[DEBATE] : On Trotsky

[Ran Greenstein]

Logos Journal, 6.3, Summer 2007 

An Ex-Maoist Looks at an Ex-Trotskyite: On Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky

by Ian Williams

A quarter of a century since he wrote it, Howe's biography of Trotsky raises far more 
questions than it can directly answer. How could a devoted democratic socialist describe a 
founder of the Bolshevik Party and thus of the Soviet state as "one of titans of the century," 
not least when the author also recognizes that Trotskyism is "without political or intellectual 
significance: a petrified ideology?"1 Outcast and unarmed, the prophet's strong residual 
attraction for someone as intellectually and politically rigorous as Howe bears scrutiny. 
Throughout this biography he is in a state of quantum indeterminacy about his subject, 
shifting from a state of intellectual criticism to one of emotional attachment, often in the same 
paragraph. We read detailed condemnation of the totalitarian state that Trotsky helped bring 
to birth, of the failure of his political movement, and of his failed predictions, yet Howe 
interlards this with general superlatives about his subject's heroic virtues.         

Howe is not alone in this. There is, it seems, a special romantic Trotsky in the hearts of a 
certain generation of the American Left in particular: a proto-Che, a revolutionary and man of 
action who was yet an intellectual and man of sensibility. It is a mythic construct, as befits a 
mythical figure, or perhaps, in this more sordidly commercial age, a spectacularly successful 
example of rebranding. In either case somehow the American Left has absolved Trotsky of 
any moral responsibility for the events in the Soviet Union after his exile and indeed tends to 
overlook his direct responsibility for the formation and, more important, the subsequent 
development of the Soviet regime.          

Coming from Britain to the United States, one cannot help but be impressed, or rather 
somewhat depressed, by the influence of Trotskyism on the American Left. Admittedly the 
Left in much of the world is now hardly at the apogee of its influence, in contrast to the 
hopes many of us had at the fall of Berlin Wall, when we imagined a new promise for the 
core collectivist values of democratic socialism, untrammeled by the sordid reality of "actually 
existing socialism" of the East European variety.          

But here in the United States it seems that Leon Trotsky's attempt to pass himself off as a 
democratic socialist was in large measure swallowed by the noncommunist Left. The Dewey 
Commission, headed by the philosopher John Dewey to examine the charges against 
Trotsky at the Moscow trials, established that the accusations were ridiculous but would 
perhaps have done better to go on to scrutinize Trotsky's own behavior in power. Although 
Dewey, according to Howe, had serious misgivings about the exile's democratic credentials 
for liberal sainthood, it would appear that many American socialists took the commission's 
report as a clean bill of political health for the exiled leader.          

Within a few short years much of the noncommunist American socialist movement was 
deeply under the influence of the "Old Man"--what remained of it, that is, after his followers 
had joined the Socialist Party and their infectious polemical sectarianism had spread 
through it, splitting it into sects. As a result, instead of being a cluster of tiny cults breeding 
on the edge of a mass social-democratic party, as in Europe, in a sense "Trotskyism" in the 
United States killed the host and replaced it.          

The Bolshevik exile joined the mainstream of American socialism, particularly among those 
intellectuals, such as Howe, who still kept the red flag fluttering from their ivory towers, and 
this certainly contributed to socialism losing its admittedly slender chance to enter the 
mainstream of American politics. For American workers and liberals the choice was between 
Communist-dominated activism and fervent loyalties to smaller and smaller sects dominated 
by and named after obscure political leaders in unconscious imitation of the Hasidic sects 
following East European rabbi families decades after the shtetl was gone: Pabloites, 
Shachtmanites, Mandelites, each wishing on the other the fate of the Amalekites. No wonder 
most of the natural constituency for social democracy chose to go with the Democrats.         

However, even among those, often academics and intellectuals, who tried to keep alive the 
ideals of democratic socialism in America, Trotsky seemed to remain respectable when other 
manifestations of the Soviet "experiment" were beyond the pale. Although he himself sought 
sedulously to project himself as the pretender to the throne of Vladimir Ilyich temporarily 
occupied by Stalin, many of his admirers solipsistically cast him in their own image, whether 
anti-Soviet or democratic socialist.        

The resilience of Trotsky's attraction is shown by the continued respect that even the 
neocons and others who began their political life in his movement feel for him, although they 
have left socialism behind. Howe's book, inadvertently, sheds some additional light on this 
conundrum: how people ranging from the tiniest and most fissured sects advocating world 
revolution and the impending downfall of capitalism to powerbrokers in the Reagan and 
Bush administrations--and staunch anti-Leninist social democrats in between--can still have 
mental icons of the Old Man hanging inside their skulls.         

In Britain, by contrast, Trotskyist movements were peripheral to the Labour Party, buttressed 
as it was by a long tradition of indigenous socialism; spurning foreign models; and nurtured 
on unions, Fabianism, and Methodism. The cyclical Trotskyist attempts to infiltrate the 
Labour Party, usually through its youth movement, were regularly defeated. They made little 
or no impression in the unions, where indeed much of the burden of combating them was 
borne by the Communist Party, which had an industrial influence way beyond its 
membership. That was also why many on the left of the Labour Party tended to travel in 
parallel, if not necessarily in fellowship, with the Communist Party, since its union influence 
gave it some sway in the Labour Party, where unions had a block vote.          

Even so, in Britain, with the intellectual and emotional support of a mass socialist tradition, it 
was entirely possible to be a radical left-wing socialist and yet to regard Trotsky, Lenin, and 
Stalin as cut from the same absolutist and totalitarian cloth.           

Howe's biography of Trotsky reflects much of the American Left's ambivalence. His clarity 
and honesty continually bring him back to a recognition that Trotsky never renounced 
Leninism and that, in the end, the latter gave birth to Stalinism. But the intellect he brings to 
bear on this is blunted, one suspects because of Trotsky's appeal to the intellectuals, like 
Howe, rather than to the intellect.           

Howe published the book in 1978, when Trotsky was important because, in effect, so many 
intellectuals thought he was. Even if Trotskyism and Trotskyists were of marginal importance 
to any meaningful political movement in the United States, the Soviet Union still stood, 
apparently strong, and in a bipolar world his views on the origins and development of the 
Bolshevik state system had relevance for socialists assessing means to the socialist future.         

It also followed a period in which Howe was wrestling for the souls of younger socialists in 
the New Left, trying to prove to skeptical revolutionaries that it was possible to be anti-Soviet 
and still a radical socialist. Although he did not pull his punches in those debates, it would 
not have helped to throw Trotsky, a Left icon, out with the Stalinist bathwater. In those days 
before the Reagan/Thatcher counterrevolution the achievements of social democracy in 
Western Europe were not the stuff to stir the blood of the young with hope. "The West is 
Red" was not a slogan to conjure with.           

Indeed, by the time Howe wrote, Trotsky may have had a rival in Mao Zedong, but the latter, 
although an intellectual with some of the necessary romantic qualifications, suffered several 
disabilities. He had missed martyrdom and had hung around too long to be distanced from 
any "mistakes" in the Chinese system. Indeed, he was not Jewish! What is more, Mao was 
not part of the Western intellectual tradition that had formed Trotsky and Howe. "Somewhere 
in the orthodox Marxist there survived a streak of nineteenth-century ethicism, earnest and 
romantic," Howe claims, with the added advantage that Trotsky was "frank and courageous" 
in the face of power (5).          

Howe introduces himself as still a socialist and admits to a "brief time" under "Trotsky's 
political influence," although in the forty years since "I have found myself moving farther and 
farther away from his ideas." So why was a social-democratic writer writing about an exiled 
Russian whose ideas he no longer espoused? Howe explains that Trotsky "remains a figure 
of heroic magnitude, and I have tried to see him with as much objectivity as I could 
summon." It was perhaps not enough.       

Heroes were in demand both when Howe was growing up and when he wrote his biography. 
The intellectually voracious radical Jewish culture of the 1930s and 40s thought that ideas 
mattered and that they could change the world. Is it too far a stretch to remember that this 
was the milieu that gave birth to Superman and other comic-book superheroes? Lev 
Davidovich Bronstein, the Russian Jewish intellectual, may never have stepped into a phone 
booth like Clark Kent, but he did transform himself into a Colossus, bestriding the globe. 
This was surely in the mind of Howe, who was rediscovering his Jewish roots and had 
recently written World of Our Fathers.         

It perhaps made marginally more sense to lionize Lev Bronstein than it did to cry when 
Stalin died, as some Jewish communists did--just before "Uncle Joe" was about to try for a 
second run at the Final Solution, by many accounts.          

The era and the people also gave birth to science fiction writers such as the explicitly Marxist 
Futurians in New York, with writers like Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, who ran dystopian 
thought experiments on society, and Isaac Asimov, who created a history of the future in 
broad galactic sweeps, reminiscent perhaps of Trotsky's depictions of the recent past. Big 
solutions, all-inclusive tidal waves of history, the certainty of true believers were all in the air 
in Howe's formative years.          

Howe rhapsodizes, as enthralled by the man as he is disturbed by the result: "His personal 
fearlessness, his combination of firm political ends with tactical ingenuity, and his 
incomparable gifts as an orator helped to transform him, at the age of twenty-six, into a 
leader of the first rank: he had entered upon the stage of modern history and only the ax of a 
murderer would remove him." It is interesting that one could write a short and entirely 
accurate encomium of Adolf Hitler in almost exactly the same vein, if one chose to eschew 
ethical judgment on the use of these singular talents and its consequences.

These occasional intrusions of hagiography into Howe's treatment perhaps highlight the path 
that many followers of the Old Man took to neoconservatism, even if it is not a journey that 
Howe himself ever chose. They help explain why Trotsky remains a hero even for those who 
have abandoned his socialist ideas. Trotsky was an intellectual who was a man of action. He 
had fomented revolution; he had waged a war that looked romantic the farther away from it 
the observer was in space and time. He wrote about his own times and deeds with verve and 
with the broad brush of certainty that appeals to intellectuals haunted by quibbles and 
details. And what's more, he was dead, martyred. No wonder people like Howe could see the 
warts, describe them, and yet simultaneously paint them over.         

However, Howe's hero never renounced the Bolshevik's methods, and he never seriously 
addressed, let alone apologized for, his own role in developing the totalitarian state that 
hounded him to his death, even though it had begun its execution of opponents while he 
was one of its leaders. Indeed, in his arrogance Trotsky never explained quite why he had 
been so politically maladroit in his assessment of the trend in the party represented by Stalin 
and why the latter, whom he despised so roundly, so equally roundly defeated and ousted 
him.        

"If there is a single text that supports those who believe Leninism and Stalinism to be closely 
linked or to form a line of continuous descent, it is Terrorism and Communism," Howe 
declares regretfully (74). He is clearly still not prepared to make the connection unequivocally 
in this biography. He deems it "perhaps profitless" to try to identify the precise time when 
"the revolutionary dictatorship of Lenin gave way to the totalitarianism of Stalin" (88). It is 
interesting that Howe himself is in effect distinguishing the two, when by then his general 
drift of political thought was rather to conflate them.          

It is equally interesting that Howe's other great mentor was George Orwell, whose emphasis 
on an intellectual tradition, on democracy and decency, anticipated Howe's and was so 
much clearer, so much earlier, about this issue. Orwell, for example, took Arthur Koestler to 
task for his residual loyalty to the party "and a resulting tendency to make all bad 
developments date from the rise of Stalin," whereas "all the seeds of the evil were there from 
the start, and . . . things would not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky had 
remained in control."2

Trotsky himself made the break with his past, says Howe, during the last decade of his life, 
when he "offered a towering example of what a man can be." He adds, "A later generation . . 
. may be forgiven if it sees the issue of democracy as crucial and regards Trotsky's sustained 
critique of Stalinism as his greatest contribution to modern thought and politics" (130).         

However, an even later generation could equally be forgiven for regarding as lacking and 
somewhat insubstantial any critique that sedulously avoids considering the roots of 
totalitarianism in the theory and practice espoused by the ruling party when Trotsky was one 
of its architects. Terrorism and Communism would have allowed him to be cast as Squealer 
as much as Snowball.          

Accurate as his current allegations about Soviet practices may have been, Trotsky was far 
from the first to identify the regime's faults, and the absence of any hint of self-criticism could 
make it look like a Tweedledum-Tweedledee bout in which the only serious question was 
whether he or Stalin should be master.     

In contrast, Howe's critique of Bolshevism is measured and analytical rather than bell-book-
and-candling exorcism. He distinguishes between the freedom of internal debate among the 
original Bolsheviks under Lenin and in the later Stalinist and post-Leninist organization and 
so to some extent discounts the inevitability of what happens when a party of true believers 
becomes possessed of exclusive state power. Few, if any, of the sects that claimed to follow 
Trotsky showed much toleration for dissent in their ranks, even if they, perhaps fortunately, 
never achieved state power to enforce their discipline. In fact the younger Trotsky was more 
astute than both Howe and the later Trotsky in foretelling the way that things would go when 
the Central Committee substituted itself for party, class, and state.          

Howe recognizes this in a strangely muted way. In describing his subject's failures he says, 
"this is not to excuse the principled failure of Trotsky to raise the issue of multi-party socialist 
democracy, it is, at best, to explain it" (125). This is strange wording, since by all of Howe's 
normal standards the failure to raise such an issue was deeply unprincipled.        

Where Howe went part of the road with the neocons in the early stages was in the strain of 
Trotskyism identified above all by anticommunism, or anti-Stalinism, developed by Max 
Shachtman, who took the Old Man's critiques of the Soviet system to new and higher levels 
of dissociation and whom Howe acknowledges as a major influence.     

The followers of Shachtman and their neocon political progeny had little or no difficulty in 
seeing Communism and the Soviet Union, not as some redeemable wayward revolution, but 
as an absolute evil to be crusaded against. That proto-neocon passion against the Evil 
Empire reached a crescendo by the fall of the U.S.S.R., ironically almost putting 
retrospective truth in the Stalinist canards about Trotskyism's alliance with fascism, in light of 
neoconservative support for U.S. alliances with right-wing dictatorships against the greater 
enemy of Communism.         

What did the neocons take from Trotsky? Certainly we know that politically they abandoned 
Trotskyism, in the sense of the revolutionary socialism that their hero would have considered 
his essence. However, there are strongly idiosyncratic characteristics of the Old Man and his 
movement that seem to be adoptable and transmittable even when pithed of their ideological 
core. As Howe, in his introduction, mentions, his hero's ideas "take on vibrancy only when 
set into their context of striving, debate, combat" (vi). As he points out, Trotsky's oratory 
earned "the dislike, even hatred, of many opponents because of what they saw as the 
polemical ruthlessness and arrogance of his style" (41).          

We miss from this an appreciation that the later Howe had himself become one of those 
opponents, an advocate for democracy and openness, for democratic socialism as opposed 
to the burgeoning totalitarianism of Bolshevism, who would surely have been cast rhetorically 
into the dustbin of history by his subject, depicted here as a Leftist Rush Limbaugh.        

However, no one who has had dealings with the various strains of Trotskyism in later years 
would have any difficulty in identifying this robustly unforgiving polemicism as an integral part 
of Trotskyite practice, even more so than that of their Stalinist antagonists.           

Indeed, Howe reports that Trotsky in 1920 condoned "acts of repression that undercut 
whatever remnants there still were of 'Soviet democracy.' Worse yet he did all this with a kind 
of excessive zeal, as if to blot out from memory much of what he had said in earlier years" 
(70).         

Trotskyism's obsession with the Soviet Union, its inability to shed the baggage of 
Bolshevism, led for decades to a strange sterile dialectic, all antithesis and no thesis, in 
which negative polemics and Talmudic exegesis of the Master's texts substituted for 
engagement with the realities of political and social life, with perhaps a penchant for 
infiltrating and suborning other political entities.         

It is fascinating to see how that passion has survived the demise of its target. The "striving, 
debate and combat," the deep self-certainty of the Trotskyist sects, the polemics with no 
quarter, the eschewal of all thought of consensus and compromise as betrayal of the truth 
are recognizable characteristics of the neocons--and to some extent of neo-neocons such as 
Christopher Hitchens, who, like Howe, has Trotsky and Orwell as twin icons. Could it be 
some common thread of anxiety for politically motivated intellectuals, un impuissance des 
clercs, a feeling that, despite the aphorism, the pen usually wilts in the face of the sword?

However, so much negative passion demands a thoroughly unworthy opponent, and radical 
Islam seems to have provided the neocons with more than enough target for their redirected 
revolutionary ire now that they have lost their primary target. Ironically some at least of their 
cousins who stayed in the nominally socialist fold have equally eagerly acted as apologists 
for the Islamic states against "imperialism."        

Howe recognizes the inherent idealism, in the Platonic sense, that Trotsky displays. 
Somewhat at odds with his own generally more approbatory treatment, he quotes 
approvingly Joel Carmichael's "shrewd" assessment of his subject: "It was no doubt his lofty-
-indeed in the philosophical sense 'idealist'--view of politics that made Trotsky 
misunderstand what was actually happening. . . . It astigmatized him, as it were, with 
respect to the power of the actual apparatus, and made him regard himself as Bolshevik 
paragon merely because of his identification with the Idea of the Party: he disregarded his 
failure to be identified with its personnel" (92).          

Certainly it could be argued that the neocons inherited from Trotsky the passion for the 
importance of ideas, and of fighting for them, and also that that intoxication, transferred from 
the heady intellectualism and sectarianism of the sundered American socialist movement, 
has transformed American conservatism, which had previously tended more naturally to 
empiricist defenses of the status quo or to golden days.

Almost equally integral to Trotskyism was the ability to hold huge, inspiring, eloquent--and 
utterly wrong--"Ideas" and to hold onto them in the face of uncooperative reality. Even the 
levelheaded Howe treasured Trotsky's "heroic" ability to be stunningly wrong in a 
spectacular, albeit imaginatively attractive way. In dealing with his "boldest" theory, of 
Permanent Revolution, Howe asserts that "the full measure of its audacity can be grasped 
even today by anyone who troubles to break past the special barriers of Marxist vocabulary" 
(28). However, while Howe is mesmerized with the "brilliance" of Trotsky's historical 
prognosis, he goes on to admit that history neglected to follow the course so brilliantly laid 
out for it. Nor does the idea that a minority working class cannot bring about socialism seem 
that audacious in the light of the historical experience of so many failed statist pseudo-
socialist experiments in the Third World.        

Indeed, Howe admits that Trotsky "failed to anticipate the modern phenomenon of the 
totalitarian or authoritarian state, which would bring some of the features of permanent 
revolution into a socioeconomic development having some of the features of a permanent 
counter-revolution" (33). As failures go, this goes a long way. Howe is too kind when he 
concludes that "Trotsky's theory remains a valuable lens for seeing what has happened in 
the twentieth century--but a lens that needs correction" (33). A lens that fails so signally 
surely needs recasting and regrinding in its entirety.         

Toward the conclusion of his biography Howe tempers his romantic attachment and 
becomes less uncritical, seeing his subject emerging as "a figure of greatness, but flawed 
greatness, a man great of personal courage and intellectual resources, but flawed in self 
recognition, in his final inability or refusal to scrutinize his own assumptions with the 
corrosive intensity he brought to those of his political opponents."         

A quarter of a century after Howe's biography, six decades after Trotsky's death, and ten 
years after the curtain came down finally on the Bolshevik experiment, things can be seen in 
a different light. Trotsky's role "on the stage of modern history" has shrunk into perspective. 
He lost the arguments in the Soviet Union: capitalism did not collapse catastrophically, the 
industrial proletariat in the world did not move to revolution. The reformers and social 
democrats he despised built societies that, even after Thatcherism and the Third Way, still 
offer workers and other citizens more in the way of prosperity, freedom, civil, political and 
social rights, than any other societies that have existed on the face of the earth.        

Trotsky may not be in the "dustbin of history" to which he consigned his democratic-socialist 
opponents in the Leningrad Soviet (52), but he is now a bit player who exited, stage left, in a 
show that was a hit for a while but has now closed with no prospect of ever reopening. He is 
more reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern than of Hamlet.         

Ironically the only admirers of Trotsky to achieve any degree of power are the neocons, those 
who have joined with the world's biggest imperialist power to remake the world in some 
neoliberal capitalist image. It is an achievement, but it is a severely qualified one. Howe, who 
knew just how ineffectual the squabbling Trotskyist sects were--"not distinguished for an 
ability to engage in fresh thought politically, or reach the masses of workers practically" 
(191)--would be amazed, possibly even amused, if he were around to see the heights 
reached by his former comrades, even if one suspects he would think they were climbing the 
wrong mountain.

After all, once the socialism was stripped out, which was quite easily done in the face of 
popular indifference, what was left of Trotskyism but the failed predictions, the ability to hold 
a deep belief, with quasi-religious fervor, in a secular idea in the face of all advice and 
empirical evidence to the contrary? Having infiltrated the conservative movement, Trotsky's 
heirs, still an antithesis looking for a thesis to batter, have substituted Islam, or Islamic 
fascism, to fill the gap in their universe left by the disappearing Soviet Union.        

They have a mission to remake the world, but instead of Trotsky's Red Army swooping to 
bring socialism to ungrateful Poles and Central Asians, it is now the U.S. military bringing 
democracy and free markets to lesser breeds hitherto without the law. And with the ruthless 
romanticism of the revolutionary, they think the price in blood is well worth paying, that 
history will absolve them.

Howe never succumbed to such temptations, retaining an attachment to socialism and 
democracy that eschewed such misplaced millennial visions. Somehow he contrives to 
admire the man while deploring his deeds; his philosophy; and, when it comes down it, most 
of his life work. But his uncharacteristic partial abandonment of his usual sharply critical spirit 
when it came to Lev Davidovich Bronstein--the Red intellectual who could, and briefly did--
demonstrates the dangerous seductions of hero worship. It is difficult to steer a course 
between the Scylla of damnation and the Charybdis of canonization when dealing with 
historical figures, and if so rigorous a thinker as Howe steered so close to the rocks as he did 
with this biography, it is a warning to others to try harder for some objectivity.

 Notes

1. Howe, Leon Trotsky, 193, 192. Subsequent references will appear in the text.

2. George Orwell, "Catastrophic Gradualism" in The Collected Essays of George Orwell, Vol. 
IV (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 5.
 

Ian Williams is the United Nations Correspondent for The Nation. His most recent books are 
Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 and Deserter: Bush's War on 
Military Families, Veterans, and his Past. His blog is Deadline Pundit.

 
=========

Ran Greenstein
Johannesburg, South Africa