political tradition which could only achieve its ends by force, would it have made any significant difference whether Trotsky or Stalin succeeded him? Given Trotsky’s impetuous nature and his practice of Red Terror during the Civil War, might he not have been even more ruthless? In terms of public attention, Trotsky’s stock has fallen even faster than Lenin’s. After all, if the three giants of the Revolution were, in the current view, ‘as bad as each other’, why should Trotsky – the one who never held the leadership – be of special interest?

‘As bad as each other’. The real abyss separating Deutscher from modern historiography is a moral one. An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kill a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than their killers is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kline dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as ‘the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity’. Monstrous or not, it’s a bargain with the future which, as anyone over 60 will remember, Europeans of all political outlooks were once accustomed to strike. But today ‘presentism’ rules, and the young read the ‘short 20th century’ as the final demonstration that evil means are never justified by high ends.

Isaac Deutscher saw history differently. His standards are not those of Amnesty International. Instead, he measures everything against the cause of the Revolution. The Trotsky trilogy has a spinal column of moral argument running through it which can be reduced to this question: did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose? In the value of that ultimate purpose, Deutscher has solid faith. Trotsky expressed it on many occasions. In Siberian exile at the age of 22, he wrote: ‘As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy and happiness!’

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As well as sharing Trotsky’s loathing for Stalin and his minions, Deutscher broadly shared his analysis of what the Soviet Union became in the 1930s. Trotsky continued to regard it as a ‘deformed workers’ state’. In other words, the basic achievement of the Revolution – the abolition of the power of capital and the ending of private ownership of the means of production – remained intact under the superstructure of bureaucratic dictatorship, state terrorism and censorship. Two things followed from that premise. First, the USSR was still reclaimable for the Revolution, though it would probably take a second revolution to achieve it. Second, the duty of all true socialists to defend the Soviet Union – even Stalin’s Soviet Union – against attack by a capitalist power remained absolute and unqualified.

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If Lenin, hard and unbreakable, was the axle of the Revolution, Trotsky was the roaring wheel. In this heroic period, he revealed a kit of talents which few humans have possessed. He was a whirlwind organiser who could bring any chaos to order, a terrific orator who could swell the hearts of thousands, a literary intellectual whose writings on culture, history, political philosophy and military tactics are still fresh and brilliant, a rare military commander who combined mastery of mobile warfare with a charisma which roused exhausted soldiers to die for him. In almost any other country, a man with such talents and such victories would have dreamed of ‘mounting the white horse’ – of taking supreme power – and it would have been hard to stop him.

But Trotsky was different. It was not just that he regarded men on white horses as a vulgar joke. He seems never to have thought of politics in terms of personal power and he was incredulous and then merciless in his contempt when he found that some of his colleagues did so. At one level, this proved his revolutionary integrity and democratic commitment. But it also revealed his weakness. Trotsky had all the gifts except political instinct. It was not just that he disdained intrigue. He was genuinely baffled by it. All his imaginative powers seemed to switch off when party colleagues pulled at his sleeve and begged him to join this or that faction in the struggle to succeed Lenin.

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Deutscher’s ‘victory in defeat’ summary to his trilogy rests, in the end, on the hope that Soviet Communism is reformable, and on simple awe. ‘It cannot be, it would be contrary to all historical sense, that so high an intellectual energy, so prodigious an activity, and so noble a martyrdom should not have their full impact eventually.’ No? All that can be said is that when the unimaginable climate of revolution returns, as in some shape it will, young men and women will read and understand Trotsky and Deutscher as we no longer can.

Do go and read Bat's account for the commentary, which teases out the nuances of Ascherson's piece better than I can over my morning coffee.