The Bolshevik Party's Struggle Against Trotskyism in the Post-October Period (1969), various authors, Progress Publishers, Moscow
This is a two-volume series published by the USSR's Progress Publishers in 1969 - during the Brezhnev era. It's a polemic designed to assure readers that a continuity exists between the Marxist-Leninism from the period before the expulsion of Trotsky in 1927 and the Marxist-Leninism that came after. Which readers, you may ask? Those on the Left who may be experiencing doubts as to whether or not the socialism of the USSR in 1969 is the same as the socialism of the revolution of 1917. Trotsky devoted much of his post-expulsion career to arguing that, some time after the death of Lenin in 1924, the USSR became 'bureaucratic', 'Stalinist', a 'deformed worker's state'. Many on the 'anti-revisionist' Left put forward a similar thesis: sometime after the expulsion of Trotsky, perhaps after Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956, the USSR became 'bourgeois', 'revisionist', 'state capitalist'. Struggle- aims to refute these charges. It shows a Trotsky fighting Lenin every step of the way, doggedly, up until the 1917 revolution, after which Trotsky converted from Menshevism to Bolshevism; but (and this is the argument of the book) Trotsky continues the fight, while in power, against Lenin and 'Leninism' until 1927.
The book makes a good case, simply because, I think, of its documentation. It quotes, at length, from all of Trotsky's published writings and from those of his followers. It's copiously footnoted, and the level of detail makes it far superior to any of the other anti-Trotsky polemics on the market.
The first volume covers the pre-revolution period and how Trotsky's theories of permanent revolution and the untenability of 'socialism in one country' came to dominate his thinking. The highlight of the volume, for me, is a comparison and contrasting of Trotsky's and Lenin's theories on capitalism, revolution, feudalism and (what we today would call) globalisation; it's an argument which still reverberates on the Left today.
As for the second volume, it passes over the period of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) and goes into depth on the intra-party quarrels inside the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) culminating in Trotsky's dramatic fall. Stalin hardly appears at all in this: the conflict is portrayed as being between Trotsky's faction and the party leadership, who are driven to distraction by Trotsky's constant polemicising, and finally turn on Trotsky after evidence emerges of the formation of active Trotskyite cells within the party. Tens of thousands of party members various party branches and organisations mobilise; they pass resolutions (not always unanimously) against Trotsky and his faction. (The book puts the number of Trotskyists within the USSR as being 2000 - a large number by today's standards). Finally, Trotsky is forced out.
The surprising thing is that Trotsky was allowed to survive in the party for so long, and indeed, we don't see a homogenous, disciplined and unified RSDLP here: even after 1917, and well into the 1920s, there's a conglomeration of mainline Leninists, Social Revolutionaries, 'Left' Social Revolutionaries, former Mensheviks and a multitude of Trotskyist alliances and factions in the party or on the outside of the party influencing it. The book inadvertently lends support to the revisionist scholarship of Lars Lih, and it seems as though the party tolerated a wide number of diverging opinions. Only there came a point when the party couldn't abide with Trotsky and the Trotskyists any more. Dissenting voices, intra-party disagreements leading to vigorous debate, were allowed up until a point when a line was crossed.
Mark Hootsen signing off
No comments:
Post a Comment