Originally published in August 2020
“To give the concept of personality real meaning, and for the scornful notion of the ‘masses’ to cease being an antithesis standing against the privileged philosophical idea of ‘personality,’ it is necessary for the masses themselves to reach a historically higher stage through the lever of revolution or, more precisely, through a series of revolutions” León Trotsky, My Life
The 80th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky is an opportunity to revisit his life and work, as well as to reflect on the legacy of the revolutionary socialist tendency and to outline the tasks that lie ahead.
Now that a long time has passed since the main events, and with the twenty-first century well underway—after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the vast body of historiographical and other works that assess the revolutions of the last century, along with the counterrevolutions that also marked it—this anniversary, once again, offers a good occasion to clarify certain lessons that can contribute to the political education of new generations of militants.
However, one of the most misguided works for these purposes is Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast), which despite the charm of the Polish-born historian, his combination of certain “theoretical” skills with those of a skilled writer, and the documentary value of his work (even though historiographical research has advanced greatly since his time), nevertheless concentrates one of the most outdated accounts of the revolutionary experience of the last century (even more uncritical in its view of Stalinism)[1].
His work, however, is riddled with mistaken theoretical considerations. Paradoxically, it becomes a kind of “argument” against the fight undertaken by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition[2]. It is not surprising, in this sense, that Deutscher opposed the founding of the Fourth International, considering it a futile operation without prospects: “No sooner had Trotsky failed with Souvarine, the syndicalists, and Treint [the author refers to disagreements with leftist sympathizers in France], than he had to face discord among the Trotskyists themselves. The history would hardly be worth telling if it were not for the fact that it played a certain role in Trotsky’s life and in the subsequent failure of Trotskyism as a movement” (Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky, The Prophet Outcast[3]).
Deutscher had, so to speak, the advantage of having died in 1967. In other words, before the history of the former USSR was sealed. He carried out a monumental historiographical effort on Trotsky that nevertheless did not stand the test of time. When read closely it is more of a justification of Stalin than that of the battle of Trotsky and the Left Opposition since he was clearly impressed by the USSR’s industrial development, its antifascist victory in World War II and so on (these were real achievements but they do not change the fundamental nature of things). He formulated a series of incorrect predictions about the country’s direction that were already evident as such by the 1960s. Worst of all he tries to “theorize”: he upholds a set of vulgar Marxist notions, economicist, objectivist, substitutionist and anti-dialectical; a perspective that runs counter to revolutionary Marxism.
The paradox in him is that of having been a “Trotskyist” historian who was Stalinophile, “lover” of Stalin, in opposition to the Stalinophobes, “haters” of Stalin, which had the opposite reaction, also with one-sided aspects such as opposing the unconditional defense of the former USSR.
The causes of putting together such a miseducational work from the revolutionary Marxist point of view were varied, both historical, the pressure of the events, and theoretical and strategic (a vulgar handling of Marxism). In the main points, he sided with Trotsky’s right-wing opponents.
We uphold a diametrically opposed assessment. We believe it is a mistake that Deutscher’s trilogy is still defended uncritically over other works that are historiographically more solid and strategically more faithful to the true spirit of Marxism, such as those by Pierre Broué, Jean-Jacques Marie, “heterodox” Trotskyist authors like Tony Cliff, and so on, or more generally, from outside Trotskyism, social historians like Moshe Lewin and many others. The historiography on the Soviet Union is as monumental as it is fascinating, even if it often comes from liberal or even reactionary viewpoints; everything must be studied critically.
We uphold a diametrically opposed balance. We believe it is a mistake that Deutscher’s trilogy is still defended uncritically over other works that are stronger historiographically and strategically more faithful to the true spirit of Marxism, such as those by Pierre Broué, Jean-Jacques Marie, “heterodox” Trotskyist authors like Tony Cliff, and so on, or more generally, from outside Trotskyism, social historians like Moshe Lewin and many others. The historiography on the Soviet Union is as monumental as it is fascinating, even if it often comes from liberal or even reactionary viewpoints; everything must be studied critically.
We repeat: Deutscher’s text is valuable and engaging. However, it must be read critically. It is a mistake to present it as a valid tool for educating new generations, due to its insurmountable theoretical and strategic limitations.
- A mistaken theory of revolution
The broader problem is that Deutscher bases his trilogy on a false theory of revolution, an ultra-objectivist theory, a right-leaning expression developed by a branch of Trotskyism in the second half of the last century[4]. Deutscher is half historian, half «Marxist theorist,» enamored with his own speculations, and this weakens his historical work.
In his writing, Trotsky would have been a kind of «romantic revolutionary» who failed to understand the circumstances of time and place. Stalin, always «in spite of himself» (a textbook objectivist argument), with all his pragmatism and realism, would have «carried out the socialist transition» (there are points of contact between the assessment Deutscher puts forward and the one Eric Hobsbawm, a modernized Stalinist, would later adopt [5]).
Deustcher acknowledges that Stalin relied on «barbaric methods» to carry out his policies. However, these methods, according to him, did not substantially affect the «socialist objectives» and, moreover, were «inevitable» given the historical circumstances (conditions are everything, subjects are nothing, as if history would move forward regardless; a “doggish” objectivism).
The «pressure of historical necessity» (always a pressure toward «progress,» of course) would have made its way through the Stalinist bureaucracy, this beyond Trotsky’s criticisms, which were in many cases fair, according to him, but perhaps missed the fact that Stalin was carrying out, «with his own methods,» we repeat, the task of the transition: «Almost every village became a battlefield in a class war without precedent, a war that the collectivist State [sic] waged under the supreme command of Stalin, in order to conquer rural Russia and overcome its stubborn individualism» (idem, 87).
But the fact is that Stalin did not wage any battle in the name of any “collectivist State” but ultimately in the interests of the bureaucracy itself.
Moreover, our classics have never used this definition, “collectivist State,” but rather much more precise terms such as proletarian dictatorship, semi-proletarian State, even workers’ State. No minimally trained Marxist would fail to see that State and “collectivism” are opposing terms: if there is a State, whatever it may be, there is no “collectivism” yet, and if there is “collectivism,” there is no longer a State (see chapter 3 of The Revolution Betrayed, for example).
Deutscher insists on something we will see later: “Among the Trotskyists, the conciliators showed a greater understanding of the magnitude and definitive nature of the events [referring to the Stalinist turn at the end of the 1920s]; those who resisted remained clinging to premises and reasoning formed in earlier years. Rakovsky, for example, judged Stalin’s orders to annihilate the kulaks as ‘ultra-leftist rhetoric’ (…)” (ibid., 87/8).
Everything is the same in Deutscher’s work: at every major split within the Left Opposition, he always sides with the right-wing critics within the Opposition against Trotsky, Rakovsky, and other “intransigeants” (he does so invariably from a “realistic” or pragmatic angle[6]).
In his scheme of the revolution and the socialist transition, Deutscher had in mind a vulgar comparison with the French Revolution. A scheme where, despite everything, despite the execution of Robespierre, despite the fact that Robespierre himself had started the Thermidor as sharply noted by Christian Rakovsky, despite even the Bonapartism of Napoleon, the bourgeois revolution had consolidated in France and even spread—with advances and setbacks—to the rest of Europe. (For Deutscher, the proletarian revolution, more specifically the Russian Revolution, followed the same pattern, no matter who was in power.)
On the contrary, Trotsky had established a clear distinction between the two revolutions in the sense that the first, the bourgeois revolution, objectively took place once feudal privileges were overthrown, freeing the operation of private property, whereas the socialist revolution, on the contrary, requires the working class at the head of the State because the State, through statization, becomes the leader and organizer of the economy.
Rosa Luxemburg, a few years earlier, from a different perspective, had insisted on the same argument, pointing out that the socialist revolution constituted the first historical type of revolution where the exploited and oppressed masses carry out the revolution for their own benefit, with full consciousness, so to speak[7].
Impressed by the developments of the 1930s, when the socialist transition seemed to “advance despite everything,” the Polish historian ended up mechanically assimilating both revolutions; defending a “historical-universal” scheme where History would advance regardless of who was in charge: classes, their struggles, programs, organizations, and leadership did not matter; the classic objectivist scheme, we repeat.
Besides being a reflection of poor strategic thinking, the assimilation between the bourgeois and the proletarian revolution is complete. And worse, in certain cases Deutscher uses Trotsky for his own purposes and then ends up “throwing him to the wolves,” so to speak.
Trotsky, for his part, and in real time, was trying to understand the events. That is why there is a back-and-forth movement between a more “stylized” class-based analysis and a more concrete appreciation of the tendency toward growing autonomy of the bureaucracy; hence he changed his emphasis as events unfolded (although, truth being, he never completely broke with the idea that the USSR was still a Workers’ State, something that, in our view, later proved not to be the case[8]).
Trotsky used the analogy of the Thermidor, the counterrevolution in the French Revolution (a counterrevolution that was political and not social because it did not restore capitalism). One of Deutscher’s most misguided uses of this definition is the claim that Thermidor would not happen in the USSR because there was no new civil war in the 1930s: “Defining Thermidor once again as a bourgeois counterrevolution, he pointed out that it could not occur without a civil war. But the Soviet Union had not gone through another civil war (…)” (Deutscher, Trotsky, the exiled prophet, 56).
The reality, however, is the opposite: there was indeed a civil war and it was bloody. The forced agricultural collectivization that massacred millions of peasants, the large and small purges that cost a million lives, the best of the vanguard (as well as other sectors initially even linked to the rising Stalinism), the super exploitation of workers and the sharp decline in their living standards with accelerated industrialization, the police state atmosphere and mass denunciations all constituted a civil war, and not one of any kind,, but a counterrevolutionary civil war[9].
A civil war of the bureaucracy against the exploited and oppressed and practically the entire generation of the October Revolution, which paid a heavy blood toll, forged the heroic tradition of the Left Opposition, a battle fought to guarantee the tradition of classical and revolutionary Marxism and which constitutes the founding act of our historical current.
However, not coincidentally, Deutscher was against the founding of the Fourth International, a task that Trotsky himself would correctly define as what justified him before history as a militant and leader (meaning it is no laughing matter what we are talking about).
Entering the current century, with the historical experience of those revolutions closed (but not the era of socialist revolution), capitalism restored in the countries where it had been expropriated (except Cuba), and with the prospect of relaunching the fight for socialism, a correct approach to the theory of revolution is essential for today’s militant generations; a task for which Deutscher’s work does not help: it leads to repeating the mistakes of decades ago, in order of doing a disservice to Trotsky himself and the tireless struggle of the Opposition[10].
- Deutscher sides with the capitulators
We have pointed out many times that the discussion within the Left Opposition, especially in the years 1928 and 1929, holds great theoretical and strategic value for the theories of revolution and socialist transition; it is interesting beyond the events themselves.
The circumstances were undoubtedly of great importance, because the capitulators of that time, Preobrazhensky, Radek and Smilga, three of the main leaders of the Left Opposition, gave in at a decisive moment: when the very existence of the tendency that had been criticizing bureaucratization since 1923 was at stake.
Their capitulation took place at a time when the left opposition had been expelled from the Bolshevik Party –a party that was becoming increasingly and brutally bureaucratized; see the vivid accounts of Victor Serge– and most of its members were exiled to distant regions of the country (let us keep in mind that Russia is a continental country).
However, after the joint Opposition (made up of the Left Opposition and the new opposition of Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had broken with Stalin) was defeated at the 15th Congress at the end of 1927, and once that joint Opposition was divided due to the prompt capitulation of Zinoviev and Kamenev in early 1928, the lack of industrialization momentum, as Trotsky and his comrades had warned since 1923, began to take its toll in the form of a growing agrarian crisis.
The Stalinist group, in a sordid struggle with what would become the Right Opposition led by Bukharin (a «struggle» carried out only at the top levels), began to implement forced grain requisition measures due to the shortage in the cities.
The harvest had declined compared to previous years; but it is also true that the peasantry –in all its layers– felt frustrated by the lack of sufficient urban goods due to the slow pace of industrialization that the bureaucracy had pursued in recent years; an opportunistic interpretation of the NEP[11].
Stalin’s measures began to worry the ranks of the Left Opposition because they appeared “leftist” (they were presented as a campaign against the wealthy peasants). With ups and downs, after agricultural supply was restored only to decline again, a new agricultural crisis broke out at the beginning of 1929 that led Stalin and his group to make a radical turn to the “left,” defining themselves by a bureaucratic program of forced agricultural collectivization and accelerated industrialization (measures taken from above, in an administrative and repressive manner[12]).
To broad sectors of the Left Opposition (sectors that were under the pressure of exile), it seemed that Stalin’s group was beginning to adopt the program they had been advocating to industrialize the country. An economistic reading that Deutscher would defend retrospectively (as would Ernest Mandel and many Trotskyists to this day): “Stalin’s turn to the left, which implicitly embraced the Opposition [sic], sealed its defeat; and the Opposition no longer clearly knew whether it should continue opposing or on what basis (…) Those who succumbed to this mood eagerly accepted the argument of Radek and Preobrazhensky (…) It was true, they said, that Stalin showed no willingness to restore proletarian democracy within the party for which the Opposition had also clamored, but since he was fulfilling such a large part of the Opposition’s program, there were reasons to expect that eventually he would fulfill the rest as well” (ídem, 64)[13]…
So then Preobrajensky and Radek had a “much better understanding of reality” than Trotsky, which suggests that their capitulation was “well-founded”… Furthermore, the expectation that it is the circumstances that force the bureaucracy to “work wonders” is also justified; objectivism and more objectivism[14].
The pressures bearing down on the Opposition were dramatic (the moment was dramatic, a matter of life or death). As a result of the international conditions of capitalist stabilization and revolutionary setback, the passivity of the working class, especially its vanguard sector demoralized by the witch hunt the party had become after the “Lenin draft” of 1924, the mass influx of depoliticized people looking for a place under the sun in the party of power. The Bolshevik Party was rapidly transforming from a revolutionary party into a party belonging to the bureaucracy; a process that, in any case, would still take some time. (Trotsky insisted that many inequalities still existed within the party, with some sectors completely rotten and others still healthy – Our differences with the decists.)
With the soviets emptied out as a byproduct of the civil war, the party remained the only hope for proletarian power as long as, of course, the organization preserved at least a minimum of internal democracy. The mistakes of Lenin himself at the 10th and 11th Party Congresses in 1921 and 1922, in the context of the country’s devastation brought by the civil war on top of the years of world war, as well as the frustration of the revolution in the West, gradually hollowed out the life of the party. A party that, moreover, was given a “lethal injection” by killing off what remained of democracy through the expulsion of the Left Opposition (Serge captures well the suffocating atmosphere within the party in Memoirs of a Revolutionary).
Tendencies and factions had been banned since 1921. And when Trotsky decided to resume the anti-bureaucratic struggle in 1926, when, moreover, Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin and both oppositions briefly unified (the Left Opposition as the principled wing and the one led by them as the centrist wing), a fierce but uneven internal struggle unfolded between 1926 and 1927–the Opposition refused to address the broader masses for fear of provoking anti-Soviet reactions–most of the party did not understand what the conflict was about, and the Stalinist group played the card that oppositions were “forbidden” and that the united Opposition constituted an “anti-party faction,” while breaking up meetings with “party scabs.”
Let us note that the methods of Stalinism against the opposition were already gangster-like. The party grouped tens of thousands of people, and the united Opposition only a few thousand; it was an island of politicized people in an ocean of ignorance, depoliticization, and also prejudice. The life of no party, and even less of a ruling party, can be understood independently of circumstances and the class struggle; the process of bureaucratization was interrelated with popular frustration due to the defeats of the German and Chinese revolutions—both failures caused by the bureaucratic apparatus—and the accumulated exhaustion from the years of world war, revolution, and civil war–Trotsky would speak of “the very normal tendency of many people to seek comfort” [15].
The struggle was unequal and, as we have said, the united Opposition was defeated at the 1927 Congress (a Congress at which it did not even arrive with a single delegate due to the maneuvers of the organizational secretariat controlled by Stalin); it was immediately divided by the capitulation of Kamenev and Zinoviev, and Trotsky along with the majority of the members of the Left Opposition were exiled to the interior of the country[16].
The sum of these events, in the face of what appeared to be a “left turn” by the ruling caste, along with the loss of reflexes at the base due to years spent in the upper ranks, led these well-known leaders, Preobrazhensky, Radek, and Smilga, to promote capitulation: “Multiple political, social, and psychological factors played a role in the mechanism that led to the crisis of the Left Opposition. Its cadres mostly came from the same background as those of the dominant trends in the apparatus, they had emerged from the same generation, the same struggles and, ultimately, from the history of the same party. They were also, more or less, marked by the degeneration of the party, in their mentality and in their way of life. They experienced deportation and exile as political death and began to understand Zinoviev’s point of view, willing to ‘swallow’ and to ‘crawl’, as long as it was within the party, since outside it there was nothing” (Broué, The Trotskyists in the USSR, a sharp characterization by the French historian that should not be taken lightly [17]).
The argument of the capitulators: Stalin was “taking on the Opposition’s program”; staying outside the party would be an act of “petulance.” It did not matter that party democracy had been eradicated, that they were forced to renounce their positions, nothing mattered: the Opposition had supposedly “proven its point against the party” and the “very dynamics of industrialization would ‘objectively’ revive democracy within it” (Pierre Broué, The Trotskyists in the USSR [1929–1938]).
By 1929, Trotsky was exiled in Prinkipo, an island in Turkey, and the main figure of the Opposition in the USSR was Christian Rakovsky. Trotsky revised his assessment of the Stalinist turn, presenting different nuances (Davidson mentions four major shifts in his position regarding the bureaucracy). But along with Rakovsky, he remained firm that it was not only the “what” of Stalin’s measures (their “content”) that mattered, but also the ”who” and the “how”. That is, how the measures were carried out and which subject-social and political-took them into their hands: “On May 26 (1928) I wrote to Mikhail Okudzhava, an old Bolshevik from Georgia: ‘In all those issues posed by the new Stalinist course, Stalin unquestionably strives to approach our position. But in politics, not only the “what” matters, but also who and how. The great battles that will decide the fate of the revolution have not yet been fought’” (My Life, 439).
The Left Opposition was practically «refounded» in this struggle, so deep the debate was. After this crisis, which took away two-thirds of its ranks (among those who left and those who faded out, its ranks went from about 8,000 members to around 1,000, Broue), there was no similar existential crisis again, although in the depths of the 1930s, the best and brightest of its members were annihilated in Stalinist concentration camps[18].
However, here Deutscher gives the reason, in this transcendental, strategic, life-or-death circumstance, fundamental for the revolutionary Marxist tendency and also fundamental for the theory of revolution and socialist transition, to Preobrajensky, Radek, and Smilga. A scandal of perverted Trotskyism, aimed at justifying Stalin’s counterrevolutionary policy: “The decisions on the pace and scale of industrialization and collectivization were made under conditions of acute scarcity of all the human and material elements necessary for the dual undertaking” (idem, 68. Stalinism, grateful, justified by “objective conditions”).
Deutscher died in 1967. He could not have had today’s perspective nor the level of accumulated research available since then. However, this does not justify that his work was carried out from a right leaning critical angle of the main body of “Trotskyism”. A work that already in its time (late 1950s) had an adverse effect, even though it became one of the most widely read biographies of Trotsky: “(…) his pessimism led him to two major political disagreements with Trotsky [his rejection of the need to build a revolutionary party and a schematic defense of the proletarian character of the Soviet state]. And both differences distorted Deutscher’s account of Trotsky’s life –especially in the last volume– giving thousands of radicalized activists who read his books a Stalinist orientation that in several cases proved to be an obstacle to their political goals” (Davidson, idem)[19].
Unfortunately, continuing to publish this work uncritically can only foster further confusion.
- Objectivism and economism.
Let’s get to the theoretical core of the discussion. Preobrazhensky saw Stalin as implementing the program he had advocated in The New Economics, his most important economic work, which rose opposed to opportunistic conceptions in economic matters by promoting industrialization (1926).
Years ago we offered a critical take on that work in The Dialectic of Transition (izquierdaweb). In our essay we pointed out that, despite all the theoretical rigor Preobrazhensky possessed, his work nevertheless suffered from economism: by speaking of a supposed “law of planning” as opposed to the law of the market as the two regulators of the transition, he lost sight of two fundamental issues. First, that the regulators of an economy of transition are three: the plan, the market, and workers’ democracy. Second, and for the same reasons, there is no “law of planning” capable of magically ensuring that a non-capitalist economy advances along the path of socialist transition, independent of the proletarian character of the state. If the dictatorship of the proletariat, for one reason or another, collapses, if proletarian democracy is dismantled, there is no way for the transition to advance in a socialist direction.
However, insofar as socialist democracy did not enter into their analyses as a sine qua non for the socialist transition, and also insofar as they had been separated from the party base for years (as Broué points out), a whole set of circumstances led them to capitulation; a capitulation to which he contributed by defending false theoretical-strategic bases (which are the very ones Deutscher repeats, point by point, in his work).
The oppositionists aligned with Trotsky and Rakovsky did not capitulate. Neither did the decists and other minor leftist tendencies who share with the Left Opposition the honor of having stood firm against Stalinism (a different matter is the Right Opposition of Bukharin, which contributed to his enthronement[20]).
Paradoxes indeed, one hundred years after bureaucratization, this work by Deutscher continues to call us to line up with Preobrazhensky against Trotsky[21]: “It was true that Stalin had initiated the left turn in a very different way than they had proposed (…) In any case, the Opposition had advocated for what he was doing, even if the way he was doing it was repugnant to them” (ibid., 69).
That is to say: Deutscher relies on a crude anti-Marxist split between form and content, between means and ends, which conveniently serves to justify Stalin and side with the capitulators against the intransigent, who resisted as best they could even amid confusion and halfway analyses: “Among some committed revolutionaries there exists the idea that a ‘just line’ in the economic realm should ‘by itself’ lead to a just party regime. This idea, with its claim to dialectics, is one-sided and anti-dialectical because it fails to see that, in the course of the historical process, cause and effect frequently switch places” (a brilliant argument by Rakovsky cited by Broué, Rakovsky or the Revolution in All Countries, 321).
From another angle, Trotsky puts forward a similar argument in My Life. He points out that trying to operate in politics with abstract moral criteria is an endeavor doomed to failure from the outset; in politics, there is no morality other than that which arises from politics itself. But only the politics that truly serves a great historical mission is capable of adhering, in its actions, to irreproachable moral methods. As the level of political problems declines, its moral level inevitably declines as well (pp. 390).
Deutscher paraphrases Preobrazhensky’s argument: “(…) the current duty of the Opposition was to draw closer to the party and then return to it—and here speaks the theoretical forerunner of ‘socialist primitive accumulation’—in order to ‘defend ourselves together against the pressure of discontent that a policy of socialist accumulation and a struggle against agrarian capitalism’ must produce in a peasant country” (ibid., 69).
But this was not merely a struggle against “agrarian capitalism,” nor an agrarian collectivization through persuasion and balanced industrialization, but rather a full-scale counterrevolution against the peasantry as a whole, which is something entirely different.
In opposition to Preobrazhensky stood two major leaders: Trotsky himself, of course, and Christian Rakovsky, unjustly judged for his later capitulation (in his most recent research Pierre Broué argues that, rather, Rakovsky may have attempted a tactical maneuver to reintegrate into the party—after a failed escape attempt—and join a short-lived united opposition in 1934, but that the plan fell through—see Communists Against Stalin), overlooking the enormous role he played during the most difficult moment of the Left Opposition[22].
We have always sympathized with the analyses “a millimeter more to the left” by Rakovsky compared to Trotsky when it comes to the bureaucratization of the USSR (Kevin Murphy points out that, invariably, the analyses coming from members of the Opposition within the USSR were further to the left than Trotsky’s own). At the same time, and alongside Trotsky, we reject the honest but defeatist arguments of the Decists, who considered the open battle already lost.
Trotsky is methodologically impeccable in rejecting that defeatist angle. At the same time, with an internationalist vision, he was able to build the Left Opposition as an internationalist current, leading to the founding of the Fourth International. In doing so, he preserved the historical continuity of revolutionary Marxism, an imperishable achievement (an achievement made all the greater because he accomplished it under the most terrible conditions, under the dual pressure of Stalinism and fascism[23]).
Regarding the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, we have always valued Rakovsky’s sharp insights in brilliant texts such as The Professional Dangers of Power, which made a strong impression on Trotsky himself. (It is worth noting that Stalinism suppressed a number of works that Rakovsky had completed or was working on during those years, his most prolific as a Marxist theorist.)
In April 1930, Rakovsky and three other members of the Left Opposition, Kossior, Mouralov, and Kasparova, addressed a letter to the Central Committee of the bureaucratized party, warning that if the current course continued, the USSR would cease to be a “workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations,” as Lenin had defined it ten years earlier, and would become a “bureaucratic state with remnants of proletarian communism”: “Before our eyes a great ruling class has formed and continues to form, with its own internal divisions, growing through direct or indirect cooptation (bureaucratic promotion, fictitious electoral system). What unites this original class is an original form, also, of private property, namely, the possession of the state. The bureaucracy owns the state as its private property (Hegel, Critique of Law)” (Rakovsky et al., cited by Broué, idem, 334[24]).
The subtlety in this discussion is that the economistic approach to the Stalinist turn was a complete mistake: without party democracy, without control by the base over the measures taken at the top, without evaluating the leadership’s methods for implementing policies, the supposed “left” turn was not only incapable of being consistent but, far more seriously, would be distorted to such an extent that it would become a counterrevolutionary turn.
In response to this, Deutscher honestly paraphrases Trotsky even though he did not agree with him: “Radek and Preobrazhensky saw in the first Five-Year Plan a radically new starting point. ‘The central question,’ Trotsky replied, ‘is not the statistics of this bureaucratic Five-Year Plan per se, but the problem of the party [a Rakovsky-style argument if there ever was one], the spirit with which the party was led, because that also determines its policy. Was the Five-Year Plan, in its formulation and execution, subject to any control from below, to criticism and discussion? And yet, the results of the Plan also depended on this’” (ibid., 74[25]).
In this life-or-death turning point for the Opposition, Rakovsky played a decisive role: “The capitulationist mood reached (…) the core of the Opposition, composed of the most faithful Trotskyists. However, Rakovsky, gravely ill and suffering heart attacks, had been transferred from Astrakhan to Barnaul—yet he still managed to regroup them. Under his inspiration, a sector of the Opposition as numerous as the one that had followed Smirnov [the second wave of capitulations by former Left Oppositionists] stopped just at the brink of capitulation. Those who made peace with Stalin, because he was implementing the economic part of the program and because they expected him to fulfill the political part as well, behaved like old-fashioned reformists content with the gradual satisfaction of their demands [Rakovsky would assert]. The political ideas of the Opposition were inseparable from their economic postulates: ‘As long as the political part of our program remains unfulfilled, the entire work of socialist construction is in danger of being shattered’” (Deutscher, idem, 76).
- “Revolution from above” or counterrevolution?
How did Deutscher view the situation? He defined it as “a second revolution” (sic) after the October Revolution, even in some cases claiming it would have “even greater importance,” an error—an absolute horror—of historical, theoretical, strategic, and human perspectives. For Deutscher, Stalin launched not just one but several “revolutions” (his assessment of the events of the second postwar period is equally scandalous).
After a series of initial inaccuracies, Trotsky emphasized the ultra-leftist and bureaucratic nature of Stalin’s measures (going thousands of kilometers further than many of his “Trotskyist” followers): “Today the Soviet economy is neither monetary nor planned. It is an almost purely bureaucratic economy. The exaggerated and disproportionate industrialization undermined the foundations of the agricultural economy. The peasantry tried to find salvation in collectivization. Experience soon showed that desperate collectivization is not socialist collectivization. The subsequent collapse of the agricultural economy dealt a severe blow to industry. The reckless and exaggerated pace demanded even greater pressure on the proletariat. Industry, freed from the material control of the producer, acquired a suprasocial character, that is, bureaucratic. The result was that it lost the ability to satisfy human needs, even to the extent achieved by the less developed capitalist industry” (The Degeneration of Theory and the Theory of Degeneration. Problems of the Soviet Regime, April 29, 1933, izquierdaweb).
But beyond this, which is already more than enough, and based on our own positions and political sensibility, on our assessment, and on later historiographical research, in our view, we repeat, Stalin’s measures amounted to both a political and social counterrevolution. Some authors estimate that millions of middle and poor peasants were killed as a byproduct of the forced agrarian “collectivization” and the resulting famines[26].
Counterrevolution which was also marked by a historic decline in workers’ living standards as a byproduct of accelerated industrialization, Stakhanovite methods, and so on. Deutscher acknowledges this but evaluates it in an instrumental way (that is, without considering its real-life consequences), not to mention the purges, the concentration camps, forced labor, and the murder of the entire workers’ and communist vanguard of all tendencies.
It is complicated for the theory of revolution to confuse revolution with counterrevolution, something that, given the complexity of events, does happen at times. And even more complicated is the idea of “socialist revolutions” that unfold despite and against the working class, the exploited and the oppressed; where not only are they not the protagonists, but they are in fact the ones who suffer them in flesh and blood instead of being able to enjoy them.
It is complicated for the theory of revolution to confuse revolution with counterrevolution, something that, nevertheless, given the complexity of events, sometimes happens. And even more complicated is thinking about “socialist revolutions” that develop despite and against the working class, the exploited and oppressed; where not only do they not lead them, but they are also the ones who suffer them – in flesh and blood – instead of being able to enjoy them!
Deutscher correctly paraphrases Trotsky by stating that the criterion for any socialist transition is the progressive increase in workers’ living standards and their growing participation in political life, but he rejects this based on his instrumental viewpoint. Where Trotsky points out the paradox that workers see the construction of industries and cities around them as something alien, abstract, that seems unrelated to their daily lives, a new form of alienation, Deutscher, from London, from the outside, from the historian’s “Ivory Tower,” believes he perceives historical progress.
On the contrary, Trotsky, together with Marx, Lenin, Rosa, and the entire tradition of revolutionary Marxism, set the standard on the increase in living standards and politicization not only of present generations but also of those to come. But even though after World War II the standard of living in the USSR rose to some extent – quantitatively, not qualitatively, the scarcity of consumer goods and housing was never overcome; nor were political rights achieved as Deutscher had expected. Bureaucratic decay rotted the revolution, and the USSR exploded into a thousand pieces and fell without honor or glory in 1991 like a rotten fruit.
But the defeat of the working class did not occur in those years. It had already happened in the 1930s, a defeat from which it would never recover as a conscious working class. In World War II, the Russian masses achieved a historic victory at the cost of 26 million dead, but this did not mean a socialist triumph. To reach that point, the bureaucracy should have been overthrown simultaneously, which did not happen.
Presenting Deutscher’s work without these insights is misguided; it dulls the critical thinking of new generations: “We have said that Trotsky’s critique was in all respects consistent with the tradition of classical Marxism and also that it anticipated the reforms of the post-Stalin era [sic]. Now we can ask ourselves to what extent it was relevant, if at all, to the situation of the 1930s. Were Trotsky’s propositions practicable at the time he made them? Was not a defining feature of that era a profound divorce between Marxist theory and the practice of the Russian Revolution? And had circumstances not made that divorce inevitable? Very few issues historians face test their confidence in their own judgment as severely as these? (…) Bureaucratic arbitrariness and cruelty were themselves an integral part of Russia’s backwardness and isolation (…) [Yet] both Trotsky and Stalin shared (…) the view that the Soviet Union could achieve rapid industrialization only through socialist primitive accumulation, a historically justified view (…)” (ibid., 98).
A doubly false statement—one Deutscher should have known in his time—that blatantly ignores the fact that Trotsky never supported Preobrazhensky’s argument of a “socialist primitive accumulation” at the expense of the peasants and workers. On the contrary, he explicitly rejected this concept, warning of the danger of complicity with the Stalinist idea of socialism in one country.
Furthermore, the very concept of primitive accumulation implies the idea of a dis-accumulation from some other class, which Trotsky understood within the mechanics of international revolution, as well as the expropriation of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie and the large agricultural landowners; never at the expense of the exploited and oppressed[27].
Deutscher concludes his misguided argument by stating: “Despite all its irrational development, the changes of 1929/30 represented a social revolution as irreversible as that of 1917, although very different from it. What manifested in this transformation was the ‘permanency’ of the revolutionary process that Trotsky had prophesied, only that the manifestation was so different from what he had expected that he could neither recognize it nor did he recognize it as such” (idem, 103).
This last statement is as opportunistic as it is misguided, doing a great disservice to Trotskyism in the postwar period, and some currents continue parroting it even today without thinking about what they’re talking about: “(…) Stalin acted, unintentionally, as the agent of permanent revolution within the Soviet Union. Trotsky refused to recognize and accept the Ersatz (substitute) instead of the real fact” (idem, 104)…
So then, we arrive at the paradoxical conclusion of The Exiled Prophet: Stalin would have been the agent of permanent revolution, something Trotsky supposedly “refused to recognize”… If this is not one of the most misguided, opportunistic, substitutionist, and vulgar interpretations of the theory of permanent revolution, we don’t know what could be.
An interpretation that, we repeat, wreaked havoc in Trotskyism: “The transformation of 1929/30 occurred at the moment of the greatest reflux of national consciousness and political energy of the nation; it was a revolution from above based on the suppression of all spontaneous popular activity. Its driving force was not any social class but the party apparatus” (Deutscher, idem, 104). Which, in a broad sense, is true, the transformation was made from above without any popular protagonism, but it was not a revolution but its opposite: a counterrevolution, not only political but also social.
Because, moreover, when we talk about socialist revolution, when we talk about socialist transition, without popular protagonism, without the masses and their organizations taking all tasks into their own hands, there is no possible revolution or socialist transition; the lasting substitution of workers in the work of socialist transition does not lead to socialism; it leads to the bureaucratic state, which is obviously something very different: “The danger of the bureaucracy, which has grown disproportionately, lies in that it gradually pushes the working masses away from effective control of the state, the unions, the party. Lenin had already observed that there is no control of the apparatus by the masses if they do not participate really and directly in government. We believe that only an apparatus supported by the trust of the masses, an apparatus based on electability, mobility, and respect for revolutionary legality can correspond to the interests of the working masses and the demands of the proletarian dictatorship” (Rakovsky cited by Broue, Rakovsky or the revolution in all countries, 316).
And Rakovsky closes with another gem: “By their demoralizing methods, turning thinking communists into machines, breaking their will, character, and human dignity – the heights of [bureaucratic] centrism have transformed into an irreplaceable and inviolable oligarchy that has replaced the party and the class” (idem, 321).
Trotsky described something very similar: “(…) beneath the surface of traditional forms, a new psychology was taking shape. International prospects were fading and vanishing. Daily labor absorbed people. The new methods, created to serve old ends, generated new ends and, above all, a new psychology. For many, the current stage, meant to be a transitional phase, was taking on the character of a terminal station. A new type of man was being formed [the bureaucrat, RS]” (My Life, 399).
Deutscher also has other “gems” in his style. He allows himself to criticize as well as praise Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, questioning one of its fundamental elements[28].
That work has, in fact, two key aspects—aspects that may seem “contradictory” to a non-dialectical mind—. The first is to highlight that the great protagonists of the revolution are the masses; without them, nothing would have happened: they are the “steam” of the revolution, and without that steam, its “pistons”—the organizations, programs, and party struggles—would not have worked. The History of the Russian Revolution is a vast historical-political fresco that makes clear that revolution is made, more than ever before, by the great masses.
But dialectically, the other central element from the second half of the work is the role of the Bolshevik Party and, within it, fundamentally, the role of Lenin himself. What is the objectivist and anti-strategic conclusion that Deutscher draws? That in his evaluation of Lenin’s role, Trotsky had committed a “subjectivist” sin. The heresy against Marxism of giving “too much weight to the leading personality”: “Here Trotsky faces the classic problem of personality in history; and here, perhaps, is where he is least successful” (idem, 212), says our historian, who rejects Trotsky’s fine dialectical argument about Lenin’s irreplaceable role in the October Revolution. Stating that: “For a Marxist, this is a surprising conclusion. The argument (…) has a somewhat scholastic flavor [sic], and the historian cannot resolve it by appealing to empirical evidence (…) Plekhanov insists that the leader is only the instrument of a historical necessity, which creates its instrument when needed [flesh-and-blood individuals would be mere ‘puppets’ of History, RS]. No great man is, therefore, ‘irreplaceable’” (idem, 214), and he goes on to fully endorse the well-known opinion of the founder of Russian Marxism that if Robespierre had not been there at the appointed hour, another Jacobin would have replaced him (as if, moreover, and we repeat it again, the mechanics of the bourgeois revolution and those of the proletarian revolution, the combination of objective and subjective factors in each, were identical).
In summary: if Deutscher had limited himself to his role as a historian, he might have been greater, might have transcended more than he ultimately did. But by manipulating the history of the revolution with vulgar theorizing, his historiographical work was undermined. This was due to a schematic approach to Marxism that has not stood the test of history: “But haven’t the Chinese and Yugoslav revolutions in our time triumphed with parties very different from the Bolsheviks of 1917 and with leaders of lesser, even much lesser, stature?” (idem, 216), says our historian, author—or co-author along with “Pabloism”—of an objectivist and substitutionist theory of socialist revolution[29].
Deutscher became too enamored with his own theorizing, losing sight of the fact that, at the pinnacle of revolution, the subjective role of the leading personality can be (and in fact is) decisive. This is a point we extend to the revolutionary party as a whole[30].
- Stalinism crushed the working class.
Deutscher died in 1967. He was a great historian but his work does not have the transcendence of others; transcendence in the sense of surpassing the determinations of his time, becoming universal. His approach to revolution and socialist transition, the theory it conveys, as we have already noted, became outdated: limited to the empirical –but not real– determinations of his time, turning its back on the main lessons of the last century.
In particular, the social and political substitutionism of the working class that his work conveys is scandalous. Deutscher acknowledges that the working class permanently lost its political influence in the USSR after the civil war (1918/21), and that this was qualitatively reinforced with the rise of Stalinism.
It is evident that a key factor in this was the Great Purges of the 1930s (Victor Serge, and many historians after him, point out that from the police climate established in the party and society with bureaucratization, workers and society in general stopped expressing honest opinions in public—the climate was one of permanent denunciation[31]).
And yet, contrary to all evidence, Deutscher claims that the political passivity of the Soviet working class was due not so much to the atomization imposed by Stalinism, but rather because the new working class, coming from the industrialization of rural means, lacked accumulated political and cultural traditions: “The recruits brought with them to the cities and industrial centers illiteracy, inertia, and the fatalistic spirit of rural Russia. Uprooted and confused by the new environment, they were immediately caught by the tremendous mechanism that would transform them into very different beings (…) Cramped in enormous settlements and barracks, dressed in rags, poorly fed, intimidated in the workshops, and often subjected to quasi-military discipline, they were unable to resist the pressures that overwhelmed them. Essentially, their experience was not very different from that of generations of uprooted peasants thrown into the social crucibles of early capitalism” (idem, 105/6).
An embarrassing argument for any moderately critical analysis of Stalinism, which overlooks the bloody operation it set up to assert itself, besides repeating the old litany —which we have already criticized— that capitalist accumulation and socialist accumulation would follow identical patterns…
It is true that Stalinist industrialization urbanized the country. It transported millions of peasants to the cities; peasants who had no prior proletarian traditions. But Deutscher’s explanation for their passivity is completely misguided. If there had been proletarian cohorts acting freely in the cities, they could have transmitted their traditions to the new working-class generations. But this did not happen due to the physical liquidation of the proletarian dictatorship; the crushing of the working class and its vanguard by the bureaucracy.
Deutscher’s insensitivity toward the Stalinist counterrevolution is striking: “(…) the working class of Russia, after overthrowing the Tsar, the landlords, and the capitalists, sank back into the inferior condition of a class unconscious of its interests and unarticulated” (idem, 108)… Something that seems to have happened as if by “magic”; a phenomenon abstracted from the international and national class struggle, from the exhaustion of the civil war. But above all, from the bureaucratization that liquidated not only politically but physically the best of Bolshevism.
Stalinism crushed the working class and its vanguard through a political and social counterrevolution that liquidated the working-class character of the Soviet state. This did not happen as a byproduct of some “cosmic” phenomenon, but through the bloodbath of a counterrevolutionary civil war carried out by the bureaucracy via the great and “small” purges, in forced labor camps, executing what remained of the militant working-class vanguard, crushing the peasantry, super-exploiting the “Stakhanovite” working class; ultimately liquidating all democratic rights of those below: “(…) almost all the Bolshevik-Leninists who survived at this date in the Soviet Union were regrouped during 1936 among the barracks of the Pechora camps, near Vorkuta, in that ‘prison beyond the polar circle’ as one of them said. Many men were absent from roll call, undoubtedly victims of the ‘preparation’ for the public trials: neither Dingelstedt, nor Pankratov, nor Pevzner, nor Man Nevelson, nor Victor Eltsin, nor Sermuks were there [the names of some of the main young Trotskyist leaders in Stalinist camps, RS]. Much less Solntsev, who died at the beginning of the year. But there are, nevertheless, dozens of names we know: Igor M. Poznansky, Trotsky’s former secretary, G. Ia. Iakovin, the Armenian Sokrat Guervorkian, the veteran VV Kossior and his companion Andrei Kunina, Mussia Magig, Ido Chumskaia, the two brothers Koté Tsintsadzé, Khotimsky, Andrei Konstantinov, Karlo Patskachvili, Karl Melnais, Vasso Donadzé, Sacha Milechin (…), as well as, of course, María M. Joffé (…),” all names of Trotskyist comrades murdered by Stalinism, and to honor them by remembering, an unrelenting assessment of Stalinism must be made with no concessions.
Failing to recognize this is a crime against revolutionary Marxism, a crime against socialist human sensitivity. Drawing lessons from Stalinist degeneration is a fundamental tool to relaunch the socialist revolution. And for these goals, Deutscher’s work does not serve us.
Bibliography
-Pierre Broue, Rakovsky ou la Révolution dans tous les pays, FAYARD, París, 1996.
–Comunistas contra Stalin, FAYARD, París, 1996.
–Los trotskistas en la URSS (1929-1938), MIA.
-Neil Davidson, Isaac Deutscher: el profeta, su biógrafo y la torre de vigilancia, izquierdaweb.
-Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky, el profeta desterrado, LOM ediciones, Chile, 2007.
– Le prophète désarmé, 1921-1929, Julliard, París, 1959.
-Víctor Serge, Memorias de un revolucionario, Traficantes de sueños, 2019, Google.
-León Trotsky, Mi vida, Antídoto-Gallo Rojo, Buenos Aires, 2006.
–Degeneración de la teoría y teoría de la degeneración. Problemas del régimen soviético, 29 de abril de 1933, Google.
–¿Cómo venció Stalin a la Oposición?, 12 de noviembre de 1935, Google.
–Nuestras divergencias con el grupo decista, 11/1/28, izquierdaweb.
–La degeneración de la teoría y la teoría de la degeneración. Problemas del régimen soviético, 29 de abril de 1933, izquierdaweb.
[1] All the boldface in the article is ours.
[2] The first volume of the trilogy appeared in the mid-1950s and the last one a decade later. Its political effect was to establish a kind of “Deutscherist” current that justified Stalinism from the left (the well-known English Marxist Perry Anderson, for example, joined this current; a current that acted as a “mediator” between Stalinism and Trotskyism).
[3] A significant detail in Deutscher’s positioning is that he opposed the formation of the Fourth International; something that is not extrinsic to the assessment he carries out in his work about Trotsky and the Left Opposition’s struggle. Pierre Broué would early on criticize his right-leaning approach.
[4] One of the most right-wing currents within Trotskyism in the postwar period was led by Michel Pablo (see “Crítica a las revoluciones socialistas objetivas” and “Tl trotskismo en la segunda posguerra,” izquierdaweb).
[5] The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century is the latest work by this well-known British “Marxist” historian who offers a justificatory, economicist assessment of Stalinism, in a vein similar to Deutscher.
[6] Not for nothing is Deutscherism synonymous with opportunism.
[7] That is, the combination of the objective and subjective factors in bourgeois and socialist revolutions are qualitatively different.
[8] Deutscher uses the latter to always opportunistically wrap up his own arguments, even against Trotsky himself.
[9] As opposed to the revolutionary civil war at the beginning of the revolution.
[10] Take note that, not coincidentally, the majority of those who joined the ranks of the Leninist Bolsheviks, as the Left Opposition was called at the time and which would later give rise to the historical Trotskyist current, were, not coincidentally, generationally, mostly young (“Brief History of the Left Opposition”).
[11] The logic of their political shift was to move from opportunism to ultra-leftism, invariably without the protagonism of the masses.
[12] There was a sector of the base that believed in the measures, giving rise to a sort of “bureaucratized activism,” a characteristic that would accompany Stalinism during its peak but should not obscure the nature of the ongoing processes (in the 1930s, this “bureaucratized heroism” led many Stalinist militants to commit the most atrocious crimes believing they were doing “good” – for example, the assassination of Trotsky himself. Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs depicts these circumstances well).
[13] Although Deutscher knew this did not occur in real time, he himself harbored hopes for a “democratic reform” of the regime during the 1950s and 60s after Stalin’s death.
[14] Objectivism is understood as a circumstance in which general material conditions are everything and the actions of subjects are nothing.
[15] From gangster methods within the party, Stalinism moved to exile and imprison opponents—in prisons or forced labor camps—and later gave way to firing squads. The battle gradually transformed into a true civil war within the party, only to become an open counterrevolution against activism as a whole and the exploited and oppressed (we will return to this).
[16] That is to say, the battle was no “joke”: Stalinism was already warning you that it could do whatever it wanted with your life if you were an opponent, not only with your daily life but, literally, with your life itself.
[17] Note that Preobrazhensky was not just any oppositionist: he was responsible for presenting the famous “Letter of the 46,” which was the first explicit anti-bureaucratic text presented to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in November 1923 with Lenin still alive (although already completely incapacitated) and without Trotsky’s signature, who guarded himself carefully since he was a member of the party secretariat.
[18] Pierre Broué leaves the testimony of María Ioffe, who summarizes and gives flesh and blood to the heroism of their struggle (she recounts the executions that took place 10 years after the debate that divided the Opposition, without, on the other hand, those who capitulated having been spared the same fate): “The brick factory had gathered under its dilapidated roof the best of the creative elite of the camps; the cream of the brave and bold spirits who with their arguments and their training, their capacity to give logical, sometimes prophetic answers, had contributed vital dynamism to the static, intolerable existence in that incredibly cold and sick-filled barrack (…) The penetrating acidity of their sarcasm revealed the truth about an apparently incomprehensible reality (…) Those who possess authentic thought are always a minority. They were the first to be disposed of: One! Two! Fire! Without moving, near their graves, they sang ‘Whirlwinds of Danger’ (…) Everything was erased, crushed, the chants, the spirits, the lives. Pages of unfinished stories were trampled on. How much could they still have given to the revolution, to the people, to life? But they are no longer here. Definitively and without possible return” (Broué, idem).
[19] The work appeared during a major crisis within the ranks of British communists due to the repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, with intellectual figures such as EP Thompson breaking away from the British Communist Party (independent socialist clubs were formed throughout the country). Yet, Deutscher’s work contributed to many of them remaining halfway in their critique of Stalinism (holding a centrist, Deutscherist political position between Stalinism and Trotskyism).
[20] The Right Opposition led by Bukharin was, along with Stalin, the architect of the exclusion of the Left Opposition (Bukharin and company later opposed Trotsky’s exile, fearing for their personal fate). They confronted Stalin starting with his ultra-leftist turn within the leadership bodies (they never proposed a battle for the base).
[21] Note that in honor of Preobrajensky, it must be said that when the great purges occurred, he disappeared without a trace: he was not taken to the major trials because he refused to testify against his former comrades (something similar happened with several other ex-Bolshevik leaders).
[22] Rakovsky’s capitulation in 1934 had an impact abroad and on Trotsky himself; it cannot be justified. However, it must also be said that he was the leader who held out the longest without capitulating within the USSR itself (the last two to capitulate notably were him and Sosnovsky, with Trotsky emphasizing their loss of internationalist perspective due to their isolation inside the country).
[23] Note that Trotsky and Sedova paid their blood price for this battle (as did all the other oppositionists): Stalinism murdered both sons from their marriage; the husbands of the two daughters from Trotsky’s first marriage also disappeared without a trace, whose daughters also died, with one pushed to suicide by the bureaucracy. Additionally, Trotsky’s first wife, a steadfast communist-Leninist until her last day and always loyal to Trotsky, also disappeared in the purges. This text is not only about “controversies” and “theories”; it’s about life itself, about how the Left Opposition militants risked their lives for the high ideals of the socialist revolution and the emancipation of the working class.
[24] It is clear that here Rakovsky is not speaking of a social class in the proper sense but of an original social phenomenon; they are attempting to characterize the specificity of the Stalinist bureaucracy, something Trotsky would later discuss in The Revolution Betrayed when he states that “by its degree of autonomy the Stalinist bureaucracy is less than a class but more than a mere bureaucracy.”
With Deutscher’s work one remains thousands of kilometers behind the real historical experience. And not only behind the real historical experience, but also behind the rich, collective, and critical Marxist elaboration carried out within the ranks of the Left Opposition: “We believe it vain and useless to try to oppose Rakovsky to Trotsky in terms of ‘class’ or ‘caste’ to designate the new ruling social layer, taking into account that the definition provided by Rakovsky of ‘this original class’ closely resembles that of ‘caste’ (…) [taken by Trotsky]. But we also think that the absence of direct fraternal intellectual collaboration between the two men on the level of theory and political analysis [due to the bureaucratic barrier of exile and banishment of both] weighed heavily on the balance over decisive years in the history of the USSR” (idem, 395). In any case, note that Trotsky also takes the concept of “new ruling class” in My Life (page 401).
[25] The tracking of Trotsky’s analytical nuances during those years is enormously rich — although it is not an easy task. It happens that his opinions are scattered throughout his writings, generally short texts that mark inflections one way or another (that is, more “class-based” analyses followed by others where he perceives greater autonomy of the bureaucracy).
[26] In Ukraine it is estimated that 6 million peasants died in what came to be called the Holodomor, one of the greatest human tragedies in the country, accompanied by others such as anti-Jewish pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century, not to mention Nazism.
[27] We already pointed out above that Mandel would also defend the deeply erroneous concept of “socialist primitive accumulation” by equating it with capitalist primitive accumulation. But if capitalism, an exploitative system, could advance by exploiting the masses, it is quite evident that a socialist transition cannot follow the same pattern. Preobrazhensky’s economism wreaked havoc in postwar Trotskyism and continues to do so today.
[28] As a digression, and against all mechanistic thinking, we do not want to overlook here the vindication that Trotsky made in My Life of his independent path as a revolutionary, something generally overlooked in Trotskyist circles but very instructive in the sense that there are several paths to revolution and truth, not just one: “Of course, the Second Congress represents in my life [Trotsky refers to the Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, 1903, where he stood opposite Lenin in the party discussion] one of the greatest ordeals, even if only because I remained separated from Lenin for many years. Looking back and considering the past as a whole, I do not regret it. It is true that I returned to Lenin later than many others, but I did so along the path I myself traced, through the experiences of revolution, counterrevolution, imperialist war, and their teachings. And when I returned to him I did so with greater firmness and seriousness” (My Life, 129).
[29] As we have already pointed out, several Trotskyist currents followed this path, such as Mandelism and Morenism at their time.
[30] Neil Davidson points out that biographies are a rather scarce genre in Marxism. The combination of the collective and the individual is something difficult to achieve satisfactorily for historical materialism (we do not agree on this, but it is secondary here), and Deutscher would have been one of the few Marxists to attempt it. However, he forgets that Trotsky himself was a master in this field. Not only did he achieve it sublimely in his History of the Russian Revolution, as we have already seen, but his own autobiography, My Life, and his unfinished biographical essays about Lenin and Stalin, have become a model in Marxist biographical literature.
[31] It is obvious that without being able to express themselves honestly in public, any socialist democracy is impossible.
