Re: Stalinist aspects of Trotsky

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 16 Jun 1996, Chris, London wrote:

>
> I suggest, dear fellow subscribers, that  Trotsky and
> Stalin were all close ideological, political, and organisational
> Bolshevik cousins.
>
> Could Trotskyists please respond to this post and itemise
> the points on which Trotsky was fundamentally different?
>

Louis: I am not a "Trotskyist", but I would still suggest that this is a
particularly sterile approach to the questions that concerns us. We are
Marxists, not bourgeois social scientists.


Chris:
------

I would really like this question to lie on the table for a bit
longer even if Louis considers it sterile, so that an admirer of
Trotsky can respond. Certainly I agree demonology whether of
Stalin alone or of Stalin and Trotsky, is sterile, but I doubt
that a Trotskyist would immediately see Trotsky in that light.

I want to test, on this mailing l'st, what the response might be.

If what Stalin and Trotsky had in common, despite Stalin's protests,
were that they were Bolsheviks, then as the Serge-Trotsky Papers
Pluto Press 1994 ed Cotterill, argues, "While the anarchists and
Poumists were being betrayed by the Communists in Spain, the
Kronstadt debate served as a foil for the larger argument that
Stalinism was the natural outgrowth of Leninism".


I rather suspect that in the
aftermath of 1989 the future of marxism lies with the marxist groups
seen as variants of the mainstream. But if Trotskyism is to
contribute, I think it must face up to the suggestion that it in
practice it has been largely oppositional. Against revolutionary
violence - that is only done by evil Stalinists, against compromise
with non-proletarian forces, against social democracy,
against labour aristocrats, - and without power.

I am not sure the distinction Louis sees between a marxist
analysis and a "bourgeois" social scientific one. I think the
momentum of exchanges on this l'st now that we are starting to
assimilate the Stalin camp and the Maoists, is one of re-examination
of the legacy of Lenin.

Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were all Bolsheviks, and once the die
was cast to move on from the bourgeois democratic revolution to
the socialist revolution in a mainly peasant country, they were all
committed to the consequences. That is not an invitation to apportion
evil, but to historical analysis. It implied the inevitability of a
powerfully repressive state machine.

No, I do not think every member of this l'st would agree that Marx
would have necessarily approved the suppression of the Kronstadt
mutiny. Marx did not assume a  party machine for
exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, Stalin and
Trotsky did. Marx fought vigorous polemical battles but he did
not defend his thought by a relentless battle against "revisionism"
which by Lenin's definition was the product of bourgeois impurities
entering the proletarian purity of the received theory.

That creates a different sort of marxism than the one of 1848 that
hesitated to impose sectarian principles on the historical movement
going on in front of people's eyes .


So I hope loyal Trotskyists will respond to the riddle about
the aspects of Trotsky's position that appear Stalinist, and help
us to take the debate onto a higher level, (I agree with Louis)
than one of just being against evil.

Chris

PS

For example in our exchanges about "Land and Freedom" it was
generally assumed that Trotskyists were sympathetic to the POUM.
In fact Trotsky was strongly critical of the POUM, and it is clear from
his discussion of the Kronstadt mutiny that he was ideologically
capable also of supporting repression of the POUM too if events
had taken a different course.
History is more complicated than nice Trotsky and nasty Stalin.
But in saying that, am I marking myself out as in favour of
bourgeois social science? I see no reason why my questions should not
be treated productively in a marxist spirit.




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