Trotsky and his "Epigones"
The failure to fully reckon with Leon Trotsky should haunt Marxist-Leninists. I say this not to ignore the decades, especially during and after World War 2, where Trotskyism discredited itself across the world, earning the title of the “running-dogs” of fascism in such countries as Vietnam and China1. I say this because too often labels—such as what I just employed—have been the easy go-to for communists outside of the Trotskyist sphere to identify it as a clique of traitors, sinister bourgeois agents devoted to sabotaging effective revolutionaries. It would certainly be convenient if this were the full story. If Trotskyists are sincere, then their theoretical foundations must be struggled against; if they aren’t, they can be dismissed out of hand.
This misguided impulse results in attempts to cordon Trotsky off as a perpetual agent provocateur. Trying to prove that Trotsky was an agent of the British, German, or Japanese empires against the USSR misses the question of why this collaboration may have occurred and treats Trotsky’s long political career and voluminous writing as a ludicrously massive act of deception. It’s the Marxist-Leninist equivalent of claiming that the DPRK builds massive models of hospitals to trick tourists, rather than investing in real healthcare. Moreover, Trotsky and Trotskyists do not need to be proven agents to assist imperialism; any incorrect strategy aids the enemy, especially when applied as dogma despite its evident bankruptcy.
Domenico Losurdo outlined the weakness that accusations of treason had on the rhetoric of both the Trotskyist and “Stalinist” positions, as well as communist historiography as a whole: “If we use the category of treason, the result is quite miserable. The history of the communist movement as a crime, traced smugly by the dominant ideology, is simply renamed, by those who find it difficult to recognize themselves in the dominant ideology, as the history of the betrayal of the original ideals”2. Both Stalin and Trotsky delved into this path in the heat of their power struggle, attempting to prove that their counterpart served the interests of fascism and world imperialism. However, while Losurdo’s critique of their power struggle maintains potent accuracy regarding Trotskyism, it misses certain aspects of Leon Trotsky himself.
Trotsky’s attacks on Stalin do not place unmediated focus on his role as a subjective factor. The “Man of October”3 makes constant references to the “Thermidorian” reaction led by Stalin, and he consistently places Stalin into an inevitable period: “It is sufficiently well known that every revolution up to this time has been followed by a reaction, or even a counterrevolution. This, to be sure, has never thrown the nation all the way back to its starting point, but it has always taken from the people the lion’s share of their conquests”4. In these frameworks, Trotsky deliberately evokes the French Revolution and the rightward shift which led to Napoleon Bonaparte. Putting aside the question of this comparison’s truth for the moment, Trotsky clearly attempts to explain the “Stalinist” shift of the Soviet Union as a historical, rather than subjective event.
Some may object that Trotsky’s framework doesn’t contradict his ability to label Stalin an agent provocateur, and this would be accurate to a degree, as demonstrated best by later Trotskyists who employ the same terms. Yet these Trotskyists were often at odds with Trotsky himself, as admitted by his disciple, Raya Dunayevskaya:
“So unused to subjectivism was this revolutionary that at the very moment of the Moscow Trials he was deeply incensed when the papers printed ‘rumors’ that Stalin had at no time been a revolutionist but had always been an agent of the Tsar and was now merely wreaking vengeance. When I brought L.D. [Trotsky] the newspapers that carried this explanation of the blood purge, he exclaimed, ‘But Stalin was a revolutionist!’”5.
So incensed was Trotsky that he instructed Dunayevskaya to publish the following in the postscript of their newspaper article: “I place no trust whatsoever in this gossip. From his youth Stalin was a revolutionist. All the facts about his life bear witness to this. To reconstruct his biography ex post facto means to ape the present reactionary bureaucracy”6. This incident shows Trotsky not only disbelieving the narrative of Stalin as an agent provocateur, but even seeing it as necessary to publish a rebuke to this claim.
If we doubt Dunayevskaya’s testimony, we can also look to Trotsky’s exchanges with C.L.R. James, the Trotskyist author of The Black Jacobins. In reviewing James’ history on the Comintern, Trotsky repudiates him for portraying Stalin and the USSR as deliberately seeking the failure of the German and Chinese Revolutions: “Stalin hoped that the German Communist Party would win a victory and to think that he had a ‘plan’ to allow fascism to come into power is absurd. It is a deification of Stalin”7. By defending Stalin’s sincere support for the failed German and Chinese revolutions of the 1920s, Trotsky not only defends Stalin’s background as a “revolutionist” but also his sincerity during his struggle with the Left Opposition led by Trotsky. Does Trotsky do this because of a desire to defend his hated opponent? Of course not. Trotsky understands that accusations of being a life-long agent provocateur would imbue Stalin with a massive subjective power in history, hence his reference to the “deification” which James’ account risks.
A preoccupation with objective conditions over subjective action marks Trotsky as a thinker, and his relationship with his ideological followers mirrors his viewpoint. To hear Dunayevskaya tell it: “Leon Trotsky at no time let subjectivism enter into an analysis of a situation, whether he was a creator of that situation or its victim”8. And in Trotsky’s own words, in the foreword to his autobiography: “Above the subjective there rises the objective, and in the final reckoning it is the objective that decides”9. These proclamations might seem odd coming from a man as infamously arrogant as Trotsky, especially given his tendency to inflate the personal importance of himself and Lenin to the Russian Revolution, yet this surface-level contradiction belies a consistent approach to the role of revolutionaries in Trotsky’s thinking.
In Stalin’s “Trotskyism or Leninism?”, he highlights Trotsky’s dual tendency to diminish the Bolshevik party to a squabbling, incompetent mess while elevating Lenin—post-mortem—to a prophet of revolution dragging the party behind himself:
“Listening to Trotsky, one might think that during the whole of the period of preparation, from March to October, the Bolshevik party did nothing but mark time; that it was being corroded by internal contradictions and hindered Lenin in every way; that, had it not been for Trotsky, nobody knows how the October Revolution would have ended”10.
Trotsky transfers the subjective factor from the party to individuals because his objectivism reduces the role of the conscious element to passive perception and reaction rather than active alteration. Per Stalin: “In Trotsky’s opinion, the principal lesson of the proletarian revolution is ‘not to funk’ during October”11. The role of a leader in preventing this “funking” assumes that of a holy prophet, issuing edicts from on high while contending with the bickering of their human followers.
As a result, it’s fitting that Isaac Deutscher titled his three-volume biography of Trotsky The Prophet in reference to Machiavelli’s dictum that: “all armed prophets have conquered and the unarmed ones have been destroyed”12. Gramsci pointed out in his own commentary on Machiavelli’s bourgeois philosophy that this great man theory could not survive the modern age, that “the modern prince” was the party itself:
“The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual; it can only be an organism; a complex element of society in which the cementing of a collective will, recognized and partially asserted in action, has already begun. This organism is already provided by historical development and it is the political party.”13
Rather than accepting the mutually corrective relationship between the head of a party and its members, Trotsky paints this relationship as a frayed alliance between an oracle and their conceited troops—while Stalin purposefully points out mistakes on Lenin’s part in “Trotskyism or Leninism?” to counter this deification. Trotsky’s implicit view of himself and Lenin as prophets finds an explicit counterpart in his labeling of Stalin and company as “epigones” of Lenin.
Trotsky’s favorite insult defines the second leadership of the Bolshevik party as pale imitations of Lenin’s grandeur, denying their ability to exert an independent, subjective will. Ironically, Trotsky’s objectivism and deification of leaders creates the perfect environment for this insult to define his own movement. Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James would go on to form the “Johnson-Forest Tendency” which split from Trotsky’s “deformed workers’ state” position on the USSR to fully condemn it as “state capitalist”. These kinds of splits came to define the Trotskyist movement. While Trotsky fought certain deviations from his ideology during his lifetime, he also deliberately encouraged factionalism: “The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of epoch decline, In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions”14. Trotsky’s inability here to discern between a party’s formation and its defense primes the stage for those tendencies which would wrench open the gap between himself and Trotskyism.
The current popular image of Trotskyism as a chauvinistic, rightward tendency producing “neocons” hides within itself a kernel of Trotsky’s original position as the leader of the Left Opposition against Stalin. Trotsky’s epigones imitate his break with Bolshevism over his actual politics. As Dunayevskaya asserted: “Leon Trotsky as man will tower above Leon Trotsky as theoretician”15. Trotsky’s act of “rebellion” against Stalin becomes the driving force behind every Trotskyist’s collision course with anti-communism. The original “Man of October” had in many ways more in common with modern day Maoists than Trotskyists. His theoretical myopia regarding terrorism, militias, internationalism, and the impotence of bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the colonized world gels better with today’s ultraleftists than Trotskyist rightwing chauvinists, yet Leon Trotsky sheds none of his responsibility for the latter.
Trotsky supported Black nationalism and even separatism in the US, albeit tepidly, and he described Statesian workers as “indescribably reactionary” while asserting that: “The argument that the slogan for ‘self-determination’ leads away from the class basis is an adaptation to the ideology of the white workers”16. Meanwhile, US Trotskyists have become infamous for arguing exactly this point which Trotsky deems an “adaptation”, to the point where they hyperbolize Trotsky’s lack of knowledge about the US to dismiss his position on Black nationalism17. In this fashion, Trotskyists become true epigones, true Trotskyites, by idealizing the man’s departure from Stalin to the detriment of absorbing his actual theoretical stances. George Orwell’s depiction of “Snowball” in Animal Farm becomes the default image of Trotsky for Trotskyists as the exiled champion of democracy, when the real Trotsky was precisely the opposite: a dogged advocate of the terroristic dictatorship of the proletariat who ventured further than Stalin or Lenin on this front as well18.
Trotsky bears responsibility for this evolution not only due to his wavering positions and alliance with figures such as the “indescribably reactionary” elements of the US Left. Trotsky provides a theoretical framework for the rightward shift of the USSR by connecting it with the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte, but he never provides a framework for his own leftward reclamation of the USSR from without. As a result, C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya took Trotsky’s half-baked formula to its logical conclusion with their theory of “state capitalism”. The vindication that Trotskyists felt at the collapse of the USSR further discredited the assertion by their founder that the supposed bureaucratic decay of the first workers’ state could be reversed.
As Marxist-Leninists who uphold Stalin, for us the question should not be to deny that any rightward shifts occurred in the USSR, but to demonstrate why the defensive stabilization of the first socialist state required these measures to survive the imperialist assault led by Nazi Germany. A key comparison arises with our combat with Maoists over the history of China. We don’t deny that a rightward shift occurred under Deng Xiaoping, but we maintain that his market reforms were absolutely necessary to maintain and thereby expand the conquests of the Chinese Revolution. Such rightward shifts are not a paradox, but part of the dialectical process by which the offensive of the revolution achieves a lasting, concrete effect. Even in the case of Napoleon Bonaparte, without ignoring key reactionary features of his reign such as his attempts to restore slavery in Haiti, we must ask whether the dissemination of the French Revolution’s bourgeois ideals throughout the European continent would have occurred without the expansionism brought after the Thermidorian shift.
The correct understanding of rightward shifts in a revolutionary state acquires acute significance in regard to the collapse of the USSR. Too often, Khruschev and Gorbachev have been understood by Marxist-Leninists only through the convenient accusation of treason, rather than as a historically grounded trend which resulted from the necessary trauma of the Stalin years and the Bolsheviks’ inability to implement the balance of reforms found by Deng Xiaoping’s party. Deng Xiaoping understood, despite his rightward reforms, that Mao Zedong was right to suppress the rightwing deviationists prior to the cultural revolution, even if this repression went too far: “If we hadn’t thwarted their [Rightist] attempt, we would not have been able to advance. Our mistake lay in broadening the scope of the struggle”19. The rightward deviation of the post-Stalin USSR must be understood not in the language of Trotsky, as an objective inevitability, but as a combination of the objective pressures of the Stalin era with the subjective failings of a party which lacked the experience it afforded the Communist Party of China.
By understanding Trotsky as a theoretician of the ultraleft, we can see the path to understanding rightwing deviations as well. Understanding Trotsky, Khruschev, and Gorbachev only as treasonous men would lead us to the same blind alley that Trotskyists and Maoists lose themselves in, so our theoretical refutation must assume the sincerity of these opponents. Naturally, any revolution will have its fair share of agents and opportunists in the truest sense of the word, but any movement with a degree of real mass impact, either Trotskyist, Maoist, or Soviet revisionist, has a rational basis in the insufficient preparation of the masses, who still register the influence of the petit bourgeoisie as well as particular traumas such as the Great Patriotic War. As Trotsky understood in his cogent moments, if we want to defeat our ideological opponents within the left, we must assume their sincere desire for capitalism’s overthrow and prove that their theories’ impotence contributes precisely to the opposite.
The convergent path between Trotsky’s ultraleft idealism and Trotskyite rightwing anti-communism originates in the attitude of Trotsky’s epigones expressed best by Dunayevskaya, lauding the man Leon Trotsky over his political theories. Maoism and Trotskyism are two sides of the same coin despite their key policy differences, because the connective tissue of these tendencies is not solid theory, but the ephemeral aesthetics of rebellion. Every Maoist who smugly declares “It is right to rebel”, thinking they have said something profound, ultimately aspires for the politics of Orwell’s “Snowball”, not Trotsky or Mao, because the image of rebellion is safer than the reality that rightward shifts are a necessary component of the revolutionary campaign. And the image of rebellion, however sincere, leads smoothly into rebellion against communism itself.
Bibliography
Ho Chi Minh. “Three Letters from Ho Chi Minh.” Vietnam & Trotskyism. Communist League (Australia), 1987. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/vietnam/pirani/hochiminh.htm.
Losurdo, Domenico. Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Madison: Iskra Books, 2023. (p. 322)
The “Man of October” was a popular nickname for Trotsky due to his birthday coinciding with the outbreak of the October Revolution.
Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. Translated by Max Eastman. Marxists Internet Archive, 1996. (p. 50) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/revbetray.pdf.
Dunayevskaya, Raya. “Leon Trotsky as Man and Theoretician.” In Studies in Comparative Communism, 166-178. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1977. (p. 168)
Ibid. (p. 169)
James, C.L.R. “Discussions with Trotsky (1939).” In At the Rendezvous with Victory, 33-64. London: Allison & Busby Limited, 1984. (p. 63)
Dunayevskaya, Raya. “Leon Trotsky as Man and Theoretician.” In Studies in Comparative Communism, 166-178. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1977. (p. 166)
Trotsky, Leon. My Life. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970. (p. 46)
Stalin, Josef. “Trotskyism or Leninism?” Moscow: Pravda, 1924. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/11_19.htm.
Ibid.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet. New York: Verso, 2015. (p. 10)
Gramsci, Antonio. The Modern Prince & Other Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1957. (p. 137)
Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. Translated by Max Eastman. Marxists Internet Archive, 1996. (p. 53) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/revbetray.pdf.
Dunayevskaya, Raya. “Leon Trotsky as Man and Theoretician.” In Studies in Comparative Communism, 166-178. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1977. (p. 178)
Trotsky, Leon. “The Negro Question in America.” Prinkipo: 1933. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm.
Phos, Damon (@DamonPhos). “I read "On the Problem of Trotskyism" by Jeff Korolev today.” X, December 6, 2023. https://twitter.com/DamonPhos/status/1732275429376221230.
“The Party knows that Lenin was a relentless revolutionary; but it knows also that he was cautious, that he disliked reckless people and often, with a firm hand, restrained those who were infatuated with terrorism, including Trotsky himself.”
Stalin, Josef. “Trotskyism or Leninism?” Moscow: Pravda, 1924. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/11_19.htm.
Deng, Xiaoping. “Remarks On Successive Drafts of the ‘Resolution On Certain Questions In the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’.” Beijing: 1981. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1981/15.htm.