Hazel Croft

A shaft of light

From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Hazel Croft reviews Trotsky’s final years

The last years of Leon Trotsky’s life – from his banishment from Russia in 1929 to his murder in 1940 – were the darkest years of the century for the international working class movement. Stalin consolidated his regime in Russia; Hitler and the Nazis smashed their way to power in Germany; Franco’s fascist militias gained victory in Spain; the imperialist powers prepared the ground for the Second World War.

Trotsky insisted that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of reaction. He fought to keep the revolutionary tradition alive and to build a new international movement based on the real legacy of the Russian Revolution. He estimated that task to be the most important he had ever undertaken:

‘I think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life – more important than 1917, more important than the period of the civil war or any other.’

This final volume of Tony Cliff’s four part political biography, The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Star, is a detailed examination, making use of new material from the recently opened archives in the US and Russia, of the immense struggle Trotsky faced.

Trotsky faced a massive task to explain a situation that had no historical precedent: how the step forward for liberation workers gained in Russia in 1917 could turn to its opposite – the Stalinist regime of tyranny and exploitation.

The USSR in the late 1920s was isolated. Revolutions in Germany and China had been defeated increasing the feeling of demoralisation among a working class weary of war and economic deprivation. Economic and social crisis threatened to reach monster proportions. Stalin’s forced industrialisation and collectivisation began in 1928 as an attempt to overcome the paralysis of a floundering economy.

Forced collectivisation accelerated and aided speedy industrialisation – not to meet the needs of the population, but in order to build up the country’s heavy industry and defence systems to be able to compete with the Western nations.

Stalin set out to achieve in just three years the kind of capitalist accumulation which had taken the English bourgeoisie over two centuries.

The result was catastrophic for the Russian population. In the countryside the policies created famine in 1932–33 in which 4 million people died. In industry there was a huge attack on the living and working conditions of the working class. The mass terror of the gulag – the notorious slave labour camps in which millions of workers and peasants perished – was how Stalin pushed through his plans.

How did Trotsky explain such monstrous changes in the regime? His major examination of the nature of the Soviet Union was contained in his last book, The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1937. Trotsky’s main aim was to dispel Stalin’s hideous notion that socialism had already been achieved in the Soviet Union.

Trotsky, writing in far away Mexico, gives a brilliantly detailed and uncompromising account of life in Russia, arguing that the brutal totalitarian state was incompatible with socialism, that Stalinism overturned every aspect of human liberation and emancipation that socialism stood for.

He also aimed to give a comprehensive analysis of the degeneration of the revolution. The roots of the rise of the bureaucracy were in the backwardness of the country:

‘The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there are little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy.’

But, argues Cliff, despite the brilliant insights and strength of this work, there was a fundamental flaw in Trotsky’s arguments. He still believed the Soviet Union to be a workers’ state, arguing that although the bureaucracy had usurped the working class politically, the basic economic gains of October were still intact:

‘The nationalisation of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitute the basis of the Soviet social structure. Through these relations, established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us basically defined.’

The ruling bureaucracy had not therefore become a new ruling class, but rather a parasitic caste, who could be removed through a political revolution which would, much like the February Revolution which swept aside the Tsar in 1917, keep the economic base of society intact.

Tony Cliff gives a thorough critique of Trotsky’s position as it developed in his earlier writings on the Soviet Union and in its mature version in The Revolution Betrayed. Cliff argues that not only was Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution, but during the first Five Year Plan the mode of production became capitalist. The bureaucracy became a ruling class, acting in its own interests, exploiting the workers who had no say in the running of production, and accumulating capital rapidly to compete with the West.

The biggest task facing Trotsky in his years of exile was to build the opposition to Stalin outside the USSR. It was a mammoth job. There was a vast chasm between the task Trotsky faced and the forces at his disposal. Stalin’s regime commanded the respect of the left throughout the world. Stalin spoke, in the name of the revolution, through the Communist Parties of the Third International who held the allegiance of millions of working class militants. Trotsky, by contrast, vilified and persecuted by Stalin and his crew, was a leader of tiny groups with a minimal base in the working class movement.

The most urgent task was stopping the rise of the German Nazis. Germany, with its huge working class, was in the most acute social and economic crisis. Trotsky put all his resources into trying to influence the course of events against the coming catastrophe. The numerous articles and pamphlets about fascism are among Trotsky’s most astute and clear writings – even more remarkable for the fact that their author was far removed from the events he describes.

Cliffs chapter on the struggle against the Nazis gives a wonderful flavour of the breadth of Trotsky’s analysis of the economic and social changes and forces behind the rise of Hitler and the clarity of Trotsky’s calls for action to stop him:

‘Germany is now passing through one of those great historic hours upon which the fate of the German people, the fate of Europe, and in significant measure the fate of all humanity, will depend for decades.’

Tragically his call for action to stop the fascists was like ‘a cry in the wilderness’. Trotsky’s supporters in Germany were too small and uninfluential to make any impact on the working class over whom the disastrous policies of the Social Democrats and the Communist Party held sway. As Cliff says, ‘Trotsky witnessed the most catastrophic defeat of the international working class without being able to affect the march of events.’

The puny size and influence of Trotskyist organisation was to become apparent not only in the defeat of the German working class, but amid the stormy revolutionary events of 1936 in France and Spain.

Trotsky’s writings on these events, like those on Germany, form an invaluable ‘revolutionary manual’ for socialists today. His polemics against the bankrupt strategy of Popular Front policies pursued by the Communist Parties of these countries, by hanging onto the coat tails of the bourgeoisie, are unsurpassable. But Trotsky’s voice went unheard. In France Trotsky’s organisation was riven by splits and faction fights. In Spain Trotsky’s group numbered only 30 by 1937.

In many ways, Cliff argues, the tragedy of Trotskyism in France was even more shattering than that of Germany. Whereas the efforts to build an organisation in Germany took place when the working class was suffering a continuous cycle of defeats, in France the organisation stagnated in a period of rising workers’ struggle with millions of workers radicalised by mass strikes and demonstrations.

In many ways Trotsky’s attempts to build a Fourth International were unsuccessful. Bitter quarrels and splits marred the building of influential Trotskyist organisations. But Trotsky’s efforts to forge such organisation left one outstanding legacy of keeping the thread of the real Marxist tradition running through to future generations.

The greatest value of Cliff’s book is that it is a critical assessment of Trotsky’s work. It starts from recognising Trotsky as one of the giants of revolutionary Marxism who applied to all his work a materialist, Marxist method aimed at forwarding the revolutionary cause. But Cliff also looks at the problems Trotsky faced in having to analyse and explain the unprecedented events in Russia and the dire situation he found himself in. This makes the book not only an account of the last years of Trotsky’s life, but also a marvellous guide to the unity of revolutionary theory and practice and how we can apply it today.

Trotsky: the darker the night the brighter the star
Tony Cliff
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