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IN CONTEXT

IDEOLOGY

Communism

FOCUS

Permanent revolution

BEFORE

360 BCE Plato describes an ideal state in the Republic.

1794 French writer Francois Noel Babeuf proposes a communistic society with no private property and a guaranteed livelihood for all.

AFTER

1932 President Roosevelt promises the American people a New Deal, initiating an era of government intervention and regulation of the economy.

2007 Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declares himself to be a Trotskyist.

2012 Russian punk band Pussy Riot denounce Vladimir Putin’s “totalitarian system.”

Throughout his career, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky always sought to promote what he saw as a truly Marxist position. He worked closely with Vladimir Lenin to translate Karl Marx’s theories into practice as the two men led the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. According to Marx’s theory, the revolution was to be followed by a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as workers took control of the means of production. However, following Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin’s absolutist bureaucracy soon crushed any hope of such a mass movement, imposing a dictatorship of one man instead. Trotsky had hoped to safeguard the advances he believed had been made in the revolution through a strategy of “permanent revolution,” which would be guaranteed by the ongoing support of an international working class. Marx had warned that socialism in one place could not hope to succeed in isolation from the global proletariat, stating that revolution must continue “until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions…not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world.” Lenin had insisted that the socialist revolution in Russia could triumph only if supported by workers’ movements in one or several other economically advanced countries. Trotsky’s followers have since argued that this failure to achieve a critical mass of support internationally was the reason that the Soviet Union fell into Stalin’s hands.

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Communism under Stalin

Within four years of Lenin’s death, the inner party democracy and the soviet democratic system—the cornerstone of Bolshevism—had been dismantled within communist parties across the world. Within the Soviet Union itself, Stalin’s doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” removed the wider aspiration for an international workers’ revolution.

  Dissidents were vilified as Trotskyists and expelled from party ranks. When his Left Opposition faction against Stalin failed, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled from the Soviet Union. By 1937, Stalin had jailed or killed all of the so-called Trotskyists of the Left Opposition, and Trotsky himself was in Mexico, hiding from assassins.

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Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky were all leading figures in the Bolshevik Revolution. After Lenin died, Stalin took power and Trotsky was a marked man.

Against morality

Many on the left reacted to Stalin’s excesses by moving to the right and rejecting revolutionary Marxism, taking up what Trotsky described as “moralistic” positions that emphasized universal values. The suggestion was that Bolshevism—the centralist system of Lenin and Trotsky—had allowed the crimes of Stalin.

  In Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky describes this claim as a reactionary spasm of class conflict disguised as morality. One of the main criticisms leveled at Bolshevism was that Lenin’s belief that “the end justifies the means” had led directly to the “amorality” of treachery, brutality, and mass murder. To these critics, morality protected against such atrocities. Trotsky considered that, whether intended or not, this was simply a defense of capitalism, since he believed that capitalism could not exist “through force alone. It needs the cement of morality.” For Trotsky, there is no such thing as morality if it is conceived as a set of eternal values that are not derived from sensory or material evidence. Hence, any behavior that is not motivated by the existing social conditions or class conflict is illegitimate and inauthentic. Abstract moral concepts that are not based on empirical evidence are simply tools used by ruling-class institutions to suppress the class struggle. The ruling class imposes “moral” obligations on society that its members do not observe themselves and that serve to perpetuate their power.

"Root out the counter-revolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps. Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service."

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky gives the morality of war as an example: “The most ‘humane’ governments, which in peaceful times ‘detest’ war, proclaim during war that the highest duty of their armies is the extermination of the greatest possible number of people.” The insistence on the prescribed behavioral norms of religion and philosophy was also a tool of class deception. For Trotsky, to expose this deceit was the revolutionary’s first duty.

RG

The Allies’ firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II illustrated Trotsky’s contention that liberal capitalist governments will break their own rules of morality during wartime.

The new aristocracy

Trotsky was keen to show that the centralizing tendencies of Bolshevism were not the “means” whose “end” was Stalinism. Such centralization was necessary to defeat the Bolsheviks’ enemies, but its end was always intended to be a decentralized dictatorship of the proletariat, ruling through the system of Soviets. For Trotsky, Stalinism was an “immense bureaucratic reaction” against what he saw as the advances of the 1917 revolution. Stalinism reinstated the worst of absolutist entitlements, “regenerating the fetishism of power” beyond the dreams even of the tsars; it had created a “new aristocracy.” Trotsky saw the crimes of Stalin as the consequence of the most brutal class struggle of all—that of “the new aristocracy against the masses that raised it to power.” He was scathing of self-declared Marxists who linked Bolshevism with Stalinism by stressing the immorality of both. In Trotsky’s eyes, he and his followers had opposed Stalin from the beginning, while his critics had only arrived at their position after Stalin’s atrocities had come to light.

"We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life."

Leon Trotsky

Critics of Marxism often claim that the idea that “the end justifies the means” is used to justify acts of murder and barbarism, as well as the deception of the masses, purportedly for their own benefit. Trotsky insisted that this was a misunderstanding, stating that “the end justifies the means” simply signifies that there is an acceptable way to do a right thing. For example, if it is permissible to eat fish then it is right to kill and cook them. The moral justification of any action must be linked to its “end” in this way. Killing a mad dog that is threatening a child is a virtue, but killing a dog gratuitously, or perversely for no “end,” is a crime.

The ultimate end

So what is the answer to the question “what may we, and what may we not do”? What end justifies the means needed to achieve it? For Trotsky, the end is justified if it “leads to the increasing power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.” In other words, the end can itself be seen as a means to this ultimate end. But did Trotsky mean that the liberation of the working classes was an end for which any destructiveness was permissible? He will only consider this question in relation to the class struggle, thinking it a meaningless abstraction to do otherwise. Thus, the only meaningful good is that which unites the revolutionary proletariat, strengthening it as a class for the ongoing struggle.

  Trotsky’s reasoning has been seen by some notable Marxists as dangerous, counter-revolutionary, and false. Harry Haywood, an African-American Marxist-Leninist who was in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 30s, believed that “Trotsky was doomed to defeat because his ideas were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people.” During the Russian Civil War of 1917–22,Trotsky had centralized command structures in what was known as “War Communism.” This centralizing tendency has been criticized by disillusioned former followers as closed to critical reflection, convinced of the absolute rightness of its own analysis, and allowing no dissent. In addition, such structures necessarily restrict power to a small group of leaders, since they are too demanding of workers’ time and effort for a wide-based system of mass participation to develop. Writing in the 1940s, US Marxist Paul Mattick asserted that the Russian Revolution had itself been as totalitarian as Stalinism, and that the legacy of Bolshevism, Leninism, and Trotskyism served “as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist (state-capitalist) systems… controlled by way of an authoritarian state.”

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Slaughter on a grand scale was perpetrated by Trotsky’s Red Army in the Russian Civil War, leading critics to compare Bolshevism to Stalin’s purges.

LEON TROTSKY

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein was born in 1879 in the small village of Yanovka in what is now Ukraine. Schooled in cosmopolitan Odessa, he was involved in revolutionary activities and took up Marxism after initially opposing it. He was arrested, imprisoned, and exiled to Siberia by the time he was just 18.

  In Siberia, he took his prison guard’s name, Trotsky, and escaped to London where he met and worked with Lenin on the revolutionary journal Iskra. In 1905, he returned to Russia to support the revolution. Arrested and sent back to Siberia, his bravery earned him popularity. He escaped from Siberia again, joining Lenin in the successful revolution of 1917. He led the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and held other key posts, but after Lenin’s death, he was forced out of power by Stalin and into exile. He was assassinated on Stalin’s orders by Ramón Mercader in Mexico City in 1940.

Key works

1937 The Stalin School of Falsification

1938 Their Morals and Ours

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