Trotsky as Alternative
By Ernest Mandel
Verso, 1995, 186 pp., $44.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Leon Trotsky has defied the efforts of enemies and friends alike to wilfully or inadvertently blacken the political heritage of one of the twentieth century's greatest Marxist revolutionaries. Generations of Stalinists have tried to air-brush the role of Trotsky out of the October Revolution and Russian Civil War, and to poison his reputation with some of the foulest slander ever invented. Among Trotsky's friends, the fine tradition of struggle of many Trotskyist groups has unfortunately been devalued by the sectarian dogmatism of some of the more crazy sects. Amongst the anti-Marxists, both conservatives and moderate social democrats often argue that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was no more than a power clash between two Marxist (therefore anti-democratic) tyrants who would have led Russia into the same hell regardless of who won. Ernest Mandel's new book on Trotsky is none of the above, though it is far from faultless in some areas. On Trotsky's political and theoretical achievements, Mandel presents a comprehensive account of Trotsky's path-breaking analysis of the threat of fascism and how the working class should unite to fight it. Mandel also celebrates Trotsky's political and military leadership of the 5 million-strong Red Army during the Russian Revolution's life and death struggle in the Civil War. Trotsky's pinnacle of achievement was, however, his leadership of the Revolution in 1917. Mandel demonstrates Trotsky's genius in understanding the dynamics of class struggle, especially the forging of political unity within the working class, and Trotsky's early recognition (earlier than Lenin) that a democratic working class power will express itself through, and be guaranteed by, spontaneous organs of self-rule such as the soviets of workers. The theoretical underpinning of Trotsky's political achievement during the Revolution was his theory of "permanent revolution". This theory challenged Marxist orthodoxy at the time by arguing that the minority working class in feudal Russia would not and could not content itself with establishing a capitalist state in a merely bourgeois revolution against Tsarism but would leap over this historical stage, take power and establish socialism in a context of international revolution. When Lenin accepted the truth of Trotsky's theory, and Trotsky accepted Lenin's truth on the need for a party of the most class-conscious revolutionaries to lead the struggle for working class power, it was a marriage made in Marxist Heaven. Paradise was soon fouled by Stalin, however, and it was Trotsky's second great theoretical achievement to analyse why the Revolution degenerated and allowed a nondescript hack like Stalin to drive the world's first socialist republic to its doom. As international revolution failed to materialise and relieve the strain on an isolated Russian Revolution, the political activity of the Russian working class slowly atrophied. With the working class exhausted and reduced to a third of its 1917 level through war, hunger and absorption into the state apparatus, the Party apparatus was forced to step in and rule in the name of the working class. This process, however, brought with it material privileges to the party apparatus. Mandel cites new research which shows that a top regional party functionary had a standard of living nine times higher, and a Central Committee member 30 times higher, than the average skilled worker. Trotsky argued that these party-state functionaries (fewer than 1,000 in 1917 but over 100,000 by 1922) formed a specific social layer which abrogated power to itself as a means to defend its material interests. So began, in 1923 with the Left Opposition, Trotsky's heroic struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, cutting through Stalin's claims to still represent socialism. For Mandel, Trotsky is not a socialist superman. Trotsky, says Mandel, made "significant theoretical and practical errors of judgement", most importantly during the dark days of 1920-21 when "substitutionism" got the better of him. Mandel argues that "Bolshevik policies and strategy during this period hindered the revival of the self-activity of the working class, and the theoretical justification [of party over class — substitutionism] made it worse". Mandel specifically cites Trotsky's support for the prohibition of parties other than the CPSU, the outlawing of factions within the CPSU, and the downgrading of the role of trade unions. These measures effectively stifled democratic working class power and by the time Trotsky recognised this, in 1923, the bureaucratic dictatorship had a firm foothold. Second-guessing the Bolsheviks is easy sport for their opponents but only revolutionaries like Mandel have the political integrity to make such criticisms. Mandel is especially right to criticise Trotsky's errors when they were committed after the Civil War was over. What Trotsky's experience with substitutionism shows is both the near certainty of making mistakes, including by Marxists, and the necessity of learning from them. Trotsky became, for the rest of the pre-World War II decades, the standard-bearer for democratic revolutionary Marxism. There are two main deficiencies with Mandel's book. He treats Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution as a timeless law, forcing all subsequent revolutions in poor, peasant countries into the mould of successful socialist revolution and working class power in Russia, without questioning whether and to what extent, say, the Chinese revolution of 1949, or nationalisation of industry alone, could be called socialist. Out of keeping with Mandel's usual intellectual rigour and level-headedness is his defence of the apostolic nature of the Fourth International (FI) as the true heirs of Trotsky. Mandel cites the FI's smallness ("often exaggerated") as "a source of growing political strength" because the FI is based on a shared moral commitment and thus immune from the temptations of bureaucratic corruption. That may be so, but it still doesn't amount to a hill of beans in terms of real political influence. Missing, too, is the colourful zing that writers like Isaac Deutscher have brought to Trotsky's life. Mandel's book is nevertheless a skilful defence of Trotsky, whose name has so often been abused and misrepresented, but ought to be synonymous with the best of democratic socialism.