Philosophy Football have produced a crowd pleasing Trotsky T-shirt in time for Xmas. So this is a good opportunity to appraise the historical legacy of Trotsky.
One of the most extraordinary achievements in advancing scholarly understanding of the USSR, and the experience of Stalin’s rule is the compendious work by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov “The Road to Terror” which assembles and discusses hundreds of previously top secret Soviet documents from the 1930s.
This describes the process of the growing use of state terror, and in particular how the causes were not solely the personal responsibility of Stalin: agency was dispersed and devolved throughout the Communist Party. The extensive use of violence came from a particular type of party organisation that had been forged in specific historical conditions and which then encountered difficult real-world challenges that triggered an exaggerated repressive response.
Getty and Naumov discuss the peculiar nature of Russian Marxism in the pre-revolutionary period. They reject the conceit of Michel Foucault that the language, patterns and interactions used in “discourse” create meaning – whereby language becomes the mediation through which historical reality is created as a social reality independent of physical reality. Nevertheless, while rejecting this specious and fashionably technical usage of the word “discourse”, Getty and Naumov nevertheless locate the historically specific experience of the Bolsheviks in creating a sub-culture of discourse, within the everyday meaning of that word: debate and discussion creating a particularly text-oriented belief system. As they put it:
“For the Bolsheviks before the revolution (and especially for the intellectual leaders in emigration), hairsplitting over precise points of revolutionary ideology was much of their political life. To a significant extent, Bolshevik politics had always been inextricably bound with creating and sharpening texts”
The nature of Bolshevism was to seek to create an ideologically relatively homogenous political party sufficiently socially insulated and self-referential to dare to overthrow not only the government but also to restructure or replace all of the civil society institutions that mediated daily life; and who were sufficiently self-assured to seek to form a new form of government untrammelled by the historical constraints of precedence or the rule of law.
Naturally, this political party was also immersed in day to day practical agitation, organising among working people, publishing and arguing with other political forces and therefore while in opposition was constantly having this self-contained intellectual world challenged. However, the messianic role that the party cast itself in made it very difficult for individuals to break discipline: they saw any behaviour that weakened the party as weakening the cause of socialism, indeed jeopardising the future of humanity, who without their success would be doomed to barbarism.
The experience of power was challenging. War and civil war, terrorism, famine and economic collapse created a brutalised siege mentality, and the language of the Bolsheviks in power became full of references to being “merciless” and “intransigent”, and of “smashing opposition”. As early as 1918 the Bolsheviks cut themselves free of any concept of constitutionality or legal process by reintroducing the death penalty by fiat, overruling the theoretically sovereign All Russian Congress of Soviets, (This incident was the cause of the Social Revolutionaries leaving government and taking up arms against the Bolsheviks – itself an irrational reaction that could only be understood from the heritage of Russian nineteenth century politics. As Randall Law describes in his very recent book “Terrorism, a History” there was a very wide acceptance of political violence in Czarist society at all levels.).
The ideological homogeneity and discipline that had informed the sub-culture of the Bolsheviks in opposition became an elite belief system and expectation of behaviour that bound together the party in power. What is more, party members were the only part of society immune to GPU (state security police) supervision until 1927, providing a demarcation in society between a political strata empowered to discuss alternative politics, and the broader population where any manifestations of opposition were anathematised as expressions of “white counter-revolution”.
Now of course, we do need to understand that the material circumstances that the CPSU leadership were operating in were desperate indeed; by 1926 and 1927 the economy was in protracted crisis, exacerbated by partial failures of the grain harvest, and the breakdown of trade with Britain and France; the fevered debates in the party in the 1926 to 1929 period, so vividly documented in Michal Reiman’s “The Birth of Stalinism” reveal a millenarian atmosphere; with factions of the leadership of the party locked in bitter conflict, while all around them society was falling apart.
After his exile, Leon Trotsky sought to present himself as a clean pair of hands. But it is important to remember that before his fall from grace he was the most ruthless of all the Bolshevik leaders; and that he had fully supported the extraordinary measures of “war communism”, had supported the violent suppression of the Krondstadt mutiny, had supported the ban of factions within the party. It was Trotsky who wrote “Terrorism and Communism” a coruscating and defiant defence of the use of state terror; and had advocated the conscription of labour, which made the Soviet trade unions determined opponents of Trotsky. He was removed from power after Lenin’s death because there was genuine apprehension among other party leaders that he might use his position as head of the Red Army to become Russia’s Napoleon.
Notwithstanding the sometimes brilliant work of party theoreticians like Nikolaii Bukharin in seeking to understand the complexity of the economic situation, and the attempts by leading party figures like Chicherin, Rykov and Tomsky to explore moderate and realistic options and to stabilise the USSR’s international trading position; the debate became polarised around caricatures and symbolic unreasonable positions divorced from reality.
For example, the left ridiculously called for compulsory grain seizures in the famine of 1927 ignoring evidence known to the party that the harvest was not being hoarded, and the crops had genuinely failed in parts of the country. The so-called “Kulak” threat was talked up to the point where people genuinely believed it, and sincerely thought that the poor and middle peasants supported the government in grain seizures. The myth of grain hoarding was to have truly horrific consequences in the 1932 famine. Stalin’s supporters caricatured all opposition as being the work of Trotskyists and saboteurs, developing a fantastical paranoia. The way in which all dissent was externalised as an alien and existential threat partially explains the fear and insecurity leading to state terror.
The Stalinised party in power developed three important attributes; i) a self-referential Weltanshauung or belief system rooted to the idea that the party itself was an historical actor with privileged access to truth; ii) a culture of demonising categories of opponent “Kulaks”, “Trotskyists”, “counter-revolutionaries”, that became symbolic concepts to pidgeonhole and depersonalise real life dissent; and iii) a leader cult, where the messianic historical role of the party became personified to an individual to whom loyalty was expected.
This is not the place to discuss the consequences of Stalin’s policies, but the USSR did achieve considerable economic growth and modest improvements in living standards over the course of the 1930s; and even the scale of repression was not experienced by many ordinary people as being any worse than the period following 1917.
It is important to understand that Trotskyism in exile developed in entirely symmetrical response, and of course grew out of the same soil. Trotsky, who while in power had brooked no dissent became a born-again advocate of party democracy as soon as he was in a minority. Each Trotskyist group has the same conceit that the ideological or theoretical delimiters which justify its special existence as a discrete organisation give it unique access to truth; the labelling of other activists as “stalinists”, or “reformists” acts to contextualise those disagreeing with the partys as being inherently flawed, and therefore their opinions are delegitimised and thus bureaucratic practices to overcome them can be justified (and a similar attitude is displayed to opponents of the leadership line within the party) ; and the Trotskyist left has especially perpetuated the leader cult, deflected onto the historical person of Lenin or Trotsky, but with an implied apostolic succession to the current leadership of their group. At its most obscene, Healy’s WRP paraded Trotsky’s death mask on stage; the Militant brought Trotsky’s living relatives to London, and the IS/SWP published the only theoretical defence of the leader cult that I am aware of “Lenin, Building the Party” by Tony Cliff. (Which as John Sullivan pointed out reads very much like a biography of John the Baptist written by Jesus)
The Trotskyist tradition has sought to unite around a shared belief system, and interpret the world through a largely self-referential and textually based discourse; so they are resilient at ignoring aspects of reality that contradict an arguably faith based political project. Concrete and specific situations in the modern world are often judged by reference to Trotsky’s writings about related but different circumstances more than half a century ago.There is a certain cognative dissonance among some “Marxists” who prefer the idealised working class of their imagination to the real, living and complicated mass of working class people; and prefer purity to the compromises and adjustments that are needed to make socialism a living political reality, relevant to the day to day experience of working people.
Indeed, while the official communist parties have, since Khruschev’s speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU systematically sought to recognise and overcome this historical legacy; the Trotskyist left, certainly in the Anglophone world, have made no such reappraisal of the aspects of continuity in their own politics with the negative parts of the Russian experience. (It is worth making the aside that the Trotskyite tradition around Ernest Mandel were always more pluralistic, as Liam Mac Uaid has recently pointed out, but in other respects still bear the weaknesses of Trotskyism)
Trotskyism consists of an uncritical identification with the Russian revolution, while simultaneously deflecting all responsibility for the negative consequences of the actual historical experience onto a mythologised “Stalinism”. The identification has two further highly negative consequences: i) firstly to accept the Russian experience as normative – which is a very poor guide for political activity in developed liberal democracies in the twenty first century; and ii) an exaggerated emphasis on theoretical homogeneity and faith in the wisdom of the small group has had extremely bad consequences in terms of sectarian and divisive behaviour.
I have written before about how “Marxism” as practised by Trotskist groups takes an unscientific attitude towards verification; and that the material basis of sectarianism lies in the conservatism inherent in separating organisationally on the basis of differences in theoretical doctrine.
In science, theories become accepted not only on the basis of explaining the evidence, but also by a process of evaluating the impact they have on the already existing body of mature scientific theory. (Follow the link here if you want more philosphical justification)
In defence of scientific realism … we must say that theories that explain the empirical evidence must also conform to theoretical virtues, such as coherence with other established theories, completeness, unifying power and the capacity to generate novel predictions.
So is Marxism a science? To which I would answer it could be, but usually isn’t. If we mean by Marxism a social theory that seeks to establish its own approximate truth through examination of the evidence, and through self-critical evaluation of its own theoretical virtues, including coherence, then Marxism is a science. However, there must be a number of caveats. Firstly, that the development of evidence involves the art of seeking to change the world though political activity, and it is extremely hard to evaluate the impact of such activity, and what evidence is gathered is subjective . Secondly, the research resources of the Marxist left, including academics, are puny compared to the complexity of the society we are seeking to understand, so any theories we develop are likely to be only highly flawed approximations to the truth; thirdly the problem of organisational conservatism on defending false aspects of theories. When we take these caveats into account we can see the inadequacy of all those arguments that start: “As Marxists we should, or as Marxists we must … “
The last factor I mention, organisational conservatism is perhaps the most important. Precisely because the empirical evidence is sparse, or subject to other interpretations that are equally consistent with the evidence, then the question of “theoretical virtues” are of elevated importance. Alex Callinicos includes a useful discussion of this in his short book on Trotskyism, discussing the question of progressive and regressive problem shifts derived from Lakatos. If the consequence of a theory entails evidence consistent with an unrelated theory then this is a progressive problem shift, that supports a presumption towards truth-likeness. If however, defence of a theory involves rejection of parts of other mature ands established theories, then we are involved in a regressive problem shift (That doesn’t necessarily mean it is wrong as all theories are only truth approximations and can be refined – but a regressive problem shift should raise a presumption of truth-unlikeness requiring further research.)
Yet the various Leninist groups, the SWP, CWI, USFI etc, all derive their justification for separateness by defining themselves as having a coherent world vision based upon a unique or semi unique interpretation of Marxism, often deriving from very partial and incomplete evidence. How could it be different? How could a few amateur researchers, with scarcely any access to evidence, really develop theories that were sufficiently supported empirically; and sufficiently theoretically virtuous in the technical sense; to explain social phenomenon as complex as the degeneration of the Soviet Union? Yet on the basis of these differing interpretations, each of these groups has developed a distinct Weltanshauung that is largely hermetically sealed. For example, if we look at the theoretical writings of the IS tendency, they only refer to works within their own “tradition”, or to the old grey beards. The same can be said of the Mandelite tradition, or the Taafeites. In other words, the left groups deliberately eschew an attempt to develop a scientific exposure of their theories to a discussion of their theoretical virtues – again in the technical sense of what degree they are consistent, consilient, lacking ad hoc features, etc.
The heritage of Trotskism in the British labour movement has therefore been a largely negative one – that is not to say that individual initiatives or campaigns undertaken by Trotskist groups were negative, or that individuals are not useful activists. The Poll Tax and Stop the War were both important campaigns that owed their success partly to the Trotskyist left. Nor should we deny the role that the Trotskist left have played in inspiring and maintaining a cadre of good socialist activists.
However, they have also tried to graft an almost entirely alien Russian tradition of organising onto very unsympathetic British conditions; and have perpetuated traditions of intellectual arrogance, and hairsplitting. They have valued division over doctrinal questions as more important than unity, and have been prepared to wreck collaborative organisations or campaigns that do not bow to their superior wisdom, and recognise their right to lead.
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