Ronald Aronson considers Leon Trotsky
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
I want to draw comrades' attention to a long, serious but profoundly wrong-headed review of the new edition of Isaac Deutscher's biography of Leon Trotsky on the Nation Magazine website: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050314&s=aronson
It is written by
As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I had Camus's
books jammed down my throat by Heinrich Blucher at
Aronson's review starts off on a rueful note:
"It is impossible to read Deutscher's
Trotsky biography today without being struck by how remote these hopes now
seem. The
I would tell the good professor to take heart since
After making some very charitable comments about what a positive inspiration Leon Trotsky was, Aronson rolls up his sleeves and begins working over his subject. Getting down to brass tacks, Aronson writes that "Trotsky's Marxism was of little use in negotiating the new situation created by the Bolshevik Revolution." Why? Because:
Stalin sought power;
Trotsky did not. In the void of backward
I am not exactly sure whether a reality, one way or another,
can be described as "Marxist" or not. Soviet history teaches us that
a social layer drawn from the party hierarchy, plant management, military
officers, etc. assumed power and ruled as a kind of intermediate layer between
the Russian working class, which had been decimated by civil war, and world
imperialism. If there is some other analytical tool that can describe the logic
of these events with more acuity than Marxism, then let's hear it. What are we
talking about? Foucault? Mike Albert and Robin Hahnel? The
Continuing along his rueful way, Aronson shakes his head in
disappointment over the foolishness of the Bolshevik leaders who thought that
the Russian revolution could unleash a world revolution. Didn't they know that
such a move was premature? Echoing Kautsky, without
having the honesty to mention his name, Aronson cites Engels, who supposedly
warned that a leader coming to power before the time is "ripe for the
domination of the class which he represents" is "irrevocably
lost." This comes from "The Peasant War In
Germany," an 1850 work that examines the career of 16th century peasant
leader Thomas Muenzer. I would think that a more
immediately relevant text is Marx's 1881 letter to Zasulich,
which argued that a peasant-led revolution in backward
Aronson thinks that the prospect for revolution in
With his busy schedule, I am not sure whether Aronson has
delved into the fascinating history of the German working-class of the 1920s,
but the preponderant evidence is that those four years of war turned them into
fierce opponents of the capitalist system. The Communist Party of Germany had
350,000 members in 1921. That's a lot of revolutionary minded workers,
methinks. And the non-Communist workers were just as uppity. In the state of
(The German revolution failed not because the workers were not ready for basic change, but because a revolutionary party had not been built. For those still committed to Marxism, those tragic days are still worth studying.)
Aronson's review concludes with the observation that Marxism leads to a single-party state and warnings against "the belief that radical acts of will can transform the world without degenerating into brutality" and a prudent reminder "that force cannot create a humane society." I would have expected him to mention the need to wear rubbers in the rain.
I don't know. That sounds a lot like Camus
to me. What people like Camus and Aronson don't seem
to understand is that revolutions are not made as a matter of choice. They are
events that are as inexorable as childbirth. When such events are on the
horizon, all that one can hope for is a good midwife. That requires a strong
stomach. For those with refined sensibilities, it might make sense to choose
another vocation than revolutionary politics.