http://socialistaction.org/leon-trotsky-revolutionary-fighter/
Leon Trotsky: Revolutionary Fighter
Published October 15, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
Oct. 2015 Trotsky & Dobbs
By JEFF MACKLER
Paul LeBlanc, “Leon Trotsky,” Reaktion Books, distributed by the
University of Chicago Press, 2015, 224 pages, $16.95 paperback
Paul LeBlanc’s new and admirable brief biography of Leon Trotsky comes
on the 75th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination in Coyoacan, Mexico,
at the hands of Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader. Trotsky, along with
Vladimir Lenin, was the co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the
world’s first socialist revolution. This was an event that changed the
course of world history in establishing for the first time a government
and state of the working class—a workers’ state—which abolished
capitalism and ruled society through democratic working-class
institutions (soviets) that advanced the interests of the vast majority.
Interest in the ideas of Leon Trotsky, as LeBlanc aptly notes, has far
from waned in recent decades, with one or another book, novel, and other
works—poems, plays, films—focusing on Trotsky’s revolutionary socialist
ideas published on average every six months. LeBlanc is a lifelong
revolutionary socialist activist and scholar, currently Professor of
History at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. He is the author of
“Unfinished Leninism” and the co-editor of “Trotsky’s Writings from Exile.”
LeBlanc sets out to focus on the latter period of Trotsky’s life when,
following his failed Left Opposition efforts to challenge Stalin’s
bureaucratic regime, he was expelled from the central leadership of the
Bolshevik Party and exiled, first to Siberia and then to Prinkipo, a
small island off the Turkish coast. As with any serious scholar,
however, LeBlanc does not refrain from covering critical aspects of
Trotsky’s leading role during the Soviet Union’s revolutionary period.
LeBlanc writes, “To understand the man, we must, of course, look at his
entire life—but in some ways the most decisive qualities of this
revolutionary are to be found in the Trotsky who, in order to remain
true to the ideals that animated his entire life, followed a trajectory
that took him out of the center of power. This was the doomed but
determined fighter who sought to defend and explain the relevance of the
heroic best that was the early communist tradition. He expended immense
energy to place the recent revolutionary experience—including
achievement, mistakes, and failures—into perspective, and to use such
insights for analyzing and battling global crises, new totalitarianisms
and the deepening violence that engulfed humanity from 1929 to 1940.”
While LeBlanc properly refers to Trotsky as a “brilliant innovative
theorist,” early on in his book he nonetheless, and strangely, refers to
“aspects of unoriginality in Trotsky’s thought, especially in relation
to the much-vaunted theory of permanent revolution, his analysis of
Stalinism, his prescriptions for defeating Hitler, and the much
misunderstood Transitional Program” (emphasis in original).
Here LeBlanc’s weak side, or super-objective “scholarly” impulse to
present a “balanced” view of Trotsky’s politics, at least at first, is
far off the mark. While he attributes this “unoriginality” to the fact
that Marx and other revolutionaries had previously dealt with similar
issues, none did so in the context of the actuality of the Russian
Revolution, not to mention Trotsky’s Marxist epic analysis of the
conditions that led to the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the rise
of fascism in Germany, and the necessity of the workers’ united front to
thwart Hitler’s drive for power.
Using LeBlanc’s method, one might easily point to the “unoriginality” of
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity since Einstein undoubtedly based
his ideas on the accomplishments of the mathematicians and physicists
who preceded him. Indeed, were we to apply this ahistorical conception
to any human field of endeavor, we would be compelled to discount as
“unoriginal” the contributions of Beethoven in music or Manet and
Picasso in art. The latter artists were all trained in the school of
classical realism, much as Marx was trained in the classical economic
theories first advanced by Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Fortunately, LeBlanc’s “unoriginal” label with regard to a number of
Trotsky’s key contributions to Marxism gives way to a valuable and
accurate exposition of Trotsky’s central ideas. Indeed, perhaps
forgetful of his initial evaluation, LeBlanc spends considerable time
explaining the brilliance and uniqueness of Trotsky’s ideas, especially
when contrasted to their twisted distortions at the hands of Stalin, his
heirs, and Trotsky’s pro-capitalist critics.
Undoubtedly, Trotsky himself sought to root in Marxist theory his views
and the absolutely necessity of their relevance in the fight against
Stalin, but to the end of returning the Soviet Union to its
revolutionary roots as opposed to affirming some religious-type dogma.
At times, I did find LeBlanc’s effort at balance a bit disturbing. He
has the habit of making statements that are patently untrue or
distorted, only to soon afterward present the other side of the
equation, in which he almost always returns to a clear-sighted
affirmation of Trotsky’s political conceptions and practice. Perhaps
this is just the required or acquired academic expression of LeBlanc’s
work, wherein “balance” is a prerequisite to publication.
Like this reviewer, LeBlanc received his initial education in
revolutionary socialist politics from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP),
founded in 1928 by James P. Cannon and other expelled U.S. Communist
Party members. Trotsky himself played a key role in the formation of the
SWP, once the preeminent revolutionary socialist party in the U.S. until
its degeneration beginning in 1979. That LeBlanc retains the essential
lessons preserved in the SWP’s half-century of leading revolutionary
Marxist work is a testament to his integrity.
In a few important instances, however, LeBlanc briefly challenges
Trotsky’s views on critical questions, as with his interpretation of the
events surrounding the 1921 Red Army’s crushing of the Kronstadt
Rebellion during the height of the civil war. Without a single reference
to Trotsky’s writings on this subject—one that has inflamed anarchist
passions and anti-Leninist/Trotskyist sentiment to this day—LeBlanc
faults Trotsky, who led the Red Army’s quashing of this “rebellion” that
threatened the very existence of the nascent Soviet state by opening the
door to a possible British imperial invasion.
Trotsky was the central leader of the 1.5 million person Red Army that
successfully and heroically defended the beleaguered Soviet Union when
it was invaded by the armies of 14 nations, including armies from
opposed sides of the first world imperialist war.
Similarly, and again without a single reference to Trotsky’s writings,
LeBlanc comes close to identifying Trotsky’s views with those of Joseph
Stalin with regard to the latter’s disastrous 1929 collectivization of
agriculture and associated slaughter of untold tens of thousands or more
of Russian peasants. Serious students of Marxism and its revolutionary
practice would do well to revisit these questions from Trotsky’s vantage
point.
Despite these significant lapses, LeBlanc’s book is a modest but
important contribution toward the education of today’s emerging youthful
revolutionaries. The author properly references a number of Trotsky’s
key writings as landmark accomplishments and necessary readings in
revolutionary socialist literature, including Trotsky’s magnificent
three-volume “History of the Russian Revolution” and his autobiography,
“My Life.”
Trotsky bibliographer Louis Sinclair long ago told this reviewer that
Trotsky’s life works constituted some 80 volumes, making him perhaps the
most prolific writer among revolutionary socialists. That he was also
among the pantheon of Marxist thinkers, the central organizer of the
insurrection that toppled capitalist rule, the founding leader of the
revolutionary Soviet Army, and the most important post-revolutionary
expositor of Marxism makes LeBlanc’s contribution all the more valuable.
I am sure that he would agree that reading Trotsky’s work is similarly a
necessity for those who would follow in this great revolutionary’s
trailblazing and heroic footsteps.
Photo: Farrell Dobbs of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party speaks with
Trotsky (rt.) in Mexico.
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Posted in Marxist Theory & History. | Tagged Paul LeBlanc, Trotsky.
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