A LIBERAL’S VIEW OF LEON TROTSKY

 

BOOK REVIEW

TROTSKY-An Appreciation of His Life, JOEL CARMICHAEL, ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, NEW YORK, 1975

As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I also believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Joel Carmichael’s is a standard liberal democratic take on Trotsky’s life and work. Mr. Carmichael, as others before and after him like Irving Howe, takes on the huge task of attempting to whittle down one of the big figures of 20th century history against the backdrop of that mushy Cold War liberalism that retarded the intellectual development of even fairly critical Western minds in the post-World war II period.  That standard response invokes admiration for the personality and intellectual achievements of Trotsky the man while abhorring his politics, especially those pursued as a high Soviet official when he was in political power. In the process Mr. Carmichael tries to account for Trotsky’s ‘fall’ from power in the psycho-biographic parlance that was popular in the 1970’s. In short, Mr. Carmichael concludes in summation if only Trotsky was less of a loner and a better Bolshevik Party infighter his personal fate and history itself may have worked out better. Hell we, Trotsky’s admirers, have been screaming about his very important failure to lead the 1923-24 against the Stalinization of the Bolshevik Party (also known following the French revolutionary example as the Themidorian reaction) struggle for years. All without benefit of pseudo-Freudian analysis, by the way. In the end Mr. Carmichael demonstrates as much about the weakness of the liberal psycho-biographical method than a serious examination into Trotsky’s politics. There are some chasms that cannot be breeched and this is one of them.

 In classic fashion Carmichael, as have others as well, sets up Trotsky’s virtues early. Thus he recognizes and appreciates the early romantic revolutionary and free-lance journalist in the true Russian tradition who faced jail and exile without flinching; the brilliant, if flawed, Marxist theoretician who defied all-comers at debate and whose theory of permanent revolution set the standard for defining the strategic pace of the Russian revolution; the great organizer of the revolutionary fight for power in 1917 and later organizer of the Red Army victory in the Civil War; the premier Communist literary critic of his age; the ‘premature’ anti-Stalinist who fought against the  degeneration of the revolution; the lonely exile rolling the rock up the mountain despite personal tragedy and political isolation. However, my friends, Carmichael’s biographical methodology tries to debunk an intensely political man by one is a political opponent of everything that Trotsky stood for. Thus, all Carmichael’s patently obvious and necessary recognition of Trotsky as one of the great figures of the first half of the 20th century is a screen for taking Trotsky off of Olympus.

And here again Carmichael uses all the points there are in the liberal democratic handbook. The flawed nature of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution as applied to Russia in 1917 and also to later semi-colonial and colonial countries; the undemocratic nature of the Bolshevik seizure of power in regard to other socialist parties; the horrors of the Civil War which helped lead to the degeneration of the revolution; Trotsky’s recognized tendency as a Soviet official to be attracted to administrative solutions; his adamant defense of the heroic days of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet Union, even in its degenerated state, against all comers until the end of his life; his weakness as a party political organizer in the fierce intra-party factional struggles and later in attempting to found new communist parties and a new international

Of course the kindest interpretation one can make for Carmichael’s polemic, like that of Irving Howe fro the social-democratic perspective, is that he believes like many another erstwhile biographer that Trotsky should have given up the political struggle and become- what? Another bourgeois academic or better yet an editor of Partisan Review or Dissent? Obviously Mr. Carmichael did not pay sufficient attention to the parts that he considered Trotsky’s virtues. The parts about the intrepid revolutionary with a great sense of history and his role in it. And the wherewithal to find a place in it. Does that seem like the Trotsky that Carmichael has written about?  No. A fairer way to put it is this. Trotsky probably represented the highest expression of what it was like to be a communist man, warts and all, in the sea of a non-Communist world. And that is high historical praise indeed. Let future biographers take note.