Ian D. Thatcher’s 2003 biography of Trotsky is a work of genuine historical scholarship. In contrast to the hagiographies of Trotskyist sects, and the impressive but biased account by Isaac Deutscher, Thatcher’s work is a measured and objective assessment of Trotsky’s political career. It also includes incisive observations on Trotsky’s writings and political analyses in the light of recent scholarship, which has served to both confirm and also problematise many of his claims.
Precisely because Thatcher has the temerity to be objective, his book met with a vitriolic reception from the cult leader David North, of the WSWS website, along with that of Geoffrey Swain:
The aim of their exercise in pseudo-biography is to restore the historical position of Trotsky to where it stood before the works of Deutscher and, for that matter, E. H. Carr were published—that is, to the darkest period of the Stalin School of Falsification.
Having read the biography in full, I can attest that North is absolutely deranged and that Thatcher’s treatment of Trotsky is actually incredibly fair-minded. Yet North would have you believe that Thatcher and Swain are both Stalinist falsifiers. What a crank.
North’s hysterical ravings can be safely ignored. The book couldn’t be more different from North’s idiotic characterisation. That said, it is disappointing that Thatcher does not write more about Trotsky’s work building the Fourth International, especially his relationship with the American and Spanish Trotskyists. There is no discussion of In Defence of Marxism, the book that more than any other condenses Trotsky’s approach to the turmoil of the 1930s and the path towards world war. (Thatcher has written a separate essay from 1991 about this book, however.)
There are some very interesting criticisms of Trotsky’s approach to history in his book My Life:
If Trotsky lost to Stalin because the revolution itself went into decline, for example, why does Trotsky claim that he could have defeated Stalin if he had acted more boldly in 1923? Even later in 1926-7, we are told that the revolutionary spirit was still sufficiently strong for the majority of workers in Moscow and Leningrad to support the Left Opposition. It seems as though revolutionary decline is invoked to explain defeat and revolutionary spirit is recalled to show that Trotsky was the real popular hero of the revolution, that his ideas had a resonance in society, that ultimately victory would be on his side.But the exact correlation of forces between ‘decline’ and ‘spirit’ at specific points in time is never fully explained and, for this reader, the primary of ‘social causation’ in explaining Trotsky’s defeat is thrown into doubt.-pp.11-12
It is particularly interesting to read about Trotsky’s attitude to Lenin’s attempts at centralising the RSDLP back in the early 1900s, when he was a trenchant critic of Lenin’s attitude to party-building.
Recounting the events that led up to the demise of the SRWU, Trotsky warned against excessive centralisation of workers’ organisations. The SWRU was made up of a series of local cells, each of no more than twenty-five members and each having its own committee of five office-holders: cashier, bookkeeper, secretary and two deputies. The members would meet twice each week to discuss their cell’s progress and activities. Linking the cells to a central committee created nothing, according to Trotsky, but trouble. Once the central committee was compromised and its assets seized, for example, all activities were brought to an abrupt end. A system of independent and isolated cells, answering local needs and questions through their own printing presses or hectographs, was the most sensible method to ensure continuity of action even if one cell was arrested.-p.24
Interestingly, Lenin made the exact opposite argument in What is to be Done? It is precisely the threat of arrest by the government that required a centralised leadership, for even if a local cell was arrested, Lenin reasoned, the underground leadership could continue to direct affairs. As it happens, the passage of time proved Trotsky right and Lenin wrong. Insofar as the Bolsheviks enjoyed a centralised organisation, they were vulnerable to infiltration from the Tsarist secret police, which placed its spies on their central committee and which succeeded in arresting and and executing a great many activists. In fact, when the February Revolution happened, practically all of the revolutionary organisations had been shattered by Tsarist repression. Almost all of the leading Bolsheviks were either dead, or in exile. The small Bolshevik organisation of 8,000 had almost no influence on events. In spite of this, the Bolsheviks went on to rapidly grow and even seize power within several months. Insofar as the Bolsheviks won support over time, it was because they were a decentralised organisation in which local branches could not be easily subjected to the discipline of the centre, something which allowed Lenin to lean upon the impatient rank-and-file against the conservative ‘committee-men’ who were reluctant about launching an insurrection. The combination of Lenin as an individual with a relatively democratic and decentralised political organisation allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power in 1917. Trotsky mistakenly drew the conclusion that the Bolsheviks’ success proved that Lenin’s ideas on organisation had been right after all, but the opposite is the case. In fact, after the farcical July Days, some branches of the Bolshevik Party declared independence from the centre in order to salvage themselves from repression. Had it not been for the relatively open conditions of the political regime created by the February Revolution, and the relatively democratic and decentralised nature of the Bolshevik Party at this time, the October Revolution would never have happened. The myth of the centralised, disciplined revolutionary party that led the workers to the seizure of power has been repeated ad infinitum by Trotskyist sects for decades.
The relatively open and democratic party regime of the RSDLP in comparison with today’s Trotskyist sects is particularly striking in the following paragraph:
As the delegate of the Siberian Union Trotsky produced his reflections on the Congress soon after its conclusion. These circulated in rough draft before being polished for publication by the party printing presses in Geneva. Although Trotsky did not want readers to lose sight of the Congress’s achievements, the bulk of his essay was given over to explaining divisions and disappointments.-p.28
Meanwhile, in Trotskyist groups, no one is allowed to write up their own report of what a given congress was like. Instead, one will find on Trotskyist websites that every congress is celebrated as a display of ‘unanimous’ agreement on everything. Any disputes or discussions are concealed from the masses, and even from most members. If anyone did what Trotsky did back in 1903, they would be expelled. Indeed, at the Fifth Congress of 1907, Trotsky:
ridiculed part of a Bolshevik resolution condemning the notion of a workers’ congress that sough to ban party members from discussing the very idea of it. How would such a level of thought control be monitored, he wondered? Finally, the Bolsheviks were angered by Trotsky’s suggestion that the Central Committee should not be allowed to alter the membership of the party newspaper’s editorial board without the prior approval of a party conference.-p.50
Trotsky speaking up against party authoritarianism and the attempt to introduce a cultish homogeneity of thought within the organisation is a striking contrast to his later behaviour, and that of today’s Trotskyist sects.
Thatcher is sceptical of Trotsky’s claim that he was Lenin’s rightful heir, pointing out that Lenin had supported Stalin against Trotsky from around 1921 onwards. That Lenin later came round to form a bloc with Trotsky over certain specific issues does not mean that he wanted Trotsky to succeed him. He had spent much of his career playing Trotsky and Stalin against each other, and there is no reason to believe that had he lived he would not have continued with this tactic.
Thatcher also questions Trotsky’s bizarre view of foreign affairs:
Free of burdensome bureaucratic obligations to the Third International, Trotsky does not seem to have been a particularly sagacious commentator on the likely spread of the proletarian revolution. His prognoses were consistently over-optimistic. In January 1919, for example, he thought that the recent murder of Rosa Luxemburg during communist-led demonstrations in Berlin signalled the beginning of Germany’s ‘July Days’, or the first, unsuccessful, movement of the revolution towards its culmination. He highlighted, hwoever, one notable variation. Russia’s ‘July Days’ had taken five months to emerge after the overthrow of the monarchy; in Germany they arose only two months after the fall of Wilhelm II. Trotsky used this comparison as evidence that Germany’s ‘October’ was soon at hand. We now know how false this prediction was. Indeed, there were crucial differences between Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1919. The German Communist Party was much smaller and less significant in comparison to the centre parties, most notably the Socialist Party (SPD). Moreover, the pro-constitutional SPD was quite willing to employ the armed power of the state to crush communist uprisings. No doubt the Entente would have been far more proactive in defending German capitalism from a communist coup, especially when the Red Army was powerless to intervene in Central Europe. For these and other reasons it is highly unlikely that a German revolution could have unfolded along the lines desired by Trotsky.
…Trotsky’s appeals to his foreign comrades reveal the profound difficulties contained within his strategy for world revolution…Trotsky gives the impression that only he possessed the genius to lead the masses…Trotsky never doubted that delays in in the world revolution were mainly due to problems of party leadership, but this was surely a simplistic approach.
…even had a communist revolution been successfully staged in Paris or Berlin, Trotsky held unrealistic expectations about how this would transform the situation in the USSR. He gave no full and sustained analysis of what quantity of free technological aid would have been sufficient to overcome Russian backwardness or whence such resources would have issued. Thus, even with a German revolution on its side, Soviet communism may all the same have had to make an accommodation with market forces. Trotsky could not escape the problems associated with communist modernisation of Russian conditions so easily.’-pp.111, p.134-135
Trotsky’s view on the Chinese Revolution is also questioned. Had his proposals been followed, it is likely that defeat would have been delayed, but not averted.
Trotsky’s views on literature expressed in Literature and Revolution are also looked at. It is clear that despite his claim that literature should be judged by its own standards, he only ever judged literature from a political standard himself. He also defended censorship in the interests of the revolution. A Trotsky-led USSR would only have had a marginally more liberal policy on cultural issues than that practiced by Stalin. His moralistic musings in Problems of Everyday Life (which I have never read) struck me (though Thatcher does not touch on this) as somewhat unusual for a Marxist, given its emphasis on the ‘superstructure’ as opposed to the material base of the Russian peasantry’s crudeness, lack of manners, chronic lateness and poor treatment of women. It is clear that the transformation of the material base brought about by the revolution had not transformed the morals and the psychology of the people. Trotsky thereby makes a concession that is damning to Marxism, for it is clear to Trotsky that socialism cannot succeed unless the people are uplifted not just economically, but culturally and psychologically. That Trotsky did not regard this as automatically flowing from socio-economic development is to his credit due to its intellectual honesty, something somewhat at odds with his dogmatic Bolshevism. It also suggests that the ‘utopian’ critics of Marxism were correct to warn that an attempt to implement socialism without a prior moral transformation of the masses is doomed to failure. Marx and Engels dismissed this as bourgeois moralising. In light of the horrors of Stalinism, this attitude should probably be revisited.
Despite our claim in the IMT that the degeneration of the USSR was inevitable due to ‘economic isolation’, Thatcher’s account suggests that Trotsky did not in fact believe when he was still in the USSR. In his works published during the mid-1920s, he argued that Russia could in fact exploit the world market for its benefit, and use it to develop socialism in the USSR. He expressed no fear in these works that foreign capitalist sabotage would push the USSR off its course towards socialism. This is precisely what Stalin did in the 1930s, when American and German capitalists came flooding into the country to help industrialise one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Only with his defeat did Trotsky now change his tune and argue that Stalinism was an inevitable product of economic isolation, and that if only the revolution had spread, it would all have been different. Indeed, The Revolution Betrayed has next to no mention of the role played by foreign capital in the industrialisation of the country. One would believe that the USSR depended entirely on its own internal resources for its development.
Trotsky’s hypocritical attitude to democracy is also touched upon, as well as his naivety that his solutions for the crisis of the Soviet planned economy would have fixed the problems he correctly identified in The Revolution Betrayed. In the IMT, we never gave a convincing account of how a democratic planned economy would work in practice. Our economic programme was borrowed without acknowledgement from Otto Bauer’s proposals for socialisation (which ironically he designed as a means of avoiding the authoritarianism of Bolshevism). It is unclear how this would have been realised in the context of a complex post-industrial economy.
Trotsky’s failure to grasp the uniquely destructive nature of fascism in the form of its racial aspects is also noted by Thatcher. This led to Trotsky’s preposterous claim that there was no essential difference between fascism and liberal democracy, as they both represented the interests of the imperialists and capitalists. One area where I disagree strongly with Thatcher is his questioning of Trotsky’s analysis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Thatcher effectively takes a pro-Stalin view, arguing that Stalin was forced into the alliance by the bungling of Britain and France, which rejected his offer of an alliance against Germany. Trotsky saw this as a cynical betrayal of the revolution in the long-term interests of the bureaucracy. Thatcher sees it as a decision made out of difficult circumstances. Trotsky is closer to the truth. Whatever mistakes the Western democracies made in their diplomacy with the USSR, the evidence is quite clear that Stalin had sought an alliance with Germany for years. (Heller and Nekrich go through all the primary source evidence in their book Utopia in Power.) The USSR and Germany had worked closely throughout the interwar period as the two great outcasts of Weimar, and Stalin’s last-minute offer to the Western democracies was little more than a ploy he made out of fear that he might not find an agreement with Germany. Britain and France for their part were uneasy over agreeing to Soviet troops marching through Poland and Romania – for good reason, if one keeps in mind what happened after the war. True, Chamberlain bungled with appeasement, but the fact that Stalin saw Hitler as a more trustworthy partner only goes to prove Stalin’s naivety on the one hand, and his long-term attachment to a German alliance on the other.
All in all, this is an informative book. More detail would have been great, but I would recommend it as a starting point for those who want to find out about Trotsky’s life and career. It is nowhere near as comprehensive as Deutscher’s three-volume tome, but it at least has the merit of being a quick read. It is certainly a better guide to his life than his own unreliable autobiography, or the nonsensical hagiography that is spewed out by the Trotskyist sects to this day.