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.