Pygmy Vs. Trotsky

Despite the fact that Hitchens has broken with his radical past and
repackaged himself as a supporter of the Bush administration and the war
in Iraq, Dalrymple is angered by what he sees as Hitchens' lingering
ambivalence toward the leader of the Russian Revolution...

"The comparison of Trotsky to Hitler is not only disgusting, it exhibits
an abysmal ignorance of basic historical facts. No one perceived more
clearly the dangers of fascism or did more to rally the German and
international working class against this threat than Leon Trotsky...

"We find, for example, the following entry for June 3, 1931 in the diary
of Walter Benjamin:

'The previous evening, a conversation with [Bertholt] Brecht, [Bernhard
von] Brentano, and [Hermann] Hesse in the Café du Centre. The
conversation turned to Trotsky; Brecht maintained that there were good
reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European
writer. We exchanged episodes from his books.'"


http://wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/dnft-a02_prn.shtml


World Socialist Web Site


An intellectual pygmy denounces Trotsky


By David North
2 August 2005


In periods of political reaction, innumerable forms of social
backwardness, ignorance and stupidity come into their own. All the
official organs of public opinion exude an unpleasant smell. Enjoying
the protection of the powers that be, reassured by the debased state of
intellectual life, and reasonably confident that no one will have the
opportunity to protest as they pass wind in public, contemporary
"opinion makers" feel no shame about what they say or write.

One product of this foul climate is a vituperative denunciation of Leon
Trotsky that appears unexpectedly in the midst of a review by Theodore
Dalrymple of a new book by Christopher Hitchens. Published in the
weekend edition of the Financial Times, Dalrymple's review objects
bitterly to a chapter in Hitchens' book that offers a somewhat admiring
portrait of Leon Trotsky.

Dalrymple, who regularly contributes columns to the right-wing Spectator
magazine in Britain, cannot abide Hitchens' acknowledgement that Trotsky
was, at the very least, a great writer. Despite the fact that Hitchens
has broken with his radical past and repackaged himself as a supporter
of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, Dalrymple is angered by
what he sees as Hitchens' lingering ambivalence toward the leader of the
Russian Revolution.

"Trotsky was a moral monster," thunders Dalrymple. To make favorable
references to the literary skills of such a man, he proclaims, "is
roughly the equivalent to making Hitler out to have been principally,
and most memorably, a lover of animals, as indicated by his affection
for his Alsatian, Blondi, or a lover of nature because he once posed for
photographs in the open air dressed in lederhosen."

Dalrymple continues: "The fact that Trotsky was a talented phrasemaker
or literary stylist is rather beside the point. He was a mass murderer
who wanted to enslave the world all at once and forever, instead of
steadily, bit by bit, as Stalin did. All this is ignored, in the name of
a completely inadequate and fundamentally primitive theory."

An attack of this sort assumes that the reader knows absolutely nothing
about the subject being dealt with. The comparison of Trotsky to Hitler
is not only disgusting, it exhibits an abysmal ignorance of basic
historical facts. No one perceived more clearly the dangers of fascism
or did more to rally the German and international working class against
this threat than Leon Trotsky. When no small number of British bourgeois
politicians were coquetting with Hitler, looking upon him as a potential
ally against the Soviet Union, Trotsky summed up the significance of
Nazism:

Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics.... Everything
that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form
of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society
has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking
up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National
Socialism.[1]

Thirty or 40 years ago, not to mention in his own lifetime, a
description of Trotsky as a "talented phrasemaker" would have been read
by a politically educated public as a rather crass
understatement—something like describing Matisse, Picasso or Rivera as
gifted doodlers. Except among the politically pathological haters of
Trotsky—the Stalinists and the fascist anti-Semites—it was commonly
accepted that Leon Trotsky ranked among the greatest literary figures of
the twentieth century. This was, by the way, the opinion of some of
Trotsky's most brilliant contemporaries.

We find, for example, the following entry for June 3, 1931 in the diary
of Walter Benjamin:

The previous evening, a conversation with [Bertholt] Brecht, [Bernhard
von] Brentano, and [Hermann] Hesse in the Café du Centre. The
conversation turned to Trotsky; Brecht maintained that there were good
reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European
writer. We exchanged episodes from his books.[2]

Brecht, Benjamin, Brentano and Hesse understood what Dalrymple clearly
doesn't: that there is a vast difference between being a "talented
phrasemaker" and "the greatest living European writer." The former can
help Madison Avenue sell products, or even satisfy the limited
intellectual needs of an ill-informed consumer of newspaper columns. The
latter exercises immense cultural and moral influence on humanity.

Trotsky's greatness as a writer expressed his stature as a thinker, a
man whose ideas commanded the attention and respect of a worldwide
audience long after he had lost all the overt trappings of political
power.

One has only to read Dalrymple's clumsy reference to "a completely
inadequate and fundamentally primitive theory" to recognize at once that
he knows nothing of Trotsky's writings, and that he has not the
slightest inkling of the issues at stake in Trotsky's struggle against
Stalinism. Which of Trotsky's books has Dalrymple read? Of the scores of
volumes attributed to Trotsky, one doubts that Dalrymple has read even
one.

Let us compare Dalrymple's banal and imbecilic reference to Trotsky's
"inadequate and fundamentally primitive theory" to a description of the
latter's work in a book about Trotsky published 32 years ago by
Prentice-Hall, which was then a leading supplier of text books used in
an academic environment. Trotsky was included in its "Great Lives
Observed" series. Describing Trotsky as "one of the giants of the first
half of the twentieth century," the introduction to this volume offers
this assessment of his theoretical work:

His analysis of social forces in Imperial Russia and his development of
the idea of "permanent revolution" suggest that as a Marxist thinker he
could, on the power of his own creativity, go beyond the formulations of
Marx and Engels. In that sense his theoretical contributions rank him
with that old but brilliant coterie of Marxist theorists such as
Plekhanov, Kautsky, Luxemburg, and for that matter Lenin himself.[3]

As for Dalrymple's characterization of Trotsky as a "moral monster," one
must wonder what criteria he employs in arriving at this judgment.
Trotsky was a revolutionist. He viewed class struggle not as one of many
means that might be employed in the pursuit of political ends, but as an
ontological reality of human society. Within this framework, he adhered
to the sternest of moral codes: one in which the actions of the
individual are judged in relation to the objective interests of the
working class and its struggle against exploitation and all forms of
oppression and injustice.

Trotsky—who sacrificed everything in defense of the revolutionary
principles he proclaimed, who gave his own life in the fight against the
Stalinist betrayal of the Russian Revolution—left behind a statement
of his moral creed:

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs
to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the
historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it
leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of
the power of man over man.

"We are to understand then that in achieving this end anything is
permissible?" sarcastically demands the Philistine, demonstrating that
he understood nothing. That is permissible, we answer, which really
leads to the liberation of mankind. Since this end can be achieved only
through revolution, the liberating morality of the proletariat of
necessity is endowed with a revolutionary character. It irreconcilably
counteracts not only religious dogma but every kind of idealistic
fetish, these philosophic gendarmes of the ruling class. It deduces a
rule for conduct from the laws of the development of society, thus
primarily from the class struggle, this law of all laws.

"'Just the same,' the moralist continues to insist, "does it mean that
in the class struggle against capitalists all means are permissible:
lying, frame-up, betrayal, murder, and so on?'

"Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer,
which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with
irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official
morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of
their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of
self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows that not
all means are permissible.

"When we say that the end justifies the means, then for us the
conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base
means and ways which set one part of the working class against other
parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation,
or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization,
replacing it by worship for the 'leaders.' Primarily and irreconcilably,
revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie
and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those
characteristics in which petty-bourgeois pedants and moralists are
thoroughly steeped."[4]

It is, of course, possible to oppose on philosophical grounds Trotsky's
rejection of Kant's categorical imperative as the basis for evaluating
the legitimacy of one or another political action. Among Trotsky's most
determined opponents was the American philosopher John Dewey. But it
would have never occurred to Dewey, a man of the greatest intellectual
integrity, to describe Trotsky as a "moral monster."

It would have been pointless and ethically impossible to serve as the
chairman of a commission established to investigate the charges made by
the Stalinist regime against Trotsky if the latter was, by the very
nature of his political life, a moral criminal. Though he disagreed with
the Marxian world view, Dewey understood all too well that issues of
great principle were at stake in defending Trotsky's reputation, his
"revolutionary honor," against false and baseless charges. Such moral
subtlety, not to mention personal integrity, is far beyond the
intellectual horizon of Mr. Dalrymple.

Finally, the columnist fails to tell us who among the political leaders
of the bourgeoisie, past and present, he counts among the paragons of
morality. Perhaps Winston Churchill, who sent tens of thousands of youth
to senseless deaths during World War I and sanctioned the use of poison
gas against insurgent Iraqis in the 1920s? Or President Harry Truman,
who issued the final orders for the dropping of two atomic bombs 60
years ago on the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing
nearly 200,000 human beings? Or, in a contemporary setting, Prime
Minister Tony Blair, who, on the basis of out-and-out lies, took his
country into a war that has cost tens of thousands of lives?

We wait, though not all too eagerly, for Mr. Dalrymple's answer.

Notes:

1. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 2004),
p. 468.

2. Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), p. 477.

3. Great Lives Observed: Trotsky (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1973), p. 1.

4. Their Morals and Ours, accessible at
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1938/1938-mor.htm.