Sebastiano Timpanaro 1972
First Published: “Quel ‘cane morto di Lev Davidovic’,” Giovane critica 30 (primavera 1972): 56-59, Franco Belgrado and Sebastiano Timpanaro;
Reprinted in Sebastiano Timpanaro, Il Verde e il rosso: scritti militanti, 1966-2000, a cura di Luigi Cortesi (Roma: Odradek, 2001).;
English translation: 2006 by Richard Bucci from the text as reprinted;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
The various parties and groups of the international workers movement, divided by deep dissensions that reflect also their judgments regarding the great personalities of the past (it is enough to think of the recent discussions on Engels, on Lenin, on Rosa Luxemburg), are nearly all in agreement on one point: anti-Trotskyism. If we except the groups that explicitly call themselves the Fourth International, all the others – reformist and revolutionary, pro-Soviet and Maoist, “spontaneist” and “Marxist-Leninist” – declare themselves anti-Trotskyist and at the same time are ready to accuse one another of Trotskyism. For Pravda, Trotskyists are the Chinese comrades, and the French students of May; for the “Gemingibao” they are the Soviet and Yugoslav revisionists; in Italy the charge of Trotskyism is not only thrown out by the reformist parties against the extraparliamentary groups, but also from these back to the others.
This enormous heterogeneity in anti-Trotskyist positions makes it obvious that the motives for anti-Trotskyism vary from one occasion to another. But for the most part rationally articulated motives – that is, disagreements over the interpretation of Trotsky’s ideas and actions – are not debated. In most cases discussions involve a “negative mythology” that has formed around the figure of Trotsky, making it possible to charge him with everything that each group or party considers erroneous, faulty, traitorous to socialism.
The origin of this negative mythology is known to all: it goes back to Stalinism, which presented Trotsky not only as a “traitor from birth” and as a hitlerite agent, but as the point of convergence for all the many diverse and completely opposed deviations from the correct “Marxist-Leninist” line – that is, Stalinism. Secondly, this mythology sees Trotsky as a reactionary masquerading as an ultra-leftist, and therefore oppositionists to the right and to the left of Stalinist policies could both be legitimately described as Trotskyist. The theory of “opposite extremes” was not invented by the clerical-social democratic coalition that governs us today, but it already existed in a Stalinist version.
In its coarser and more traditional form this mythology survives and is innate in that “M-L” sector of the extreme left which criticizes the reformist parties and the CPSU only in terms of the “betrayal” of an earlier Stalinist policy, and sees Maoism, in essence, as only a continuation of Stalinism. But also the official communist parties, with the CPSU at the head, having quietly laid aside (without, nonetheless, ever having disavowed it, take note) the calumny of Trotsky as nazi agent, have not quite renounced a more subtle but no less mystifying use for anti-Trotskyism. A typical product of this tendency is the recent collection of judgments by Lenin on Trotsky published in the USSR and reissued to Italian readers in the form of an “original” anthology by Luciano Gruppi (Lenin, Su Trotsky, Editori Riuniti, 1971):it represents one of the best examples of how it is possible to accomplish historiographic distortion by putting together authentic quotes.[1]
In the introduction, Gruppi seemingly attenuates the traditional accusations against Trotsky, but only to attack the revolutionary left, the “present-day currents of extremism,” which, he continues, “have nothing to do with what Trotsky represents in the history of the workers movement” (p. VII). But was it necessary for him to say this, since the parties involved, the “extremists,” are in agreement with Gruppi, in declaring themselves non-Trotskyist or absolutely anti-Trotskyist? The truth, as we shall soon demonstrate more clearly, is that the revolutionary left, in Italy as in the rest of the world, contains in itself more Trotskyism than it is willing to admit, and that Gruppi himself recognizes this, a fact which gives the Brezhev-Gruppi anthology its evident character as a political polemic of today, rather than simply as a historigraphic reconstruction.[2]
But while anti-Trotskyism functions as the strategy of the official communist parties – in their polemic against adversaries holding to “national paths to socialism,” from their fortress of internationalism – there remains the question of whether it is logical for the whole array of forces which reject present-day revisionism and Stalinist nostalgia, and interpret Maoism in terms of a rupture with, rather than a continuation of Stalinism, should continue to call themselves anti-Trotskyist. These forces have demonstrated in reality that they have the knowledge needed to be free of much mythology, real and imagined. They have reevaluated the important aspects of utopian socialism (with particular regard to Fourier), of anarchism, of the thought of Rosa Luxemburg. They have laid stress on proletarian internationalism, on the struggle for communism as a struggle that will be decided definitively only on a world scale, on the necessity for the revolution to continue also after power is won – and it is these ideas which Trotsky upheld, with an intellectual rigor and practical diligence that cost him exile and his life. One can philologize and quibble as much as one likes over the differences between the “permanent revolution” of Trotsky and the “uninterrupted revolution” of Mao, but it will never be shown that the extent of the differences are truly substantial.[3] Again: the new revolutionary forces conduct a basic polemic against party and state “bureaucracy,” and here also it is a hopeless task to ignore Trotsky (and, of course, Luxemburg too) as the inspirer of this polemic.
Why, then, does anti-Trotskyist mythology endure in the extreme left? One reason (a contingent one, “external,” and certainly insufficient to explain this phenomenon in and of itself, yet in our view not without weight) is the declared anti-Trotskyism of China – and secondarily, also of Cuba, although accusations of Trotskyism are made against Fidel particularly frequently. For analogous reasons, the extreme left has always pushed to declare itself more Stalinophilic than it actually is in truth, and the Chinese comrades always feel they must deny what they must to Trotsky. The Chinese comrades are conditioned by a determinate polemical relationship with USSR, by determinate requirements of struggle and of internal “pedagogy,” and therefore in some measure make instrumental use of categories like Trotskyism and Stalinism, understanding, even if the discussion is legitimate, the exact measure of this instrumental use, and the damage it might do to the clarity of their internal and international political standing. But the European Maoists can and should speak more clearly, just because they are not burdened with those responsibilities of “state.” Their unconditional acceptance of the Chinese comrades’ anti-Trotskyism is a sign that they are not completely free of the need of a State guide, denied in words, but not in effective practice, which prevents the European Maoists from being more unbiased and questioning.
There are, however, more substantial reasons. The anti-Trotskyism of the extreme left is revealing itself more and more to be one manifestation of the more general phenomenon of its anti-Leninism. In the extra-parliamentary left, as is known, Lenin is encountering foul weather. It is becoming ever more difficult to find an anti-Stalinist Leninist: from purely opposite evaluations, would-be “Marxist-Leninists” and “spontaneists” of varied shadings are unanimous in recognizing substantive continuity between Leninism and Stalinism. The process is as simple as it is ahistorical and mystifying: the “authoritarian,” “organizational,” antispontaneist aspects of the thought and of the praxis of Lenin (and these aspects are there) are isolated and disconnected from their dialectical relationship with the opposite elements – the libertarian, antibureaucratic – which are just as essential to Leninism, and it is then demonstrated that Stalinism was already contained, potentially, in Lenin. Having thus identified Leninism’s inescapable Stalinist future, the operation is then completed by revising the past: the sources of Lenin’s thought – his conception of the party, his determinism and materialism – are found in Kautsky, and therefore Lenin is linked to all those gross degenerations that are known as the “Marxism of the Second International” in a broad sense – broad enough to include not only Kautsky and Bernstein, but Engels also. True, creative, nondogmatic Marxism after Marx would be represented in Luxemburg, and, now, Mao. Since, however, such “chain reactions” are difficult to stop, and every intellectual, however intelligent, is always destined to be outdone by another intellectual still more intelligent, the perception has consequently begun to be made that Marx also is too materialist, determinist, Eurocentric, and therefore a species of anti-Marxist Maoism has been developed (at the opposite pole from the Stalinist pseudo-Maoism of the “M-L”), which happens to accord quite well with the idealistic upbringing that we have all had, an upbringing likely to have been much more narrowly “European” than all the thought and writing of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Given this context, Trotsky has no doubt attracted very little interest. His internationalism and his polemic against bureaucracy would appear to be deserving, at the most, of limited “historical” recognition, but devoid of timeliness, because it would have been transcended, given that Luxemburg and then definitively Mao are still enclosed within this limited Leninist horizon. In its more elementary form, the objection to Trotskyism (which is, as we have sought to demonstrate, also an objection to Leninism) could be formulated like so: “What is the point of waiting for the restoration of internal party democracy when Mao has made it clear that the fundamental problem is that of the relationship between the party and the masses, and has brought to Marxism a theoretical and practical enrichment of such importance as to reduce the polemic between Stalinists and Trotskyists to “family squabbles” in which the Trotskyists are the foreordained losers, exactly because they have not discussed the Leninist conception of the party?” Unlike these comrades we are convinced at present that Maoism does supercede Leninism – but only in one respect. The foundation of the correct relationship between the party and the masses represents, without any doubt, a contribution of historic proportions, a qualitative leap due both to the genius of Mao, and to the profoundly different means by which the Chinese Revolution developed in comparison to the Soviet one (the mode by which state power was taken by the Bolsheviks, with relative ease initially, rather than at the end of a long popular struggle that involved and educated the great masses in the revolution, had eventual negative consequences). But does a correct relationship between party and mass render superfluous the specified restoration of party democracy? It doesn’t seem so to us, and on this point the Maoist experience seems wanting to us, because contrary to the method of the party-mass relationship, the party continues to be led by methods that are in some measure still partly Stalinist: the non-public discussion, the masking of real differences in ideas and interests behind moralistic condemnations and the hammering and obsessive exaltations of the “thought” of a leader (you don’t want to call it the cult of personality so as not to confuse it with the specific characteristics, certainly much more negative, that constituted the cult of Stalin? call it what you want, then, but it did exist), unexpected silence from leaders who until yesterday had held major positions, and so on. “In Moscow in the Time of Lenin” – to borrow the title of Rosmer’s book – these things did not happen, and that had very important consequences for the international workers movement. Every militant of every country was able, without too much effort, to know the real dimensions of the differences between Lenin and the Workers Opposition, between Lenin and Trotsky on the role of the trade unions within the Soviet state, etc. There was no need for Kremlinologists, for the very reason that, even though the degeneration of the bureaucracy was then taking hold, party democracy was in large measure a reality, and the adjective in the term “democratic centralism” still meant something. (In regard to these matters, we share the observations made by Gianni Sofri, in Quaderni Piacenti, no. 44-45.) This confirms that the absence of party democracy is a problem which cannot be solved, either internally or internationally, with an even more ample party-mass relationship. The problem of party democracy will in truth become irrelevant only on the day that the party (like the state) dies out. But the Chinese comrades would never agreed that the Cultural Revolution will come to an end (and they would have every reason not to agree to this), since now the party is at last peaceful, though for some it was not so a year ago.
And so, if the problem of party democracy is still unresolved – and if, on the other hand, it does not depend on simple statutory measures or trust in the honesty of the leaders, but that it is connected to the internationalization of the struggle for communism, and to the real overcoming of the gap between base and summit – then the antibureaucratic polemic undertaken by Lenin at the end, and developed by Trotsky, always in connection with the problem of the world revolution, will not appear very much outdated, a lot of mere “Third Internationalism,” as the majority of the comrades of far left still believes. Before us stands, in our opinion, the reality of Trotskyism, and the necessity that it be studied, discussed, and critically assimilated by those comrades who, like the undersigned, have never belonged to Trotskyist groups and would never feel the need to declare themselves specifically Trotskyists.
With respect to this proposition, we would make a final remark concerning that position which could be summarized in the formula, Trotsky yes, the Trotskyists no. This is the attitude of many militant comrades of various far left groups, though it is not the “official” position of any of these groups.[4] Likely these comrades do not want to introduce a cause for divisiveness in the groups they belong to, by evoking a matter that seems without decisive political value at the moment. But how is it possible to clarify Stalin and Stalinism without confronting the question of Trotsky? Certainly, if the Trotskyist groups which adhere to the Fourth International have not, even in the new climate of anti-reformist polemics and the discovery of revolutionary Marxism which took hold in the sixties, completely succeeded in breaking from their isolation and establishing relations with the groups of the “nuova sinistra,” this cannot be wholly attributed to remaining anti-Trotskyist prejudices. It also depends on a certain sectarian spirit born of their long ostracism during the Stalinist years which has almost inevitably developed in these groups, and from an overly “Old Bolshevik” outlook which caused them, on an international level, to underestimate the original appearance of Maoism, and within individual European countries, to adopt a merely negative position against all of the young groups of the extreme left. The criticisms, for example, that “Bandiera rossa” has leveled against these groups were generally just, but were not accompanied by a sufficient awareness of the new aspects of the capitalism and the condition of the working class which the groups of the new left were forced to interpret themselves, if in a confused manner, falling into pre-Marxist conceptions.
This having been said, it is necessary to add nonetheless that the distinction between Trotsky and the Trotskyists can be, and often has been, a means to relegate Trotsky to a “history museum” and to deny the reality of some important aspects of Trotsky’s thought which seem to us right to reassert. If the discussion develops on this theme, the thought of Trotsky would no longer be the property only of the Trotskyists.
Postscript. The present article was already written when, without apparent demand, Trotsky: His Life, Thought, and Selected Writings, edited by Alberto Giordano, was published (Milano, Edizioni Accademia, 1972). Giordano’s essay, which forms a splendid couple with the syllogisms of the new left groups, is a new instance of that subtler form of mystification about Trotsky that has come into effect in recent years, now that the vulgar Stalinist slanders of “Trotsky as hitlerian agent” appear untenable. We do not know Giordano’s political orientation, but he clearly belongs to that not uncommon category of people in which the more they praise you the more they want you dead, and give you a hand only in order to take away your whole arm. Giordano is willing to grant a lot to Trotsky – the gifts of military leadership, mastery as a writer and historian, fine literary taste, open-mindedness toward the surrealist and futurist avant-garde – provided that all political currency is denied to his thought and actions and it is accepted that “that figure, with all the respect he deserves, has simply been consigned to history” (p. 13). All the author’s powers are stretched to dig a gulf between Trotsky and Lenin and to emphasize, on other hand, the continuity between Lenin and Stalin. To do this he is compelled to present to us a Lenin of little internationalism, an advocate already of “socialism in one country,” believing in the NEP not as a transitory measure, but the reverse, as mainly definitive (this difficult task is taken on, it should be said, by Piero Pagliani, in a portion of his weird “Introduction,” inserted after Lunacharsky’s “Profile of a Revolutionary”). And he is constrained to give his exposition a very strange slant, bringing Trotsky’s political activities and thought to a conclusion in 1927, with the exile to Alma Ata. On the entire period from 1927 until his death – and this is the period of The Revolution Betrayed, of the writings on China, of the criticisms of the tragic Stalinist zig-zags concerning the kulaks and “social fascism,” and so on – Giordano’s essay and Pagliani’s supplement are wholly silent. But maximum skill in following the First Principle of Mystification (which teaches: “be silent about that which cannot be falsified”) comes in the “Chronology” at the back of the book, from which it is learned that in 1937 Trotsky had “intellectual and practical contacts with some would-be American Marxists (Burnham, Shachtman) who proclaimed their sympathy with him, but ended up in time increasingly assuming the positions of the extreme right (supporting, for example, the electoral campaign of Goldwater in 1964)” – as if Trotsky had not already denounced the renegacy of these would-be Marxists (cf. L. D. Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, edited by Sirio Di Giuliomaria, Rome, Samonà and Savelli, 1969). And so we arrive (“finally!” Giordano should think) in 1940, the year in which this historical, wearisome person, Trotsky, “is murdered in obscure circumstances” (“Chronology,” p. 276). In these times, when assassinations “in obscure circumstances” are multiplying in Italy and all over the capitalist world, it would not be excessive, we believe, to be more truthful about the instigator of Trotsky’s assassination.
1. The subtlest of Gruppi’s commentaries (“I distinguish ...”), the constant hand-raising, the accolades which fall somewhere between falsehoods and distortions, are all well-inventoried by G.P. Samonà, along with other judicious observations, in the article, “Un nipotino (gesuita) di Stalin” [A (Jesuit) Grandson of Stalin’s], in Bandiera Rossa no. 9, December, 1971.
2. One undoubtedly unhappy passage by Gramsci (Note sul Machiavelli, p. 67) offers Gruppi the opportunity to counterpose a “national” position of Lenin’s to Trotsky’s supposed “cosmopolitanism, but not internationalism” (p. XII): the accusation, this business of “cosmopolitanism,” echoes an old theme of antisemitic propoganda, and is often reused in anti-Trotskyist polemics. At any rate, the relationship between Gramsci and Trotskyism cannot be reduced entirely to this one phrase, and, moreover, it will only become possible to evaluate this relationship fully when Gramsci’s complete notebooks are published. For an early evaluation, see, meanwhile, the book by S. Corvisieri (Trotskij e il comunismo italiano, Samonà e Savelli, 1969), which, in our view, holds its value also when the author passes on to other themes.
3. In Quaderni Piacenti 21 (January-February 1965), p. 23, Edoardo Masi rightly refers to the “policy of permanent revolution already upheld by Lenin and especially Trotsky, and today by the Chinese communists,” and, with regard to the erroneous position of the Comintern on the Chinese question, observes (p. 221) that Trotsky “had the merit of understanding well before Stalin of the looming disaster, and interpreted the Chinese situation at the time in a way that for the most part is analogous to the position advanced later by the current in the CCP which followed Mao.” More recently, comrade Masi, without repudiating any of his positions, has held that Trotskyism is best separated from Maoism within the framework of an interpretation of Mao’s thought as basically anti-Marxist; see in particular his introduction to Victor Serge, Le lotte di classe nella rivoluzione cinese del 1927 (Samonà e Savelli 1971, and for the complete ideological explanation, his essay on “Mao e la sinistra europa,” QP 39 (November 1969), p. 51 ff.
4. The existence of a wide “unconfessed” interest in Trotsky can be partly attributed to one fact, paradoxical at first glance: the fortunate publication of Trotsky’s works in Italian translation, in contrast to declared anti-Trotskyism or the “manifest indifference to the thought and work of Trotsky that, as has already been remarked, almost all the parties or groups of the Italian left have revealed. Outside Italy, on the other hand, a renewal of explicit debate on Trotsky has already occurred, which also includes comrades who do not adhere to the Fourth International” (see the review by A. Chitarin in Problems of Socialism 1971, no. 4, pp. 666 ff). A beginning in this same direction has been made even in Italy, by the review Soviet, which, judging at least from the numbers issued so far, has launched a serious discussion on the development of Leninist and Trotskyist thought, with the sole shortcoming, perhaps, being an attitude too one-sidedly polemical against Maoism.
This essay by Sebastiano Timpanaro and Franco Belgrado first appeared in 1972, and especially identified the authors to the Italian far left as supporters of the politics of Leon Trotsky. Readers today might find this statement strange, since the essay has many laudatory things to say about Mao, even to the point of acknowledging (in recognizably Maoist language) “the genius of Mao” as a responsible factor in the “foundation of the correct relationship between the party and the masses” which “represents . . . a contribution of historic proportions.” The essay’s original readers, however, would have noticed first of all its defense of Trotsky, a fact of which the authors were very much aware. For these readers – intellectuals associated with the working class groupings of the extra-parliamentary left – were in their great majority self-described Maoists of one or another variety. The groupings to which they belonged – most prominently Potere Operaio, Avanguardia Operaia, Il Manifesto, and Lotta Continua – came into existence during and in response to a powerful rise in militancy among the Italian working class which culminated in the “hot autumn” of 1969-70. This was a massive rebellion, involving thousands of factories from Torino to Bari, and millions of workers. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the union federation it led (CGIL) attempted to control and blunt the force of the upsurge, and in places openly opposed the strikers. Consequently, the leaders of the workers movement tended to arise within the individual factory committees (CUBi), which were less susceptible to PCI control. Many of these, and thousands more militant workers and intellectuals formed the core of the new groupings, and in doing so they were consciously defying the PCI leaders, and they looked outside the Soviet-allied party for revolutionary inspiration. For superficial, impressionistic reasons, they came quickly to regard the Chinese leaders and Mao especially as more militant, more in favor of mass spontaneity, more intransigently anticapitalist than the Soviet and PCI bureaucracies. Especially inspiring to some, at least from afar, was the spectacle of the Cultural Revolution. This bureaucratic upheaval, which was demonstrably anti-proletarian, is perhaps best understood as an attempt by Mao to strengthen his rule, much weakened by the “Great Leap Forward,” the economic fiasco he had promulgated. Nonetheless, to many workers and intellectuals in Italy, the Cultural Revolution had at that time the appearance of a mass revolt against conservative misleaders (like their own Berlinguer and Co.). On top of affording Mao undeserved status as an uncompromising revolutionary, the militants of the new left groupings also exhibited the typical signs of a PCI miseducation concerning Trotsky, which some made worse with an admixture of Maoist anti-Trotskyism. This variety was the most retrograde, since it harked back to the bloodiest days of the Stalinist terror against the Bolshevik Party and Trotsky.
It was in this context that Timpanaro and Belgrado wrote in 1972, but in pursuing a strategy of educating about Trotsky’s life and thought by attempting to find common ground with Maoism, they committed some serious lapses. This Timpanaro explicitly acknowledged in 1979, in a “Postscript” to the second English edition of On Materialism, his well-known collection of essays affirming the materialist core of the Marxist outlook (London: Verso, 1980). That Timpanaro in 1972 should have followed such a strategy, however, is not at all incomprehensible, given certain factors. Since 1945 he had been a member of the revolutionary left wing of the Italian socialist movement. He was sympathetic to Trotskyism, but not a part of the small Trotskyist movement in Italy. He was familiar with the press of the official Fourth International, however, and would have found there plenty of support for Mao and the Cultural Revolution. In fact the late leader of the Fourth International in Italy, Livio Maitan, who for years followed a policy of “deep entrism” in the PCI, was just then known mainly as an advocate of Guevaraism and Maoism. Because of the policies of the official Fourth International, Trotsky’s insistence on the leading role in the revolution of the revolutionary party and the urban working class had little chance of being communicated in Italy at a time of urgent need. In his “Postscript,” Timpanaro chose not to recognize Maitan’s dalliance with “soft” Maoism, but instead incongruously saluted the “comrades of the Fourth International” for maintaining a clear-headed posture during the time when Mao and the Cultural Revolution were enjoying (undeserved) popularity in Italy. The present essay of Timpanaro and Belgrado to an extent reflects the confusion of that time, but it also contains many cogent points about Stalinism and Trotsky’s withering critique of it, and increases our understanding of the dissemination of Trotsky’s ideas in Italy.
R.B., Brooklyn, N.Y. 2/06 ([email protected])