Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1927 article, "The Appeal To The Party Members".
BOOK REVIEW
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION, Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1971
Today in 2006, at first glance it is not obvious why militant leftists should read about Leon Trotsky’s fight in the 1920’s not only to save and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution but to vindicate his revolutionary honor against the attempts by Stalin and others to diminish his role in it. Fair enough. However, aside from the need to set the historical record straight as a matter of elementary political hygiene (which is a worthy endeavor in itself) a close reading of this work will demonstrate to militants leftists the need to fight for their own politics despite attempts by forces inside and outside the ostensibly socialist movement to call those politics into question.
Although the last serious ideological fight against the bogie of “Trotskyism” occurred in the 1960’s and 70’s ( granted a long time ago) when various international Maoist and guerrilla warfare tendencies went to the Stalinism stockpile of slanders that does not eliminate a resurgence of such falsification if viable revolutionary socialist struggle comes back on the agenda. This writer notes that every time ostensibly socialist tendencies want to denigrate currents to their left they take their arguments from the stockpile of falsifications that Trotsky fought to correct here.
The attempts to discredit the revolutionary role and political leadership of Trotsky went through various stages depending on the various alignments in the Russian Communist Party in the 1920’s (and by extension in the Communist International as well) when it became under Stalinist direction an adjunct to Soviet foreign policy rather than a vehicle for international revolutionary strategy). The issues, however, remained fairly constant; Trotsky’s alleged Menshevism (he stood outside of the Bolshevik Party until 1917); his ‘underestimation of the peasantry’ (a particularly charged issue in a peasant-dominated country like Russia); his theory of permanent revolution which put the socialist revolution on the immediate agenda both for Russian and later, by extension, internationally; his flair for administrative solutions to Soviet economic problems, for example, on the militarization of labor during the late stages of war communism and his later dispute with Lenin on the role of trade unions in the Soviet state; and, not unimportantly, his willingness to step on some very big toes to get tasks done i.e. his prickly, if ardent, personality.
These issues mingled together in the various disputes first as Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev (known as the triumvirate) tried to keep Trotsky from leadership after Lenin’s death by attempting to drive an unbridgeable chasm between Lenin’s policies and his, that never existed in Lenin's post-revolution period. Then as Zinoviev and Kamenev went into opposition (and for a time joined Trotsky) Stalin and Bukharin did the same. Later, the victorious Stalinist faction put all these previous factional lineups in the shade by their rewriting of the history of the revolution to exclude Trotsky. The final efforts culminated in the charges against Trotsky (in absentia) during the frame-up Moscow Trials of the late 1930’s. Underlying all these efforts was the attempt to eliminate Trotsky’s role as leader of the October Revolution and the Red Army and ultimately to build up Stalin’s slight role in them. And when it counted, in the 1920’s, these efforts were successful.
Trotsky, as an individual revolutionary trying to defend his revolutionary honor, faced the same problem then as the various left oppositions which he led in the Russian Bolshevik Party faced. That is the ability of the Stalin-dominated bureaucracy to set the terms and tone of the debate in the struggle for power by the weight of sheer numbers and by control of the state media and propaganda apparatus. Given the vast disproportion of forces Trotsky, in the end, was not able to fully vindicate himself before the party and Russian public opinion. But, as this book demonstrates, he did leave those who want to learn a record. Unfortunately, before the demise of the Soviet Union in 1990-91 Trotsky was still not vindicated before history. The best the latter day Stalinists under Gorbachev could come up with is that he was a dangerous “ultra-left” visionary- a 'global class warrior'. Trotsky may still wait his vindication before history. He is, however, in no need of a certificate of revolutionary good conduct by his political opponents, this writer or the reader.
BOOK REVIEW
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION, Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1971
Today in 2006, at first glance it is not obvious why militant leftists should read about Leon Trotsky’s fight in the 1920’s not only to save and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution but to vindicate his revolutionary honor against the attempts by Stalin and others to diminish his role in it. Fair enough. However, aside from the need to set the historical record straight as a matter of elementary political hygiene (which is a worthy endeavor in itself) a close reading of this work will demonstrate to militants leftists the need to fight for their own politics despite attempts by forces inside and outside the ostensibly socialist movement to call those politics into question.
Although the last serious ideological fight against the bogie of “Trotskyism” occurred in the 1960’s and 70’s ( granted a long time ago) when various international Maoist and guerrilla warfare tendencies went to the Stalinism stockpile of slanders that does not eliminate a resurgence of such falsification if viable revolutionary socialist struggle comes back on the agenda. This writer notes that every time ostensibly socialist tendencies want to denigrate currents to their left they take their arguments from the stockpile of falsifications that Trotsky fought to correct here.
The attempts to discredit the revolutionary role and political leadership of Trotsky went through various stages depending on the various alignments in the Russian Communist Party in the 1920’s (and by extension in the Communist International as well) when it became under Stalinist direction an adjunct to Soviet foreign policy rather than a vehicle for international revolutionary strategy). The issues, however, remained fairly constant; Trotsky’s alleged Menshevism (he stood outside of the Bolshevik Party until 1917); his ‘underestimation of the peasantry’ (a particularly charged issue in a peasant-dominated country like Russia); his theory of permanent revolution which put the socialist revolution on the immediate agenda both for Russian and later, by extension, internationally; his flair for administrative solutions to Soviet economic problems, for example, on the militarization of labor during the late stages of war communism and his later dispute with Lenin on the role of trade unions in the Soviet state; and, not unimportantly, his willingness to step on some very big toes to get tasks done i.e. his prickly, if ardent, personality.
These issues mingled together in the various disputes first as Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev (known as the triumvirate) tried to keep Trotsky from leadership after Lenin’s death by attempting to drive an unbridgeable chasm between Lenin’s policies and his, that never existed in Lenin's post-revolution period. Then as Zinoviev and Kamenev went into opposition (and for a time joined Trotsky) Stalin and Bukharin did the same. Later, the victorious Stalinist faction put all these previous factional lineups in the shade by their rewriting of the history of the revolution to exclude Trotsky. The final efforts culminated in the charges against Trotsky (in absentia) during the frame-up Moscow Trials of the late 1930’s. Underlying all these efforts was the attempt to eliminate Trotsky’s role as leader of the October Revolution and the Red Army and ultimately to build up Stalin’s slight role in them. And when it counted, in the 1920’s, these efforts were successful.
Trotsky, as an individual revolutionary trying to defend his revolutionary honor, faced the same problem then as the various left oppositions which he led in the Russian Bolshevik Party faced. That is the ability of the Stalin-dominated bureaucracy to set the terms and tone of the debate in the struggle for power by the weight of sheer numbers and by control of the state media and propaganda apparatus. Given the vast disproportion of forces Trotsky, in the end, was not able to fully vindicate himself before the party and Russian public opinion. But, as this book demonstrates, he did leave those who want to learn a record. Unfortunately, before the demise of the Soviet Union in 1990-91 Trotsky was still not vindicated before history. The best the latter day Stalinists under Gorbachev could come up with is that he was a dangerous “ultra-left” visionary- a 'global class warrior'. Trotsky may still wait his vindication before history. He is, however, in no need of a certificate of revolutionary good conduct by his political opponents, this writer or the reader.
