Leon Trotsky was one of the most hopeless and deluded ideologues who has ever lived. His self-righteousness and unwillingness to accept political reality led directly to his defeat at the hands of Stalin. It further led him to adopt all sorts of bizarre and ridiculous positions on fascism and WWII once he was in exile. To this day, Trotskyist cults continue to parrot his dogmas as if they had any relationship with reality.
Throughout the factional fight with Stalin, Trotsky underestimated Stalin time and time again. He did not take him seriously as an opponent, and missed opportunity after opportunity to oust him from his position. This was valuable time that Stalin needed to strengthen his hold over the party. The very methods that Trotsky complained of when Stalin used them against him had been defended by Trotsky and the other opposition members when they held power:
Trotsky and his associates were absolutely correct. The appointment system was Stalin’s most effective instrument in conquering power. Although he did not invent it, he perfected it. Boris Souvarine, in his analysis of the structure of the state, singled out the two chief concentrations of central power – the Secretariat, which worked in close association with Orgburo; and the Central Control Commission, with its local control commissions, introduced in 1920 to register all complaints against officialdom but very quickly transformed into a weapon for combatting all criticism and maintaining the strict discipline.
…Trotsky and his associates justly criticized the system of appointments from above, but they were criticizing a system that Lenin had created and were thereby violating Lenin’s precepts. More importantly, they were criticizing a system created with their consent and participation. They voiced their opposition to the system after the Twelfth Congress, when it began to turn against them. Despite the sharp polemics between the supporters of Trotsky and Stalin, they agreed on the decisive point: the party should run the entire life of the country, not only its political life, but social, economic, and cultural matters as well. Their agreement on this point showed that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was in the last analysis only a struggle for power.’-Utopia in Power, pp.163-165
Here was Trotsky’s reaction to Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation once he was in exile:
‘The Trotskyists welcomed the decision to collectivize agriculture, although Trotsky did reproach Stalin for his theoretical illiteracy, for not even considering the second volume of Capital in his policy of collectivization. (Trotsky wrote this in his Bulletin of the Opposition, which he began to publish after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.) Sometimes it is possible to find in Trotsky’s Bulletin letters from the Soviet Union criticizing collectivization for not being radical enough. “In place of the dispossessed and deported kulaks,” a certain A.T. complains in a letter dated June 12, 1930, “in the soil fertilized by centrist illusions, we see the sprouting of new capitalist shoots.” In a 1931 pamphlet, Problems of the Development of the USSR, Trotsky called collectivization “a new epoch in the development of humanity, the beginning of the liquidation of the ‘idiocy of rural life'”. Ante Ciliga, who in 1930 was in Stalin’s prisons and camps, told of the unenviable position of the imprisoned Trotskyists when they received instructions from their leader to defend the view that the Soviet Union was a “workers’ state.” It is true that Trotsky wrote, “The Soviet Union has not entered into socialism, as the ruling Stalinist faction teaches.” Instead, Trotsky argued, it had entered “only into the first stage of development in the direction of socialism.” In a letter to his son in October 1932 he wrote that it would be wrong to raise the slogan “Down with Stalin” as a war cry at that moment because “at present Milyukov, the Mensheviks, and Thermidorians of all sorts…will willingly echo the cry….It may happen within a few months,” this great strategist of the revolution continued, “that Stalin may have to defend himself against Thermidorian pressure, and that we temporarily may have to support him.” With enemies like these, Stalin didn’t need friends.’-p.247
Here, we see the origins of Trotsky’s ridiculous thesis that the Trotskyist movement had to continue to give ‘critical support’ to the ‘workers’ state’ of the USSR under Stalin – a state which was arresting, jailing, killing and spying on Trotsky’s supporters, and would ultimately kill Trotsky himself. Trotsky flattered himself with thinking that he still had a lot of influence in the USSR, and that Stalin would need his support to solidify his regime. He dreamed of returning triumphantly and being reappointed to the leadership of the regime. It never happened. Stalin would build socialism his way, without Trotsky’s input, and without the help of the Left Opposition. Stalinism, as bad as it was for Trotsky, was still preferable to Menshevism or liberalism. Stalinism was just an ‘aberration’, a bump in the road, over which the proletariat would cross and arrive at real socialism. We now know, decades later, that this position was utter idiocy, that nothing could be worse than Stalinism except perhaps Nazism, and that the world would be a better place if the Communists had never seized power in Russia, for Stalinism is the logical conclusion of communism.
Trotsky was just as clueless on the subject of fascism. From the early 1920s onwards, Trotsky pushed the idea of the ‘united front’, whereby the Communist Parties would offer an alliance to the social-democrats against fascism. Trotsky knew that the treacherous reformist leadership would be hostile to any such arrangement, but he thought that the rank-and-file SPD workers could be peeled away from the influence of their leaders by such a manoeuvre, which would bring about the defeat of fascism and the overthrow of liberal democracy. Sadly, Trotsky underestimated the tribal loyalty that millions of workers had to the existing social-democratic parties. Historians of Weimar Germany have revised the notion that a ‘united front’ of communists and social-democrats was possible, pointing to the serious distrust that existed even at the level of the rank-and-file between the two sides. If anything, the communists had more in common with the fascists than the social-democrats, as they both sought to bring down liberal democracy. The KPD in Germany even gave support to the Nazi attempt to overthrow the SPD government in Prussia in 1932, and indulged in anti-Semitic rhetoric to try to win over more German workers, in competition with the Nazis’ own anti-Semitic propaganda. It is a sick joke to think that such a corrupted organisation could have been a reliable ally in the fight against fascism. The KPD’s denunciation of the social-democrats as ‘social fascists’, idiotic as it was, was only one of the many serious obstacles to a KPD-SPD alliance. Even if such an alliance had been pulled off, they could never have seized power, as the German military would have reacted by either launching a coup and imposing a military dictatorship or bringing Hitler to power earlier than they did. The terrible truth is that Weimar was probably doomed from 1929 onwards. This doesn’t mean that Nazism was inevitable, but it does mean that German liberal democracy was probably living on borrowed time – and the result would not be socialism, but some sort of fascism.
Trotsky failed to appreciate the uniquely destructive and evil nature of fascism. He described both fascism and liberal democracy as representing the interests of imperialism and capitalism, and suggested that there was no essential or moral difference between them. Here is what he had to say in an interview with a Brazilian Trotskyist in 1938 about the coming war:
Trotsky: In order to understand correctly the nature of the coming events we must first of all reject the false and thoroughly erroneous theory that the coming war will be a war between fascism and “democracy.” Nothing is more false and foolish than this idea. Imperialist “democracies” are divided by the contradictions of their interests in all parts of the world. Fascist Italy can easily find herself in one camp with Great Britain and France if she should lose faith in the victory of Hitler. Semifascist Poland may join one or the other of the camps depending upon the advantages offered. In the course of war the French bourgeoisie may substitute fascism for its “democracy” in order to keep its workers in submission and force them to fight “to the end.” Fascist France, like “democratic” France would equally defend its colonies with weapons in hand. The new war will have a much more openly rapacious imperialist character than the war of 1914-18. Imperialists do not fight for political principles but for markets, colonies, raw materials, for hegemony over the world and its wealth.
The victory of any one of the imperialist camps would mean the definite enslavement of all humanity, the clamping of double chains on present-day colonies, and all weak and backward peoples, among them the peoples of Latin America. The victory of any one of the imperialist camps would spell slavery, wretchedness, misery, the decline of human culture.
What is the way out, you ask? Personally, I do not doubt for a moment that a new war will provoke an international revolution against the rule of the rapacious capitalist cliques over humanity. In wartime all differences between imperialist “democracy” and fascism will disappear. In all countries a merciless military dictatorship will reign. The German workers and peasants will perish just like the French and English. The modern means of destruction are so monstrous that humanity will probably not be able to endure war even a few months. Despair, indignation, hatred will push the masses of all warring countries into an uprising with weapons in hand. Victory of the world proletariat will put an end to war and will also solve the Spanish problem as well as all the current problems of Europe and other parts of the world.
Of course, Trotsky’s ridiculous predictions were debunked. Britain sacrificed its empire and its ‘material’ interests to defend democracy and beat fascism. The war did not bring about a revolution or cause the democracies to become fascist. The British and Americans loyally stood by their governments in the decisive hour. Capitalism entered a golden age. There was a cultural renaissance. The post-war period gave us Camus and Sartre, Bellow and Baldwin, Hollywood, the Beatles, etc. Socialism gave the world nothing.
We would gloss over Trotsky’s failed predictions in the IMT (and never admitted that Grant repeated this idiocies for some years before changing his mind and borrowing the analysis of Morrow and Goldman). However, if you think about it, this is a pretty big thing to get wrong, especially for an ideology claiming to be ‘science’. One of the premier geniuses of Marxist theory absolutely failed to correctly predict the outcome of WWII. That is absolutely pathetic. If Trotsky couldn’t manage it, what use is Marxism as an ideology? If his biographer Lord Skidelsky is to be believed, even the British fascist Oswald Mosley came closer to accurately predicting the outcome of the war than Trotsky did.
He also advocated giving ‘critical support’ to reactionary regimes in the Third World against ‘imperialist’ democratic regimes:
I will take the most simple and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat. Truly, one must have an empty head to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. Under all masks one must know how to distinguish exploiters, slave-owners, and robbers!
Of course, if Trotsky was guided by common sense and not dogma, he would know that the scenario he outlined would have strengthened Vargas’ regime, because he would be seen as a national hero who defeated imperialism. Trotsky believes instead that it would have led to a revolution. Complete nonsense. A similar thing happened in the USSR – Stalin’s regime was strengthened thanks to the prestige it gained from winning WWII. It did not bring about a revolution of any kind. Ethiopia is also a case in point. Despite having argued that anticipated that a successful resistance of Italian colonialism by the Ethiopians would bring about the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie’s ‘reactionary’ regime, all it did was strengthen his rule. After his restoration by the British in 1941, Selassie remained Emperor until 1974, when a group of communist army officers overthrew him and established a Stalinist regime. Imagine taking this idiocy seriously. One could justify giving ‘critical support’ to Saddam Hussein against the Americans, or to any other tinpot dictator, as many Trotskyists have done in the past.
Trotsky’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’ on the issue of WWII was adopted by the British Trotskyists such as Ted Grant, who argued against supporting the British government in WWII. Instead, they argued, Trotskyists should conduct agitation within the military and the wartime industries, encouraging mutinies and strikes, so as to overthrow the government in favour of a socialist one, which alone could defeat fascism. Thankfully, most British workers ignored the Trotskyists, remained loyal to the government and stood by Churchill in order to bring about fascism’s defeat. Sadly, many French workers listened to the Communist Party, which had an identical position to that of the Trotskyists on the conflict, and effectively helped to bring about the Nazi conquest of France in 1940. Imagine if a similar fate had befallen the United Kingdom during its darkest hour. Trotsky’s idiotic ideas would have enabled the triumph of fascism in Europe.
Trotsky made this singularly idiotic prediction about the war just before his death in 1940 – he claimed that as Hitler’s troops were recruited from worker and peasant backgrounds, they would rebel against the German regime, and join forces with the conquered peoples within the Nazi empire in order to bring down Hitler’s regime and bring about socialism. As we know, this did not happen. Again, he totally misunderstood the nature of modern totalitarianism and nationalism, and how it was more powerful than any notion of ‘class’. Moreover, the war did not last ‘months’ as he had suggested, but six, long, gruelling years, with millions dead by the end, and hardly any means of production left for the working-class to inherit. All of this was rebuilt, not with socialist means, but American money – America being the only major belligerent that had escaped bombing raids and serious economic destruction and devastation.
Trotsky had argued that the triumph of ‘imperialism’ on either side of WWII would result in the enslavement of humanity. He was half-right. It led to the enslavement of Eastern Europe under Stalinism. However, it also galvanised the movement for independence in the Third World. Britain and France, weakened by war, could no longer hold on to their colonies. India became independent within three years of the war’s end. Throughout the 50s and 60s, African countries also gained independence. Trotsky’s predictions were yet again falsified. Remember, a central aspect of Trotskyism is the claim that the Third World countries could not gain independence under capitalism, as the native bourgeoisie is tied to imperialism. The theory of ‘permanent revolution’ says that the working-class, allied to the peasantry, must lead the fight for independence, and that any such fight must result in the building of socialism, not liberal-democratic capitalism. This might have been true in some cases, but not the case for all Third World countries. Instead, the fight for independence was led by the bourgeois intelligentsia, with the working-class and peasantry playing important, but not decisive, roles. In most cases, what happened was a transfer of sovereignty from the ruling class of the colonising country to the native elite, which resulted either in liberal democracy, like in India, or quasi-Stalinist dictatorship, like Ghana, or a kleptocracy of native elites. One way Trots get around this is by saying that ‘Yes, these states gained independence, but it was not real independence as they were still tied to capitalism afterwards and cannot develop on this basis.’ But the truth is that every country is in some way dependent on other countries as a result of the globalised world we now live in. Moreover, the likes of Brazil, India and China have developed strong capitalist classes in their own right, which are no longer as dependent on foreign imperialism as in the past, and are able to conduct independent foreign policies aligned with their own interests. Trotsky had argued that such countries could not hope to develop on a capitalist basis, yet they clearly have been able to do so, and thrived.
Moreover, despite his belief that Stalinism would be overthrown by the proletariat in place of ‘real socialism’, Stalinism was strengthened for a whole historical period, and half of Europe fell under its sway. Trotskyism was utterly vanquished, with most of the Trotskyist cadres in Europe being killed by the fascists or by the Stalinists. Trotsky himself was killed in 1940, and his movement fell to pieces. It seems that almost all of the prophecies and predictions he made during his tragic life were utterly falsified. To think that to this day, there are people uncritically defending his dogmatic positions on these issues.