I certainly agree with Clive James that Leon Trotsky was a bad man and a Communist, but is it really true that there are lots of people "who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class." James doesn't have any, you know, examples of such people. But if you're out there it's true -- Trotsky and Stalin fell out over interpersonal rivalries and Trotsky's view that Stalin was proceeding too slowly with collectivization. That said, this seems a little pointless. Will Slate pay me to write some anti-Nazi articles?
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Trotsky Fans of the World Unite!
02 Apr 2007 01:16 pm
Comments (51)
"is it really true that there are lots of people "who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class."
Sure. I've got a soft spot for Lev.
Mistakes were made, but he's definitely the most alluring one of the Bolsheviks.
I must say. I am very comfortable with this article.
The most notable, contemporary praiser of Trotsky: Christopher Hitchens.
I thought all the Trotskyites had become neo-conservatives. Maybe now that they've rejected Trotsky, they see him as indistinguishable from liberal Democrats.
Suleyman Stephen Schwartz wrote in the National Review
To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky ... To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists, and Stalinists in their second childhood, make of it what they will.
There are still Trotsky-fans out there.
My impression, remembering back to the early 70s, was that Trotsky's whining seemed a bit inconsistent with Bolshevism, sort of like playing Ralph Nader to the 2000 Dems. Self criticism had a role, everyone admitted, but it just seemed more critical at the time to criticize LBJ and RN than Stalin.
Gee, when Trotsky's name comes up, my mind mostly runs these days to Irving Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, and Kanan Makiya....
Did Stalin, Lenin et al. live up to the utopian aspirations of communism, instead turning Marx and Engels's dream into a totalitarian nightmare? Sure.
Of course, I'd bet Adam Smith and James Madison would have some serious gripes about the way things are nowadays, too.
He probably still has a following among some groups of European intellectuals and student types, a lot closer to Clive James's milieu.
Here in the U.S., he's no more than a footnote. Demonstrating once again that, for all the railing against "the left" that we hear, there really is no "left" to speak of in the United States.
Interestingly, the number of people killed by imposing private enterprise on agriculture - in India and Ireland - a process that used utilitarian intellectuals, like Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and James Fitzjames Stephen - killed many more people than were ever killed in the Terror famines in the Ukraine. I wonder if Clive James will include that fact in his entry about John Stuart Mill, or Queen Victoria. It is a fine question as to who was the greatest mass murderer - Queen V. or Stalin.
Frankly, I'm a bit surprised at the anti-Lev vibe. I thought almost all lefties had a soft spot for Trotsky. How could you not like Snowball?
Maybe you have to be a certain age. Certainly anyone younger than, oh, 45 (or even 50), was not subjected to the popularity back in the late-60s/early 70s. You just had to be there, I guess, and see the popularity of Trotsky but especially Mao, Ho, Fidel, Che, etc. It was definitely there; I still get into arguments with some who defend these guys.
Nice one, Petey. Don't the current crop of the remaining Bushies (defections every day), esp. the likes of Brooks, Krauthammer, et al, remind you, after Snowball's departure, of the sheep when they changed their tune to, "Four legs good; two legs BETTER"?
On a related note, James's piece on Sartre from Slate recently was one of the most intellectually dishonest things I've ever read in my life.
MaxGowan--I was there, and as I remember it, Fidelistas did not at all care for Trotsky. The Fidelistas were Stalin-brand all the way. I don't think the Maoists had much use for Trotsky either. Trotsky was very controversial among radicals.
I realize however that, to those who get in arguments with those who flirted with communism while the war in Vietnam raged, that might seem incomprehensible. But you had to be there.
Without getting into debates about the relative awfulness of the USSR, on a personal level Trotsky is much mroe appealing than Stalin, or Lenin for that matter. If you read his autobiography or otehr less immediately political writing, you get a sense of critical intelligence, wide-ranging curiosity, self-awarness and sensitivity to the people around him that is pretty rare in revolutionaries or political leaders in general. A Communist but not necessarily a bad man, except insofar as the latter follows from the former.
And while your're right about the immediate causes of the Stalin-Trotsky split, it has to be said that Trotsky, lacking Stalin's insane paranoia, would almost certainly have been far less murderous in power. But then, that's a pretty low bar.
"You just had to be there, I guess, and see the popularity of Trotsky but especially Mao, Ho, Fidel, Che, etc."
I wasn't there, and I've got a soft spot for Fidel in addition to Trotsky. Cuba has done reasonably well for its people since the revolution, in comparison to its neighbors. I don't care for Mao, though. Way too Stalinist for my taste.
Don't get me wrong. All of these folks who followed Lenin missed out on the lessons of the most important person in all of human history, Cleisthenes. The history of freedom is the history of legislative bodies, and all that.
But just because folks are a product of their time and place doesn't necessarily make them bad folks. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, but I've got soft spots for them too.
Clive James is obsessed with painting other people as insufficiently anti-Nazi or insufficiently anti-Stalinist. This has included everyone from Isaiah Berlin to (more recently, in the Times Book Review) anyone who thinks Leni Riefenstahl was a reasonably good filmmaker. Needless to say, the scales fell from his eyes a long time ago. The rest of us apparently aren't sensitive enough to all that suffering.
Interestingly, the number of people killed by imposing private enterprise on agriculture - in India and Ireland - a process that used utilitarian intellectuals, like Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and James Fitzjames Stephen - killed many more people than were ever killed in the Terror famines in the Ukraine.
This is actually a valid point. But I'm not sure what's gained by arguing it.
Wow, this thread is showing Petey in a whole new light. A flattering one, IMO.
Amen Raenelle. And the Communist left would much rather negotiate with the reactionaries over the non-Communist Left. Reminds me of the joke about the Revolutionary Sectarian Vanguard Party from Mars (RSVP). I was more focued on the excuses of mass murder that were made during that time, among these various heros.
There is a tradition of former far leftists migrating to be come far rightists. Former Trotskyist David Horowitz is a prime example.
Wow, this thread is showing Petey in a whole new light. A flattering one, IMO.
Until the next thread when he calls everybody stupid for not being sufficiently bloodthirsty, anyway.
Smug, facile, self-satisfied moralizing from Clive James--what a surprise. If I were to say that the USA was built on the genocide of the Indian nations, or if I were to characterize some historical figure such as Charlemagne or Louis XIV as a "mass murderer," or if I were to call Winston Churchill a "racist" (as he undoubtedly was), no doubt someone like Clive James would tut tut from the depths of his comfy chair that I was being ever so simple minded, that I didn't understand the context of the times, and wasn't I being just a tad overwrought?, etc. etc. When it comes to 20th century communists, however, no denunciation is too crude. The Publisher's Weekly review of his book Cultural Amnesia on Amazon.com says that "even in an entry on children's author Beatrix Potter, he feels called upon to denounce Soviet children's books." James is a typical cold war pop intellectual, still repeating the same old tunes going on 20 years after the wall came down. How tiresome.
Actually, here in France there are not one but two self-identified Trotsky-ite presidential candidates. One of them, Olivier Besancenot, is running with the party named the League of Communist Revolutionaries. Honest.
I think you'd dig him, Matt. He's young, very intelligent, and an excellent speaker and debater. And yes, he's also a Trotsky-ite.
Here's a portrait of Trotsky I did on my Etch-A-Sketch:
http://etchasketchist.blogspot.com/2007/02/trotsky.html
"Until the next thread when he calls everybody stupid for not being sufficiently bloodthirsty, anyway"
Hey, if Dems don't appear sufficiently bloodthirsty to make the median voter think we'll defend them from dirty foreigners, folks far worse than Dems will win elections and thus wield the awesome power of the US government toward some rather unpleasant ends.
If you're not as bloodthirsty as Al Gore, in policy terms, that's your choice. But in political terms, you're stupid.
MaxGowan--I think you mistook my meaning. I'm rather proud of my flirtation with radical left politics.
Back then, traditional politics didn't seem like an option for ending the war; it was, after all, a Democrat who had started the damn thing. There was a very real generation gap--the "greatest generation" generally supported the war and were angry at their children for opposing it--so the movement against the war was very much a Children's Crusade. If we made huge mistakes, well, we were teenagers without adult guidance.
And, historically, the Russian left in the early 20th century made the US left look like a love-in. Yet they had a successful revolution. If the tsar had gotten Russia out of WWI, as Nixon got the US out of Vietnam, the Revolution in Russia either wouldn't have happened, or it would have looked a lot different. IOW, I don't think of the splits in the left with contempt. I wish we'd been smarter, I wish we'd been wiser, I wish we'd been more mature with our feelings and morals. But I'm glad (proud) I was so upset with that war that I questioned everything that seemed to support it.
I confess to thinking Trotsky was at least mildly cool, due to his ability to go from coffee-house intellectual to ruthlessly successful general and empire-builder. But I certainly never thought he was a liberal...
Hell, Genghis Khan is pretty cool, if you don't mind that whole "ravaged most of Asia" thing on his resume...
The undue admiration that some on the American left may have had for Trotsky in the 1940s and 1950s -- and I emphasize, per MY's observation, the past tense, because the phenomenon really evaporated after that -- may stem from the symbolic role that Trotsky played in the late 1930s in breaking the American left's affection for the Soviet regime.
Briefly: in 1929, Trotsky was exiled from the USSR by Stalin. In 1936-38, many of Trotsky's former allies in the USSR were put on trial in Moscow for various alleged crimes. Trotsky's purported participation in those alleged criminal activities was a major focus of the trials.
In 1937, a number of American leftist intellectuals, headed by John Dewey, conducted an inquiry into the charges leveled at Trotsky during the first of the Moscow trials and concluded that the charges were nonsense and that the trials were a sham. (The Dewey Commission's findings were ultimately confirmed by Khruschev's "Secret Speech" of 1956.)
The Dewey Commission's findings caused a rupture on the American left: while a minority continued to defend Stalin's regime, many others became convinced that the Soviet regime was tyrannical and corrupt. The latter group split into roughly two factions, one of which became part of the American anti-Communist left, and the other became "Trotskyites," i.e., philosophical Communists hostile to the Soviet regime.
Trotsky was admired by some on the American left for a couple decades thereafter, probably due to (i) his role in precipitating the American left's disaffection from the Soviet regime, as described above; (ii) his considerable writing while he was in exile; and (iii) outrage at his murder at Stalin's direction in 1940.
Admiration for Trotsky waned in the late 1950s and 1960s, in part because the anti-Communist faction in the American left was predominant, and in part because of new historical insights about what rotten bastards all the Bolsheviks were (e.g., Khruschev's de-Stalinization efforts; Robert Conquest's work in the 1960s).
I'm not sure that there were any new American Trotskyites after, say, the mid-1950s. I am under the impression that well into the 1980s, there was considerably more affection for Trotsky in Europe, which is what Clive James may be thinking about.
(If anyone has anything add to this or can identify any errors, I'd be appreciative.)
I think that's Col. Sanders not Trotsky.
"I think that's Col. Sanders not Trotsky."
Chickens of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your breading.
I liked this quote from the NR Trotsky article:
This is, unfortunately, the essence of the Stalinist method: to find tiny lapses where they do not exist, and to formulate arguments on the basis of what one wishes was said, rather than what was said.
Many of the neocons are Ex-Trotskyites, and they maintain many Trotskyite beliefs: belief in a proposition nation, egalitarianism, world government, the forced spreading of democracy, etc.
Freddie, I agree with you about the Sartre entry - it was very much in the old Cold War Style, where your politics were entirely judged on your opinion about Stalin, while your local or national political acts were simply ignored. Thus, there wasn't a word about Algeria, a colonial war against which Sartre showed himself entirely prescient and courageous, as opposed to, say, Camus, who was the George Packer of his time... Well, not entirely - Camus was a great writer, when everything is said and done. I guess that would be a little too relevant, however, given Slate's general prowar tilt up to 2004-2005.
One place where the distinction between Trotskyites and Stalinists was pretty clearly drawn was in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Intellectually, not much distance between them, but the first people the Stalinists went after were the Trots (they were not yet powerful enough to take on the anarchists). While both were operating from the same Marxist paradigm, the Stalinists were corrupted by actually holding power (in Russia), whereas the Trotskyites were authentic idealists - why else be a Trotskyite? Conversely, it is easy to see Trotskyism is power, as being much like Stalinsim, though probably not on the same scale.
Roger, though reputable historians dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory for decades, it is now accepted that the Ukrainian famines were deliberate. Several nations have acknowledge it as genocide, which implies intention. Perhaps this was also true in Ireland and India, but I actually don't know. Was it?
Martin, have you read Mike Davis' The Victorian Holocaust? Deliberation, in the case of the Ukranian terror famines, is proved by the chain of evidence contained in bureaucratic memoranda. The same method is applied by Davis to, say, Strachey's concern, in 1875, that labor camps in which starving indians were being kept were costing too much money. And there were numerous notes about how the Indian population was too much for the agricultural resources of the country, so that it was a good thing a 'natural culling' was taking place - this, while the Brits were exporting foodstuffs from India. In the 1860s, British officials had averted famine in the Bengal - showing that it could be done - and were reprimanded for their efforts. Too expensive.
So you can read the intentionality as you will - we do know that the monetarization of the economy, which the British promoted by requiring that taxes be paid in money, produced massive debt and destroyed the in-kind economy and the food storage that the Indian villages had developed for famine occasions. And that the British were trying to do just that.
I think the Soviets were very influenced by the British model in India. They liked the idea of redoing the agricultural economy in the same, top down way.
I would've thought that the character Rik from "The Young Ones" would've signaled the death knell of Trotskyism.
"Will Slate pay me to write some anti-Nazi articles?"
C'mon, there's a vast market today for anti-Nazi cultural and intellectual products, far more lucrative than the anti-Communist one. Ask your screenwriter father how much more sellable is an anti-Nazi screenplay than is an anti-Communist one.
Roger, thanks for the info.
On another note, is this site every going to get fixed so that it does in fact remeber your info if you accept the cookie? Does this work for anyone else?
I think Ben Wattenberg the PBS neocon was also a Trotskyite. For all we know, Joe and Hadassah Lieberman keep a Trotsky statue in their dining room. He's their kind of guy- a "liberal imperialist".
I think Ben Wattenberg the PBS neocon was also a Trotskyite. For all we know, Joe and Hadassah Lieberman keep a Trotsky statue in their dining room. He's their kind of guy- a "liberal imperialist".
I think Ben Wattenberg the PBS neocon was also a Trotskyite. For all we know, Joe and Hadassah Lieberman keep a Trotsky statue in their dining room. He's their kind of guy- a "liberal imperialist".
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the revival of the romanticized Trotsky as portrayed by Geoffrey Rush in Salma Hayek's Frida. My guess is that contemporary Hollywood political "thinkers" think Trotsky was almost as kindly and heroic as Gael Garcia Bernal's Che Guevera.
Science fiction writer Ken MacLeod also shows evidence of Trotskyism. No neocon he....
Interestingly, the number of people killed by imposing private enterprise on agriculture - in India and Ireland - a process that used utilitarian intellectuals, like Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and James Fitzjames Stephen - killed many more people than were ever killed in the Terror famines in the Ukraine.
I think you mispelled "Imperialism." If the Indians and Irish had been allowed their own property and been allowed to make their own decisions what/how to grow and who to sell things to, there would've been plenty of food on hand, I think.
It's not surprising that the death toll would be higher - the British imperial structures lasted centuries, while the famine lasted maybe a decade. Estimates of Stalin's total death toll go as high as 50-60M.
jon, "If the Indians and Irish had been allowed their own property and been allowed to make their own decisions what/how to grow and who to sell things to..." just what the british utilitarians thought. They introduced the idea that land was property that you can sell, and the idea that the economy was all about selling for money. That was what taxing was about - a way to monetize the economy. The population didn't want to monetize the economy, nor upset the complicated system of in kind exchanges - or at least there is no evidence they wanted it. These ideas, of course, came with maximum violence and social disruption. In Ireland, the English were always trying to enforce property laws - they hated the freeranging cattle, they hated the feudal catholic structure, and in destroying it so damaged ireland that an island that had the same population as England in the 1700s plummeted, in terms of population, due to mass death, deportation and emigration, and hasn't really recovered to this day. The idea that people should just have their own stuff and sell it and chill, dude, ignores that to do that, you have to have a whole system. And that system was installed, everywhere, against the wishes of the mass of the population, who were not itching to become little capitalists.
This is one of the reasons I find Hayek so funny. The Road to Serfdom acts like communism came out of the blue - as if the social control necessary to put the free market system in place arose from the people, in contrast with the top down control of the communists. That is a crock - the market system was imposed by the people Burke called the "theoreticians", certainly against the will of the people. The socialists and fabians in England arose out of the same families - the Mills, the Stracheys - who imposed capitalism on India. The form of control - from the top - was simply transferred from one set of economic defaults to another.
They introduced the idea that land was property that you can sell, and the idea that the economy was all about selling for money. That was what taxing was about - a way to monetize the economy.
No, they didn't. Irish and Indians had been trading (including in land) for centuries at least (millenia in the case of the Irish), for currency.
the market system was imposed by the people Burke called the "theoreticians",
The market system has been pretty much global for millenia, dude. Currency systems and transnational trade date back to before the first millenium BCE. Investor classes date back to Athens or some other Greek polis.
certainly against the will of the people.
That's why shopping and ebay are so unpopular.
The form of control - from the top - was simply transferred from one set of economic defaults to another.
So there was really no point in the useless American Revolution, since it just transferred control from one set of hands to another. I think I'll reserve my judgement (and the vote the Empire never gave).
Jon, dude, gotta say, you seem pretty grievously misinformed about India in the 18th and 19th century, as well as the many and varied markets and economic systems that have sequenced through that thing we call history. Dude, you seem to think people were just waitin' around for that there ebay - woo boy, I hope they enclose the common grazin' land so we can get us some ebay - maybe I'll educate you some.
Dude, the classic book on the subject of changes in Indian law brought about by the small Indian civil service is E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959). Hey, maybe you can get it on ebay! And dude, check out the ryot question - why don't you look up what Thomas Munroe had to say about the subject about collecting taxes directly from the peasants in the villages - which, hey, dude, he had your idea that they really, really secretly had the same land tenure notions as English yeomen. Sweet, isn't it? Nothing like dispersing traditional means of accumulating capital and 'liberating it' on up into the hands of those groovy capitalists - who all just happened to be english! Dude, you'd love it - libertarianism in action and only 7 million died in the 1870s cause of it. Totally cool, and a real predecessor of ebay and everything like we got today. Bitchin'.
As for "the market system has been pretty much global for millenia, dude" - dude, there are many market systems, and the one that I was pointin' to like, there? with the comment from Burke? like, it was like a whole new system. One in which the land and labor and commodities were restricted not by economic rationality, but by traditional social ties. Dude, at one time it was called feudalism! Believe or not. You might want to see if they have a copy of Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation on ebay too.
... and the one that I was pointin' to like, there? with the comment from Burke? like, it was like a whole new system. One in which the land and labor and commodities were restricted not by economic rationality, but by traditional social ties. Dude, at one time it was called feudalism!
I believe you just changed your tune. Above, you said of the British in Ireland and India that,
> They introduced the idea that land was property that you can sell, and the idea that the economy was all about selling for money. That was what taxing was about - a way to monetize the economy.
Now you say there was a market system there beforehand. Make up your mind.
Now, it's true that the overall setup of the market was different. Before, it was serving feudal rulers, who at least were present and mostly had some tradition of caring about their people a little bit. In Imperialism, the rulers were far away, and felt that the ruled people lived to serve the ruling people. But that's MY point.
So, how was it market economics per se that starved Indians? Did the colonial Indian market operate for the economic rationality of the Indians?
So, how was it market economics per se that starved Indians? Did the colonial Indian market operate for the economic rationality of the Indians?
Pretty simple. Although really, go to ebay and get some books, rather than relying on a guy in a comments column to answer this question. Communal property - in which property claims overlapped, and were held at the village level, and tied to various rules above that - developed, of course, communal sources of savings - notably, the saving of grains and foodstuffs for local use. Taxing wasn't just making farmers go to market with foodstuffs grown on communal properties - to which, necessarily, they had controverted claims. The whole point of taxing in species was to get the peasants to dissolve those communal holdings. But in fact, products don't appear just like that. So the peasants were forced to borrow - which produced a moneylender class with first claims on the food, backed by the british. Thus, instead of being able to save a reserve for bad weather, the peasant's whole orientation changes to growing to sell to the moneylender to pay off debt. Net result is that the communal ties developed to withstand bad weather collapse.
Now, I bet you can guess the rest of this story. Of course, the British state did have the power to interfere - they could even have distributed food themselves. But that would be ... coddling the lazy peasants! You don't want a buncha lazy farmers lying around, do you. You will never get to the heaven of ebay that way. So what you do is you feed them very little. And if many die, why - there's a sort of darwinian, a sort of malthusian justice to that, isn't there? While the commissars in stalin's russia justified their crimes with reference to revolution, the very upright British were simply innocent instruments of the invisible hand of natural selection. It makes such a difference!
And really, you still do seem to think there is a one size fits all market. If there was, we would never have seen capitalism. You might be surprised that capitalism is a pretty recent thing. At least, that was the story back in Adam Smith's day.
Comments closed April 16, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Yeah, I bet worldwide there are more fans than you might guess. Plus, I wouldn't equate the Nazis with the Russian Communists. For one thing the liberal West allied with the Commies against Hitler. Sure we had a falling out later, after the war, but still...
Posted by Peter K. | April 2, 2007 1:29 PM