Essay:Trotskyism: Petty-Bourgeois Ideology and Politics
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Trotskyism: Petty-Bourgeois Ideology and Politics
No one seriously disputes today the leftward shift among the masses and the growing search for a fundamental social alternative. The SPD and the Greens make desperate attempts to adapt to this. And among the deceptive maneuvers intended to create confusion is the effort to make a supposedly “revolutionary” politics attractive: Trotskyism. There are many documentaries about Leon Trotsky, and time and time again, when the history of socialism is discussed, Trotskyism is presented as an “alternative” that was brutally suppressed by the terrible “Stalinists.” What are we to make of this?
A striking convergence
“Who was Leon Trotsky?” asked a programmatic article by the German Trotskyist group “Sozialistische Alternative (SAV)” (Socialist Alternative) in December 2005. Referring to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, they claim that “he undoubtedly stands in line with these brilliant theorists and fighters for socialism.” The article continues: “His undervaluation in historiography stands in stark contrast to his leading role in the socialist workers’ movement in the first half of the 20th century.”
But they can hardly mean mainstream bourgeois historiography, since for decades it has viewed Trotsky exactly as they do: “With him, a personality appears on the stage of revolutionary struggle in Russia who must be named alongside Lenin in rank and significance,” writes, for example, Georg von Rauch (“History of Bolshevik Russia” 1963).
Karl-Heinz Ruffmann similarly relies explicitly on Trotsky in volume 8 of the World History of the 20th Century (1975) for the eyewitness accounts he uses: “... indeed some of them possess almost documentary value, especially when they come, as in the case of Trotsky, from prominent former representatives and members of the Soviet party-state” . The reactionary Adenauer government also evaluated him as a “decisive leader of the October Revolution” and called Trotsky “one of the most important theorists of communism”. And while the 1956 ruling banning the KPD declared an entire worldview (Marxism-Leninism) incompatible with the “liberal democratic order” of the Federal Republic of Germany, the reliably establishment figure and former Lower Saxony culture minister, Professor Peter von Oertzen (SPD until 2005), had no qualms about serving as official “scientific advisor” for the publication of Trotsky’s works!
Trotsky influenced, in his struggle against the socialist Soviet Union led by Stalin, the anti-communist term “Stalinism” the most, and for this he was used as the chief witness against socialism in the Weimar Republic, by the Nazis, and by the postwar German governments. For decades, and especially in times of political upheaval, Trotskyism has been used by the ruling classes.
Historical facts
According to the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative, Trotsky was “the outstanding revolutionary personality of his time.” If one believes bourgeois historiography, this may be true, but the facts tell a different story. His time was the emergence of the Russian revolutionary movement and the construction of socialism after the victorious October Revolution. And in this period, from the standpoint of the revolutionary workers’ movement, Trotsky played an opportunist, vacillating, and later hostile role.
When revolutionaries (the Bolsheviks) split from reformists (the Mensheviks) in 1903, he sided against Lenin. He did participate in the Russian Revolution of 1905, but after its defeat he again joined the camp of opportunists: while the Bolsheviks led by Lenin fought underground to preserve the party and defended themselves against the “liquidators,” who wanted to dissolve, liquidate, the revolutionary party, Trotsky took the ridiculous position of a “mediator.” Stalin therefore accused him in 1912 of preaching “this childish sermon about uniting the irreconcilable” for years (Stalin, Works, vol. 2). Since 1913 he belonged to the so-called “intermediate group,” which also opposed Lenin’s policy during World War I, only to jump on the moving train during the October Revolution of 1917 and join the Bolsheviks. For a short time he applied his abilities to the victory of the revolution, and the Bolsheviks did not turn away anyone willing to help. With his political knowledge he rose to leading positions, but his petty-bourgeois craving for leadership quickly set him against Lenin’s line.
In December 1920, Lenin gave the fundamental speech “On the Trade Unions, the Present Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky.” He polemicized against Trotsky because, in Lenin’s view, trade unions in the revolutionary workers’ state must be “not an organization of coercion” but “an educational organization, an organization of involvement, of training ... a school of administration, a school of economic management.” What mattered to him was avoiding “fundamental errors ... with which this pamphlet by Comrade Trotsky is bursting” (Lenin, Works, vol. 32). But the Trotskyists are not ashamed to reverse reality and claim in their article that “the pivot of his ideas was the self-activity of the working class.”
Trotsky never became at home in Lenin’s party, his petty-bourgeois leadership drive and his craving for recognition produced an uncontrolled hatred toward the party leadership, especially toward Stalin when he assumed Lenin’s position in 1924. After the expected workers’ revolution in Germany and other developed capitalist countries failed or did not materialize, Trotsky returned to the camp of capitulators. Masked with the phrase “permanent revolution,” he argued that the building of socialism in a single country, the victorious Soviet Union, advocated by Stalin was impossible: “We have always emphatically opposed the project of building a national socialist society ‘in the shortest time’... The problems of our economy will ultimately be decided on the international level.” All his political activity focused on fighting Stalin and the party leadership. In 1927 he was consequently expelled from the party and in 1929 deported from the Soviet Union. From abroad (mostly from Mexico), he continued his counterrevolutionary activities and called for the violent overthrow of the party leadership.
Through the divisive so-called “Fourth International,” he waged an international struggle against the communist parties. When in 1936 the elected left-wing government in Spain was overthrown by Franco’s military coup and the communists supported the Popular Front in taking up armed struggle, the Trotskyists stabbed them in the back. While Franco received weapons and military support from Hitler and Mussolini, and England and France sabotaged the democratic republic, only the Soviet Union provided military aid. Despite these historical facts, the Trotskyist article does not hold Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, or the West’s “non-intervention” policy responsible for the defeat of the Spanish democracy, but instead blames the united-front policy of the communists, claiming: “Popular Front leads to defeat.”
Progressive people around the world were outraged by this betrayal, and the Mexican communist David Alfaro Siqueiros, himself a fighter on the republican side in Spain, openly described his feelings: “As mentioned, the POUM, a Trotskyist organization, had instigated an uprising in Barcelona that claimed more than five thousand lives. This incident increased our indignation to the boiling point. What we had often discussed casually in the past now took firmer shape. At any cost, we swore, Trotsky’s headquarters in Mexico had to be shut down, even by violent means.”
Underhanded tactics
Since Trotskyists were largely discredited and isolated in the revolutionary workers’ movement, they increasingly refrained from appearing openly. They used the tactic of entryism, joining existing organizations and starting subversive work from within. Whether the KPD or SPD after the war, the PDS or WASG after German unification, all these parties were subjected to Trotskyist infiltration attempts. The new formation of revolutionary workers’ parties after Khrushchev’s revisionist betrayal in the late 1960s was likewise targeted: Trotskyists entered anti-revisionist organizations, like the KPD/ML, to sabotage their reconstruction.
Politically, the Trotskyists have long been finished and refuted. The book “History of the MLPD (Part 1.)” summarizes their role as follows: “The Trotskyists wrongly claim to be ‘revolutionary Marxists.’ Trotskyism is a petty-bourgeois deviation from Marxism that objectively plays a counterrevolutionary role. Politically, Trotskyism is nothing other than left reformism.” Elsewhere it says: “Trotskyism can best be understood as the ideology and politics of petty-bourgeois careerism, which infiltrates the organizations of the revolutionary workers’ movement in order to subordinate and destroy them. (...) The stronger and more unified the revolutionary workers’ movement becomes, the less room it leaves for Trotskyist careerists”.
For more on Trotskyism, read my essay “Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism?”, here on Revolupedia.