What are your thoughts on Trotsky?

Asked by: Anonymous

I very much admire him. Trotsky’s outlook was always characterized by an unwavering belief in unity through dialogue, and his attempts to facilitate conversation between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks prior to the Mensheviks’ embrace of Russian liberals was admirable, if perhaps overly optimistic (fault though it may have been, Trotsky’s sheer faith in the potential of humans to come together to shape their destiny and transform the societies in which they live for the better is one of my favorite things about him). His leadership during the Civil War also helped lay the groundwork for the new socialist project, and along with Lenin in his old age, Trotsky became a fierce critic of excessive bureaucratization even whilst maintaining the necessity of state intervention on behalf of the masses.

After Lenin’s death and Stalin’s rise to power, Trotsky became the de facto head of the opposition to his rule and authored many works, including Literature and Revolution, which maintained that socialism could openly embrace the finer aspects of “bourgeois” culture — literature, the arts, theater — because its goal was not to promote an alternative proletarian culture but to create a state of affairs in which class division was materially impossible. That is, in marked contrast to Stalin’s denunciation of every manner of highbrow sentimentality, Trotsky asserted that, ultimately, new cultural forms must be predicated not on the rigidities of current class preferences but on the possibility of a liberated and unified humanity. In short, Shostakovich would have undoubtedly fared better under Trotsky than he did under Stalin and a conceptual and cultural basis for a more authentic socialism might have been laid.

Moreover, unlike Stalin, Trotsky was consistent in his opposition to fascism, rejecting the Russian leadership’s pact with Nazi Germany and calling for Soviet intervention to halt fascism’s spread in Europe. His theory of permanent revolution also went beyond Stalin’s proletarian fixation by seeking to incorporate the peasantry into his vision of where the workers movement must go from here (it would be years before Mao would also recognize the importance of involving the peasantry in the movement for socialism).

In all this, I think Trotsky provided valuable correctives to the Stalinist Party line. My general feelings are that, had Trotsky gotten into power rather than Stalin (as Lenin would have liked), the Soviet experiment probably would have gone much better and history could have been radically different. Of course, we’ll never truly know, but I think his life and works provide ample reasons to assume as much.

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