Seventy years after the assassination of Trotsky, yet another attempt

“History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no
battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything,
possesses, fights. It is not ‘History’ as if she was a person apart, who
uses man as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is
nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes” Karl Marx

The endeavor to write a commemorative piece on Trotsky has proven to
be more taxing that one could imagine. What words have not been written
about the Old Man whom some love and many detest? Countless biographies
have been produced. Few seek to tell the truth and the rest are the not
uncommon heaps of rubbish that Trotsky himself was familiar with later
in his life.

There is always that feeling of inadequacy in retelling the story –
even a mere episode of it – of a man whose life has penetrated the
course of history and stirred the course of it. However, on this
occasion, the 70^th year of his assassination, one feels
obliged to set aside the routines of political activity and embark on
the defense of his legacy from the filth constantly thrown at the man
and his ideas.

The man died but his many enemies never seem to feel satisfied. Even Time in its eulogy could not resist the temptation to deliver petty personal jibes at the Old Man:

“All his life he had lived in a shadowy world of conspiracy and
revolution. But now the great revolutionary’s life had become singularly
peaceful. His following had dwindled to a handful of devoted,
inconsequential disciples. His written work was esteemed less for its
revolutionary content than for its masterly prose.

“At 60 Leon Trotsky was a successful author with an adoring wife, a
house in the suburbs and enough money to live in smug comfort. A
lifetime devoted to the destruction of the middle class had made him one
of its members.” (Death of a Revolutionary, Time, September 2^nd 1940)

However, this so-called “handful of devoted, inconsequential
disciples” is still here 70 years after their “master” had been sent to
the grave. Like the handful of Bolsheviks of Lenin’s time that the world
dismissed as a sect before the Russian Revolution, the followers of
Trotsky’s ideas keep burrowing away in the labour movement like a
“mole”, hated so much by the social democratic leaders and equally
despised by the Stalinists all over the world. Mere mention of Trotsky
brings disgust to their face, reflecting a morbid fear that his ideas
are still as relevant today as they were then.

His theory of Permanent Revolution is an ever present reminder to
those leaders of the labour movement who long ago abandoned any hope for
socialism. But what irritates his enemies more than anything else is
his determination and dedication to the cause of the working class. He
was a man who followed his chosen path to the end without ever
faltering, a solid rock but with rough defects that make him more human
all the more so. Mediocre personalities lash out violently at him,
fearing that a comparison will draw out their own inadequacies.

Personal jibes litter many article and books on Trotsky. Portrayed in Time’s
eulogy was an old man cast out and living peacefully in his
“middle-class” suburban house with “smug comfort”. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Trotsky hated this suburban house, which was
more of a prison with its guard towers, electrically controlled
steel-encased double door, and strict security protocol that would not
let him talk with anyone alone in his study. He felt confined. The
capitalist moral that denies hundreds of millions of people the comfort
of life also tries to deny him this so-called “smug comfort” of a loving
wife and hearty meals from his own garden.

The latest assault has come from two well known historians, Professor Robert Service of the University of Oxford with his Trotsky: A Biography and Professor Bertrand M. Patenaude of Stanford University with his Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary.
Both, in a strange but not surprising coincidence, are research fellows
of the Hoover Institution – a well-known anti-communist think-thank
that has and had amongst its ranks figures like Condoleezza Rice,
Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, and Michael Boskin. Both published
their books in the same year, 2009, the year when the world was in a
serious recession. Economically speaking, 2009 was not the best year to
publish a book, let alone two books on the same subject. Robert would
have definitely known that Bertrand, his comrade-in-arms, was writing a
biography on the same figure, and likewise for Bertrand. Maybe both of
them recognized the failure of Ramon Mercader who only managed to
deliver one blow – though fatal – and let Trotsky escaped to the embrace
of his wife and gave him the chance to live long enough to utter to his
life-long companion “Natasha, I love you”. This time such privilege
cannot be afforded any more. Two blows ought to be enough to do the job
now.

In this new period that has opened up, history seeks a political
forceed that can fill the vacuum long left by the social democrats, the
reformists, the ex-Stalinists, who abandon the ship when it is being
tossed violently by events. While these so-called leaders are content to
be “captains” of boats drifting aimlessly in the open sea of history
without rudders, some are even taken in by the other side and serve as
deck hands for the enemy, Trotsky and the few who truly followed his
footstep never abandoned the ship.

The bourgeoisie never felt satisfied even after Trotsky had been
killed. Every now and then they feel the need to drive another ice pick
deeper into the skull. Like Stalin, they are obsessed with Trotsky, with
killing him over and over again, because he is never quite dead. In the
upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, the ruling class was suddenly alarmed
by the revival of Trotskyism. Consequently, from 1975 to 1979, three
biographical assassinations on Trotsky were published for an obvious
reason.

Now we are entering a new period. For the first time since the fall
of Soviet Union, there is a leader of a country, Hugo Chavez – with the
ability to captivate the ‘apathetic’ youth – who speaks favourably about
Leon Trotsky. The shock waves of the recession – and more importantly
its aftermath – awake many minds who have been in deep slumber. Robert
Service worries that many youth will rally to Trotsky’s ideas without
“the desire to read what he had written and done” because Trotsky “was
never quite what he said he was or what others said about him” (p. 497)
Professor Service feels he has to save the unsuspecting impressionable
youth from Trotskyism.

Professor Service has to belittle Trotsky and the movement that he
founded. Unable to intelligently dissect and dismantle Trotsky’s ideas,
other than a petty assertion that communism stifles personal initiative,
Professor Service can only resort to character assassination and a dose
of outright lies. Trotsky was “arrogant”, “egocentric”,
“untrustworthy”, “lacked tactical finesse”, “self-absorbed”, “ignored
the needs of his children”, “treated his first wife shabbily”. This fine
characterization of Trotsky’s personality can be found in just one
page. The 500 pages of Trotsky are littered with such snide
little remarks. Many of them are so contradictory with the other
statements Robert Service makes about Trotsky, so out of place, that one
wonders whether he inserted them at regular intervals to fulfill a
certain character-assassination quota of jibes that the Hoover
Institution requires from their fellow researchers.

Take this for example. He wrote that Trotsky “inspired his entourage
to feats of sacrifice” (p. 3). A page later he is declared as
“untrustworthy”. Unless his entourages are foolish baboons – which they
were not, as many of Trotsky’s comrades were capable people – then one
might wonder how a person can inspire such sacrifice while being
untrustworthy.

Then again, “He disdained the need to fight dirty even though he was
far from the cleanest of political figures. The insurmountable hurdle
for him in the race for the Lenin succession was the fact that he lacked
the overwhelming desire to become the leader. He felt better as a
battered contender than as a fighter consumed by ambition to be
champion. He did not want paramount authority badly enough.” (p. 498)
The first sentence itself is already a contradiction. Trotsky hated to
fight dirty and that is why he lost to Stalin – an assertion wrong on so
many levels in and of itself – but he was also not a “clean”
politician. Trotsky had “lust for dictatorship” (p. 4) but “he did not
want paramount authority”.

Robert Service is also quite disingenuous when he says that “a brief
re-ascent [of Trotskyism] occurred during 1968 during the students’
disturbances in Europe and North America, but it barely outlasted the
year” (p. 2) There is no way that Professor Service could have missed
the Trotskyist “mole” in the British labour movement that built such a
powerful position and caused serious concern to Britain’s political
order in the two decades of the 1970s and 80s. That was the Militant
Tendency, which had three MPs, dominated Liverpool council, and was the
favourite target of the media. Robert Service would have been in his
mid 30s at the height of the Militant in Britain. He cannot plead ignorance on this.

One will not find lengthy quotations from Trotsky’s works on his
major ideas: Permanent Revolution, the theory of the degeneration of
Soviet Union, Transitional Programme, United Front, etc. But Professor
Service is not interested in answering Trotsky’s ideas in the first
place. For any person with a penchant desire for knowledge, Professor
Service’s work is not a scholarly work that shines any new light on
Trotsky’s life despite his claim to have dug out “the buried life” of
Trotsky. It is not a work of an honest historian. It is a tabloid-style
biography of the lowest quality, cheaply constructed, reflecting the
decadence of bourgeois scholarship.

The hatred of the bourgeoisie toward Trotsky’s life is succinctly
expressed by Robert Service in his online interview when he said that
“he [Trotsky] wasn’t a good thing for anybody at any time.” This is
because the ruling class cannot accept that there is still a figure from
the October Revolution who still stands for genuine communism while
Stalin, to their convenience, had discredited and butchered the
Revolution. They wish Trotsky had taken the road of Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Radek, and many of his comrades-in-arms who bent before the tremendous
pressure of the Stalinist bureaucracy. His greatest contribution to
humankind is to have upheld the clean banner of Marxism when others had
deserted it. This the ruling class cannot forgive.

However, apart from this heap of rubbish that Robert Service and
Bertrand Patenaude have written, there are good works on Trotsky that
have come out around the same time: Jacob Tierney’s comical movie The Trotsky and Rick Geary’s graphic novel Trotsky: A Graphic Biography. Jacob was inspired by Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom
when he wrote the script of his movie, although they cannot be compared
at all. The movie says nothing about the idea of Trotsky. It is a
parody at best, but one that actually ridicules society more than it
does the life of Trotsky. Rick Geary’s work is not a biography in a
standard sense. It is a work of art, but more honest in its defects and
limitations. Artists can sometimes reflect the world more honestly than
the “objective pen” of academic scholars.

Seventy years have passed since the assassination of Trotsky. Yet his
ideas still persist from decade to decade, carried by innumerable
genuine class fighters who seek to liberate humanity from the fetters of
capitalism. None in the movement have suffered so much as the
supporters of Trotsky’s ideas. Many too have deserted our ranks, seeking
so-called “new ideas” that have never materialized. They complain that
we are clinging to old ideas and methods, that we “sound like a broken
record”. But the old tunes of capitalist oppression are still playing,
and even louder. Robert Service and his colleagues know this very well
and they try to disguise it.

One might think that Trotsky’s greatest contribution was leading the
October Revolution and building the Red Army from the exhausted masses
whose body and will had been smashed completely by the Great War. The
picture of him addressing tens of thousands of cheering workers and
soldiers seems to bring about some romanticism, a sense of glory, of
victory. But a man’s worth is truly measured when the hard time comes.

Philistines simply mock Trotsky’s descent from a man who had
yesterday been the greatest in the land of Russia to an exile, an
outcast with a handful followers. But Trotsky shines even brighter
during the darkest day of the Revolution, as recalled by Victor Serge:

“I have never known him greater, and I have never held him dearer
than I did in the shabby Leningrad and Moscow tenements where, on
several occasions, I heard him speak for hours to win over a handful of
factory workers, and this well after he had become one of the two
unchallenged leaders of the victorious Revolution. He was still a member
of the Politburo but he knew he was about to fall from power and also,
very likely, to lose his life. He thought the time had come to win
hearts and consciences one by one – as had been done before, during the
Tsar’s rule. Thirty or forty poor people’s faces would turn towards him,
listening, and I remember a woman sitting on the floor asking him
questions and weighing up his answers. This was in 1927. We knew we
stood a greater chance of losing than of winning. But, still, our
struggle was worth-while: if we had not fought and gone under bravely,
the defeat of the Revolution would have been a hundred times more
disastrous” (Victor Serge, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky)

This grueling work of winning the hearts of the ones and twos, in
small meetings with a handful of people, through newspapers that might
only be read by dozens, this we have continued doing the past 70 years.
Those small minds who seek glory in politics can never understand this.
If the ideas of Trotsky were so irrelevant, why are there so many books
and articles dedicated to proving that they are dead? Surely this is an
indication that the bourgeois deep down in their hearts know that in the
period we have entered, one of severe crisis of capitalism, the ideas
of Marxism, defended by the Old Man, are the only ones that can offer
working people a way out of the nightmare of poverty, unemployment, wars
and crises.