The subheading for Ella Whelan's article is "Brexit showed the ruling elite is still terrified by Trotsky's ideas of working-class upheaval". At the same time, Whelan is correct in this assumption but off the mark on the rest of the article.[1]
Calling Trotsky a 21st Century Bolshevik while
correct is only done so from the standpoint of negating his revolutionary ideas
in order to align him with one or more faction of the British ruling elite. Whelan
is not the first writer to link Trotskyism to one or more sections of the
ruling elite.[2]
Whelan's article contains a degree of flippancy and cynicism
you would expect from a writer who writes for a magazine that makes the Spectator
magazine look like the Communist Manifesto. She also seems to have a fixation
with Leon Trotsky having written a previous article for the Critic entitled: Trotsky's
lesson for dealing with Covid-19.[3]
Whelan is not the only former radical to warn of the dangers
to the ruling elite of Trotsky's ideas. Another journalist who now writes for
the Daily Telegraph Janet Daly warned a good while back that Trotsky and his
ideas should not be allowed to save socialism.
Daly was a radical in the sixties but soon shed that cloak
of radicalism and like a number of her generation shifted very far to the
right. Daly writes "In the 1970s, as I clung to my Marxist convictions, I
heard an interview with Sir Keith Joseph, one of the great architects of the
Thatcherite revolution. He described the dangers of what he called "the
pocket-money society." If the state provided all of the basic human
needs—housing, health care, education, care for the elderly—, it left nothing
for people to provide for themselves, other than the more trivial recreational
things. Their earnings became like children's pocket money, to be spent on toys
or self-indulgence. The state took all of the significant economic choices of
adult life out of their hands, diminishing them as responsible, moral beings.
Joseph's words did not convert me on the spot, but they shook my beliefs to the
roots because they chimed so convincingly with the evidence that I saw around
me".[4]This
blind political stupidity does not need any comment to suffice to say if Whelan
wants to know where she is going to end up politically, she should look no
further than to Janet Daly.
Whelan has now assumed Daly's mantle writing "And so it
is unsurprising that 80 years after his assassination at the hands of a
pick-axe-wielding Stalinist mole, Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein). Trotsky was
killed by a Stalinist agent, not a mole and why the need to put his former Jewish
name in brackets. A name that he has not been associated with for over ninety
years.
The article shows the author's laziness and political proclivities
in this next quote when she writes that Trotsky "has somewhat fallen out
of favour. While his revolutionary career and unwavering polemics against the
Stalinist regime won him support among lefties from Birmingham to Bolivia
during the twentieth century, the slow (and painful) death of the left has all
but killed off Trotskyism".
Whelan seems to have been so distracted by her attempt to
rubbish Trotsky's legacy and that of his modern-day followers that she has not paid
too much attention to the fact that the wsws.org has just undertaken a massive technological
and political transformation of its website. It can safely be said that for the
last 19 years this website has not only defended Leon Trotsky's ideas but has
expanded them to the degree that perhaps not even the Old Man could have envisaged.[5]
There is a degree of nervousness and silliness in her
article that comes from the fact that Whelan who has read some of Trotsky's
writings but does not believe what she writes is true. She writes "For
many of today's wannabe revolutionaries, ideas such as the dictatorship of the
proletariat or even the transformative power of the working class is not as
attractive as jam-making socialists and knighted lawyers in the Labour Party or
farting about in fancy dress for"the climate".
Her comment is just silly, hardly worth commenting on and is
not true. The significant number of new members that are coalescing around the
Fourth International are very serious people, and they are looking for answers
to extremely pressing pollical and social problems faced by millions of people all
over the world.
Whelan's article is not without insight when she writes "Communism
has been so warped by historical inaccuracy it is easy for people to project
their prejudices onto it. But not so when she writes "But even so, if all
hope of revolutionary Communism has been dead in the water for decades, and all
that's left is crass characterisations, why should we remember a man like
Trotsky?".
Whelan does say some correct things about Trotsky's life
such as this "perhaps the most important thing to know about Trotsky is
that his real strength lay in his desire to inspire the masses to take control
for themselves. In chapter 24 of My Life, he pays tribute to Nikolay Markin — a
shy sailor" with the sullenness of a force-driven in dee" who became
an important figure in the revolution and a close friend to Trotsky'ss own
family. Trotsky describes how Markin quietly took charge of small things at
first — such as the hostility Trotsky'ss family was facing in the"big
bourgeois" house they were lodging in — and then larger tasks, including
establishing printers to publish The Worker and the Soldier. Inspired by the
revolutionary politics of the Bolshevik Party, and the rousing speeches given
by Trotsky, workers like Markin realised they had the ability and the ambition
to seize control of the means of production.
Trotsky describes how Markin became, for a time," an
unofficial minister of foreign affair", writing pamphlets that Baron von
Kühlmann and Count Czernin" read eagerly" at Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky
writes that it did not matter that he"had no academic degree, and his
writing was not free from grammatical error" or that"his comments
were sometimes quite unexpected" because Markin" drove the diplomatic
nails in firmly, and at the very points where they were most need".
She is wrong however when she writes that Trotsky's writing
and aspirations were specific to the historical moment and says "some
things have not changed so much. Capitalism might have evolved and transformed
itself beyond anything Bolsheviks might recognise, but its inherent weaknesses
and limits remain the same. What has changed is our unwillingness to mount a
challenge to it."
Trotsky's writings are being looked at now because they still
have a contemporary feel to them. The problems that Trotsky grappled with in
his day are still ones we have to deal with today.
Whelan in her excitement to bury the influence of Leon
Trotsky she repeats one of the old Stalinist slanders of Trotsky that has been
repeated down the years and are used by modern-day charlatans to besmirch his revolutionary
record.
She writes "But if Trotsky'ss strengths lay in his
capacity to organise and defend the revolution, his failings in part contributed
to its downfall. Unlike Lenin, who was so adept at managing internal party
manoeuvring, Trotsky was incapable of working out what to do with the power
struggle following Lenin'ss death. His refusal to take the deputy leadership of
the party after 1924, and his blindness to the threat that Stalin posed, were
disastrous for the Bolsheviks".
On this occasion, Whelan is really out of depth and shows a
simplistic understanding of the history of the Bolshevik revolution and Trotsky's
battle with Stalin. As an article in the wsws.org points out "The conflict that emerged between Stalin
and Trotsky was not a subjective fight between two individuals over personal
power, but a fundamental battle waged between irreconcilable political
programs. The consolidation of power by Stalin, and the bureaucratic
dictatorship that he personified, was not the inevitable outcome of the Russian
Revolution. It developed out of the conditions of an economically backward
workers' state that was surrounded by world imperialism and isolated by the
delay of the international and European revolution. A series of revolutionary
upheavals were defeated due to the political immaturity of the revolutionary
leadership internationally.[6]
Whelan to a limited extent understands that the revolution
needed to spread internationally which was at the heart of the battle between
Trotsky and Stalin when she writes "But
ultimately it was the failure of the revolution to spread internationally that
led to the collapse of the first working-class revolution in history. Where
Stalin destroyed the gains of the revolution, enforcing socialism in one
country, Trotsky was a firm believer in the need for workers of the world — not
just Russia — to unite. So why repeat the slander.
To conclude, Whelan asks Why is Trotsky still relevant
today? A question she is politically incapable of answering without slandering
Trotsky and his modern-day supporters and attempting to tie him to one wing of
the British bourgeoisie. She is correct in saying that Trotsky had an "unshakeable
belief in a working-class revolution" and it is this that is inspiring
millions today".
It is also true as Whelan writes "Unlike other
historical figures who live to regret their intervention in history, Trotsky
remained resolute in his belief in working-class independence to the end. That
is what made him such a threat". So what better than to leave the final word
to Trotsky when he wrote: "I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a
Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable
atheist . . . life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all
evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full".[7]
[1] https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/the-21st-century-bolshevik/
[2] See- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/07/misi-j31.html
[3] https://thecritic.co.uk/trotskys-lesson-for-dealing-with-covid-19/
[4] http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1350404/posts
[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/02/pers-o02.html
[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/_beta/left-opposition-stalinism-1923-1933
[7] The Testaments of Trotsky-(February/March
1940)Fourth International, No. 7, Autumn 1959, p. 30. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi-is/no7/testaments.htm
