Zheng Ziyan
Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes? / Some of the king's names are listed in the book / Were the stones and bricks moved by the king?
......
Did the young Alexander conquer India/on his own?
There are victories on the page / Who will prepare the celebration feast?
……
A whole bunch of historical facts/a whole bunch of questions.
—Quoted from Bertolt Brecht's The Question of a Worker Reading History, translated by Feng Zhi
The history of war and revolution in the first half of the twentieth century has always been talked about. Even people who have no interest in history should be able to name important names, such as Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin, or Joseph Stalin, and hear stories of these important people. In contrast, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) at first glance looks like the opposite of these people. Eighty years after his death, he seems to have become some sort of obscure addition to the magnificent history of the international communist movement, with the shadow of the "banished" always hanging over his name. Most of his accounts first give him the label of "exiled Soviet dissident", followed by positive evaluations such as "founder of Soviet power", "founder of the Soviet Red Army", "revolutionary idealist assassinated by Stalin", "literary and artistic talent", or "traitor of the Soviet Union" and "careerist". Historical figures, however, are not mannequins to be labeled. History is also far more than the history of important figures running amok and going up and down. If these labels are stripped away and Trotsky is put back into the context of history, what kind of image should he present?
Trotsky
Devilology and theology
Trotsky was an important historical figure, and there are not many works about his life and ideas. However, despite the very different values of the works, they will show some similar characteristics from the reader's point of view.
In 2017, Russia's Channel One produced eight episodes of the tv series "Trotsky," which claimed to be "the first complete presentation of Trotsky's life," which aired on the centenary of the October Revolution. The following year, Netflix bought the rights to the TV series and aired it on its website at the end of that year. The tv series has a large number of historical loopholes, and also portrays the image of a number of Russian revolutionaries in a very negative way, and Trotsky is portrayed as a ruthless and unscrupulous executioner who will do whatever it takes to achieve his goals.
Poster of Trotsky
This quickly sparked controversy and rebuttal: in February 2019, Esteban Volkov, son of Zinaida Volkova, the eldest daughter of Trotsky, launched a statement refuting the play, which was signed by many prominent scholars and leaders of Trotskyist political groups. Faced with possible controversy, Konstantin Ernst, producer of Trotsky, insisted that "the creators did not intend to make a documentary about Trotsky's life, but to weave a fictional story around the life of this important historical figure" to convey a certain of their thinking.
If you leave your mind aside, the TV series "Trotsky" is a model of demonology—Trotsky is literally portrayed as a devil, and the creators present the life of this devil with the mentality of a believer studying exorcism. For European, American/Russian audiences immersed in Catholic/Orthodox culture, the many symbols used in the show have an extremely clear meaning effect. For example, the episodes constantly suggest that Trotsky's Jewish identity is incompatible with Russian Orthodox culture (which is a very bad anti-Semitic rhetoric); in the first episode, Lev Davidovich Bronstein's Trotsky, who is still Levi Davidovich Bronstein, realizes the meaning of violence and trickery through the "click" of the warden, "degenerating into the devil", and this episode is constantly interspersed with shots of snakes, insects, rats, and ants used in Christian culture to symbolize the devil In the third episode, faced with the lack of fuel for the train, Trotsky orders the crosses in the village graves along the way to be cut down and burned, which is undoubtedly the image of a "blasphemer" or devil; the end of the episode directly quotes Biblical Proverbs 4: 19: "The way of the wicked seems to be dark, and he falls without knowing why." ”
Konstantin Ernst himself described Trotsky in the play as "a rock star" who "combines all good and evil, injustice and heroism". Apparently this image of the "devil" made him both disgusted and fascinated. He may have preferred to portray Trotsky as a Satanic demagogue and anti-hero in Paradise Lost. It never shows how Trotsky was organized in the Soviets or within the Social-Democratic Labour Party, and the portrayal of Trotsky's revolutionary work was limited to speeches and conspiracies. The series concentrates on Trotsky's many impassioned and well-written speeches, which strongly hint to the audience that Trotsky's personal charisma is so great, others are so easily manipulated by him, that he only needs to talk aggressively about "revolution", "violence" and "the ideal new world" in the debate, and Lenin, the most mature and experienced Bolshevik statesmen, will be impressed by him; he only needs to conspire, and then shout to the masses in the streets, and speak generously to the soldiers on the battlefield, and he can command thousands of troops to revolutionize for him He ultimately failed, first because his Jewish identity was not tolerated by the Russian Orthodox tradition, and secondly because the revolutionary violence he advocated ate his most caring relatives and friends, and also created Stalin, and finally himself. The creators always presented Trotsky as Karisma's leader, and their ambivalence towards him was evident.
The plot depicting Trotsky's relationship with women best reflects this ambivalence of the creators: Trotsky's wife, Natalia Sedova, was completely hidden as a revolutionary and portrayed as Trotsky's fervent admirer. In the second episode, the creators askEdova to gaze adoringly at Trotsky and make the following remarks: "The revolution is like a woman, you have to ravage her fiercely, and she will give birth to a new world for you!" This scene, this metaphor, conveys precisely the view of the creators of the series on the history of the revolution: the revolution is nothing more than a fanatical and ignorant mass "like an emotional woman", attracted and instigated by the revolutionaries' "ruthless masculinity", and ultimately "destroying the deep and great Russian culture".
This attitude is, of course, rooted in the rise of nationalism in Russia in recent years. There has been much toes to be said about the ambiguous attitude of today's Russian authorities (including Channel One) towards the history of the Russian Revolution, but the demonic perspective of Trotsky's episodes reflects something deeper than Russian nationalism. To see this psychology clearly, there is a contrast between the other side of demonic science—theology.
It can be said that this theology has sprouted since the beginning of the Trotskyist movement. After Trotsky's expulsion, his connection with the European workers' movement was constantly worn out. In the third volume of Trotsky's three-volume biography, The Prophet in Exile, Isaac Deutcher describes, with the help of detailed documentation, the attitude of conservative political forces in the West towards Trotsky in the 1930s, the strength of Soviet propaganda in the field of European public opinion, and how a group of well-known left intellectuals eagerly defended the Soviet Union by disparaging Trotsky. The factions that supported Trotsky faced a multi-pronged attack: the fascists had to exterminate any socialist, the Nazis added to this layer of anti-Semitism; intellectuals sympathetic to the Soviet Union had always acquiesced or supported the crackdown on Trotsky. In view of Trotsky's important role and great prestige in the Russian Revolution, he was again regarded by the political elite and many intellectuals in the West as a symbol of attack on the Soviet Union and the socialist revolution. They certainly could not sympathize with Trotsky, who had a high reputation in the revolution and crushed the Crusades, much less tolerate his organization of the workers. But the soviet regime expelled those who helped build it, which in itself illustrates the problem. There were few and few people working for the Trotskyist faction, and most of them ended dismal under such a pinch.
Faced with a situation of being attacked on the back, Trotsky's supporters or sympathizers had to deal with propaganda from the Soviet Union and the olive branch of the bourgeoisie. The Trotskyites chose to hold high the theoretical banner of "revolutionary Marxism" (i.e., Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution) and to show how the bureaucracy headed by Stalin had betrayed the October Revolution, and that Trotsky was the true inheritor of the spirit of the October Revolution, and that only the spirit of the October Revolution could bring about real emancipation for the working class; they could only compete with the Communist And Socialist Party, which had a strong foundation among the Workers and Left intellectuals of Europe, in such discourse. As for the intellectuals who sympathized with Trotsky, they sided with Trotsky to a great extent because of his personal charm. For example, when Trotsky tried to enter England in 1929 and sought temporary asylum, George Bernard Shaw, who sympathized with him, wrote to the then British Secretary of state of the House, John Robert Clynes ( a Labour politician ) :
"He [Trotsky] will be an inspiration and hero to the militant ultra-left in any country."
Deutcher commented that under the circumstances, Shaw's description still had a factual basis – Trotsky's appeal to the working class survived, and he could still fight guerrilla warfare with the Gebou (the State Political Protection Bureau of the USSR) and the communist forces of various countries. However, karisma was very fragile: after visiting Stalin, Shaw was finally impressed by Stalin's ability to do things. For the liberal left intellectuals who were still infected by Trotsky's demeanor, eloquence, literary talent, and democratic fervor, Karisma, who created Trotsky, was only in line with their desire to rebel against mainstream, anti-totalitarian sentiments. For the Trotskyites, whose movement is weaker and weaker under the three-sided attack of the traditional political elite, the fascist forces and Stalin, they can only defend more firmly the reputation of Trotsky, the "orthodox successor of the spirit of the October Revolution". This collective unconsciousness, shared by Trotsky's supporters, was formed precisely for self-preservation.
In his new preface to Trotsky's refutation of Karl Kautsky's book, Slavoj Žižek deliberately distinguished Trotsky, as a communist revolutionary, from the literary genius, the anti-Stalin fighter who exalted democracy, "Mr. Brenstein, the bourgeois favorite." But in fact both discourses can be seen as the theology of Trotsky, the former abstracting the history of the October Revolution into a genealogy of a few revolutionaries, while the latter speaks adorably about Trotsky's talent and passion. The only difference between these two theologies and the devildom that the creators of the Trotsky series believe in is only the difference in value orientation: theologians have reduced the history of the October Revolution to a genealogy of revolutionaries, while the devilologists have reduced it to a book of devils. The Stalinists insisted on the expulsion of Trotsky from the genealogy, and later self-proclaimed Trotskyists always made the restoration of his divine status a top priority. It was only natural that Estevan Volkov, full of affection for his grandfather, wanted to wash away the false descriptions that Trotsky had imposed on Trotsky's personal accounts. However, when the statement devotes most of its time to the fact that Trotsky was always bright and upright (with only a pitifully short passage saying that the episode "distorts the mass movement"), it also unfortunately becomes a footnote to the divine spectrum when it attracts such prominent left-wing intellectuals as Žižek, Jenmings, or Nancy Fraser.
The treatment of such important historical figures as Trotsky, whether theological or demonic, actually reflects the general characteristics of popular historical narratives: for major historical events, the narrator must extract important historical figures from them; to approve or deny these historical events, it must begin with the praise or negation of these historical figures; conversely, to praise or deny these historical figures, the reader is equivalent to praising or denying these historical events; to narrate historical events is to describe the relationship between these important historical figures. The most fundamental, purely material basis of this character is that historical materials, other than the accounts of the words and deeds of individual figures—such as current affairs reports, slogans, statistical materials—are themselves scarce or difficult to organize. For the history of revolution based on mass movements, it is naturally more difficult to record and describe the huge mass movements. In addition, most mature narrators need to undergo systematic academic training, but narrators who can pass contemporary academic training are themselves difficult to avoid the habits of intellectuals: worship the theoretical, speculative and polemical talents of historical figures, and envy the political skills of historical figures, so when describing these issues, it is difficult for the narrator to avoid reducing history to the history of struggle or intellectual history of important political figures.
At a deeper level, the realpolitik to which people are accustomed undoubtedly leads to a social psychology in which the masses are not cold or easily incited; it is believed that participation in politics is only the work of outstanding politicians. In this way, politicians are given a sense of superiority over the masses, their personal image is regarded as the "incarnation" of politics, and their ideas, the confrontation between them, are regarded as the cause and destination of political confrontation. This is the social unconscious behind Trotsky's theology/devilology, and even the theology/devilology of the revolutionaries.
Stills from the Russian drama Trotsky
The weapon of the Prophet
This social unconsciousness, reflected in the history of the Russian Revolution, became a popular narrative of the October Revolution. The demonic science of the Trotsky episode portrays Trotsky as the ultimate initiator of the October Revolution. It strongly suggests to the viewer that the "Ten Days that shook the world" in 1917 were entirely the result of a deliberate conspiracy by Trotsky alone. In terms of the disparagement of Lenin's role, this is not even in line with historical facts. In contrast, the theological accounts of Trotsky's admirers held that the October Revolution "succeeded under the command of Lenin and Trotsky." Some of them also cite the title of Doyche's biography of Trotsky, calling him an "armed prophet." If the "October Revolution" refers only to the November 7 uprising, then this statement is in line with historical facts. But the energy that accrued before the seizure of power was by no means created by a few prominent politicians who predicted the results, or even unilaterally by the Bolshevik party to which they belonged. For Trotsky, who rose to prominence in 1917, it was not only his eloquence, boldness and foresight that propelled him to the stage of the October Revolution, but also the rise of the working class power in 1917.
In the first volume of Trotsky's biography, The Prophet of Arms, Doycher portrays Trotsky in 1917, especially his military prowess, his eloquence and appeal. Trotsky only abandoned his past prejudices in May 1917 and went to the side of the Bolsheviks, but immediately became one of the most influential figures in the Bolshevik Party. Seemingly to confirm Trotsky's "incitement", the episode "Trotsky" focuses on Trotsky's appeal to sailors in 1917 in the fourth episode. This is not without historical evidence, but this appeal is not entirely due to Trotsky's eloquence.
The February Revolution of 1917 put an end to the tsarist system in Russia and created two parallel new organs of power, the Provisional Government and the Soviets. Alexander Rabinowitch, an expert on the history of the Russian Revolution, studied the history before the October Revolution in detail in his monograph Prelude to Revolution. In his essay How the Bolsheviks Won, he summarized the february-July 1917 shift in public opinion:
At that time, petrograd workers, soldiers and sailors were involved in politics in various ways, and they generally regarded the Provisional Government as an institution of the propertied class, which opposed fundamental government and social change and was indifferent to the needs of the people. On the other hand, despite the growing criticism of the moderate socialists by the lower classes in Petrograd for their support for the Provisional Government and the continuation of the war, they still regarded the Soviets at all levels as truly democratic organs of people's self-government. Thus, two important political slogans of the Bolsheviks – "All power to the Soviets!" And "Immediate peace!" It attracts more and more people to support it.
Naturally, the ideas of the workers, soldiers and sailors did not grow out of thin air, and the Bolshevik Party had been cultivating for more than a decade to germinate the seeds of these ideas. In the second half of 1917, it was the Bolsheviks who, on the basis of their previous deep cultivation, were in line with the collective will of the proletariat. The most immediate motivator of this collective will was the so-called "April Crisis": the fundamental difference between the working class represented by the Soviets and the Provisional Government, which came to the fore in the treatment of the war. The Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, Milyukov, issued a programme with a very ambiguous attitude towards the war. Although Russia's allies in World War I had seen it as a concession by the Provisional Government to the Soviets, Russian workers, tired of the war, took to the streets in anger to protest this "attempt to prolong the war." The three main parties in the Soviets – the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks – had different attitudes towards the Provisional Government, with the former not wanting to oppose the Provisional Government, while the latter argued that the Soviets should be given more power than they are now. The power of the three is now basically balanced among the masses of workers, but the mood of the masses has undoubtedly become very distrustful of the Provisional Government.
The July Uprising that followed was a turning point for the Bolsheviks to surpass their opponents. At that time, the Provisional Government was still determined to continue its offensive operations in the war, and the headless war and the collapsing economy made the anti-war masses "overdone" the frenzied mood. At this time, the leadership of the Bolshevik Party considered the time to be premature and had no intention of using the mood of the masses to overthrow the Provisional Government immediately. However, after the failure of the mass uprising, the Bolsheviks were falsely accused by the Provisional Government and right-wing groups of "the main culprits who led to the unfavorable war on the front line". Although the masses were temporarily disappointed in the Bolsheviks, the reaction of the Provisional Government and the Kornilov Rebellion made the masses feel imminent the threat of counter-revolution, and when the Kornilov Rebellion was crushed, the Provisional Government of the propertied classes was completely bankrupt in the minds of the working masses. The Bolsheviks' consistent anti-war, anti-capitalist programme is now seen as a rational solution to war and economic collapse, and its power has soared on the basis of the original.
On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were not monolithic, and they were always able to adapt more flexibly to the mood of the masses:
The Bolsheviks were not simply top-down, and from March 1917 onwards the Bolshevik organization was divided into three factions, left, right and center, each of which sought to shape the party's policy... Instability, changing situations, constantly changing situations spread throughout Petrograd, the revolution of 1917... Subordinate organizations are relatively free to adjust their demands and strategies according to their understanding of the development of the actual situation.
In mid-to-late October, this feature is even more prominent. At this time the Bolshevik grassroots organizations discovered that the masses might not accept an uprising in the name of the Bolsheviks alone. This has left the leadership divided. Trotsky used his eloquence and military prowess at this decisive moment. Together with other prominent propagandists, he mobilized the masses of Petrograd on the grounds that the Soviets were facing the threat of counter-revolution. The mood of the masses, who wanted the Soviets to replace the Provisional Government, was now pierced through the window paper, which eventually prompted the previously divergent leadership to agree to an uprising in the name of defending the Soviets. Trotsky then personally lined up for the uprising. By this time, the organizational discipline of the Bolsheviks was truly manifested: once the resolution of the uprising was passed, those who disagreed would also resolutely carry it out.
It can be seen that the final victory of the Bolsheviks was the result of the repeated interaction, continuous learning and run-in between the Bolsheviks and the booming workers' and soldiers' movement. No leader starts with an infallible view, because personal opinions always lag behind a rapidly changing situation. If Trotsky's personal faculties played any role here, it could only be that the proletariat, which was closely associated with the Bolsheviks, regarded the eloquent Trotsky as spokesman for the Bolshevik spirit, and the deep cultivation and clear basic program of the Bolsheviks in the past gave them a high degree of trust; they granted him the right to dispatch them.
It is easy to see that the facts of the history of revolution are clearly different from the demonic historical view of the Trotsky episode or the theological history of Trotsky's admirers. To be precise, on the battlefield of the revolution, eloquence, theoretical ability and military aptitude were only the hilts of the "prophet" Trotsky's sword, and the sharpest blade of his weapon was in fact a vigorous proletarian mass movement that gathered in the short term a radical collective will. Only in this sense can Trotsky in the revolution be called an "armed prophet."
Devilologists may argue that even if the October Revolution had been the masses pushing the revolutionaries along, there is no doubt that the revolution that Trotsky helped eventually created Stalin and thus devoured himself. Unfortunately, if we follow the analogy just now, this is not the story of your own sword stabbing yourself to death, but the story of the sword being broken.
It was the enemy of the nascent socialist regime at that time who broke the sword: the run of imperialism and the counterattack of the White Army. No one knows how to build a socialist economy under the conditions of low productivity in Russia, how to "summon the best democracy by magic" (Rosa Luxemburg, "On the Russian Revolution"). It certainly has no precedent, and it is clearly impossible to discuss what would have happened "without external intervention and civil war", as is the case. Under the pressure of intervention and the Counter-Offensive of the White Army, the proletariat that supported the Bolsheviks died on the battlefield, and the tactical "military communism" in many respects far exceeded the necessary limits. Although the Red Army won and retained power in the civil war, it greatly hurt the already weak national economy. Under the threat of the ensuing famine, not to mention the organisation of the proletariat, even whether the proletariat could not die of frostbite became questionable, and this situation soon led to a series of political events capable of shaking soviet power. The relationship between the self-preservation regime and the working class on which it had relied in the past underwent an irreversible change: on the eve of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks were the only party that responded genuinely to the radical collective will of the working masses; and now there seems to be a barrier between the reality of hardship and the programme, and although the tired mood under the great appeal of the October Revolution cannot yet form a collective will, "to survive by expanding the revolutionary base" can no longer respond to the most urgent direct demands of the working class.
On the basis of this reality, the differences between Trotsky and the Stalinist faction are naturally difficult to resolve as dignifiedly as they were in 1917. Trotsky was first met with a series of resistances at the heart of power. In organizing the Left Opposition in 1923, Trotsky adhered to his basic theories, advocated planning and workers' democracy to counter rising bureaucracy, and advocated a world revolution to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution. But now it is completely different from 1917: it is unacceptable for the Bolsheviks, who have moved to a dominant position in social production, to abolish these powers; for the masses of workers who have been hurt by the civil war, they cannot actively convey the collective will without the organisational forces. Although the policies that later became Stalinism certainly do not tolerate "Trotskyism in the spirit of the October Revolution", they are in fact reduced to a struggle of different directions within the powers-that-be, when the organisational base of the working masses no longer exists. Before his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotsky was still able to speak directly to the masses of workers as he had in 1917, and his speech was still as imposing and literary as in 1917, but the speech at that time was able to be listened to because it corresponded to the collective will of the workers' organizations that held real power, and it no longer existed.
From this point of view, when the "Prophet" Trotsky commanded the Red Army in victory over the White Army, that is, when he disarmed. The political struggles of the years that followed were only a prelude to his exile. Once his eloquence, theoretical ability and military ability are not armed with the forces of the masses, they can no longer shine the light they once had. The political elites of Western Europe, the Soviet powers and the newly emerging fascist forces all sought to sever Trotsky's ties with the mass movements, and they did basically. Trotsky never really got close to the forces that had once armed him for the rest of his life. Of course, this does not prevent the ruling cliques in the West from still fearing him. His mind and language are like nuclear fuel, and even locked in a box can make people feel terrible heat. When they saw his words, they recalled the deep-soul fear that the armed prophet had brought them. In this case, however, these personal traits of his can only ultimately become a corpus for the "power of thought."
Unfortunately, this corpus also includes Deuter's biography of Trotsky. As a biographer, Deutscher inevitably devoted a great deal of space (probably at least 1/4) to depicting Trotsky's personality, portraying him as a "hero of classical tragedy." Moreover, there is no doubt that the title he took—"prophet"—opened up the title of "prophet" for Trotsky in later generations. Later generations, whether out of respect or irony, liked to climb the "prophet", or because of his criticism of Stalinism, they thought he predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, or called him a delusional person who talked nonsense.
But Doycher's inspiration for the title—niccolò Machiavelli's Treatise on monarchy, which famously states that "all armed prophets triumph, but non-armed prophets fail," could not have allowed such wanton play. In Machiavelli's context, the "prophet" is a metaphor for civilian political leaders, which has nothing to do with the ability to foresee the future, and the assertion can obviously only be interpreted in one way: the power of the civilian political leader (= prophet) comes from his mastery of the power of the masses, and the mastery of the power of the masses requires the use of force to make the latter obey. For the Russian communist revolutionaries, the source of their strength, their weapon, is precisely not their personal theoretical talent and charm, but the power of the masses; it is not the masses that obey their will, but when the "revolutionary moment" comes, their will is highly compatible with the direction of the rapidly growing mass movement; this fit itself is the result of many years of deep cultivation and interaction before the "revolutionary moment". Trotsky, the prophet, confirmed this from both sides.
In 1917 Trotsky spoke at Moscow's Red Square
When reality shines into the theory
If we remove the myth of the "prophet" whose form is far greater than its content, what kind of legacy does Trotsky leave today's world after his eighty years of death?
If we talk about theoretical legacies, then at the top of the list is undoubtedly the "Trotsky's version of Marxism" – Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution put forward in his Summary and Prospect after the Revolution of 1905. At first glance, it seems very deviant: "In order to accomplish the tasks of the democratic revolution, the proletariat must take power and exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat, so that the democratic revolution will grow directly into a socialist revolution" (or vaguely "the revolution must proceed uninterruptedly"). The masses of workers, however, confirmed it in the October Revolution of 1917. It is, of course, accompanied by great controversy, and controversy just shows that its vitality is still there. Only dead theories can be treated with "recognized consistency." It naturally compels anyone who tries to understand social movements to pay attention to the generation of the collective will and the distribution of leadership in social movements.
But more importantly, this scrappy theory itself is a direct product of the wave of working-class movements that have emerged in the revolution. According to data Cited by Trotsky himself in his History of the Russian Revolution, there were about 1.5 million workers in the enterprises under the jurisdiction of the Russian Factory Inspection Bureau in 1905, about 2 million in 1917, 1.843 million political strikers in 1905, and 575,000 in January and February alone in 1917! The Soviets, which emerged in 1905 and 1917, represented the self-organization of the working class, through which the working class expressed its collective will: abdication of absolutism (1905) or withdrawal from war (1917), eight-hour workday, and the granting of democratic rights to the masses that had not existed before. It was the flourishing mass workers' movement that gave Trotsky the possibility of a "permanent revolution" – not a possibility, but an immediate realization.
Compared with the theory of permanent revolution, Trotsky's theory of the nature of the Soviet state contains a much greater tension. Trotsky emerged as a "left opposition" in the political struggles after 1924, known for exalting workers' democracy, criticizing "degenerate bureaucracy", and encouraging free art. But what cannot be ignored is that he also, in his famous article refuting Kautsky, arrogantly defended the soviet policy of terror, the militarized hierarchy of production management, and the rapid and comprehensive planning of production in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s. Even Doycher, who greatly admired Trotsky, found it difficult to associate this almost Bonapartist idea with Marxism, with workers' democracy.
However, as with the theory of permanent revolution, whether it is the pursuit of a policy of terror or the subsequent acting in the guise of a "left opposition", it is in fact a reaction of Trotsky as a political leader to the mass movement, and therefore not necessarily logically coherent. In the face of the threat of civil war, the policy of militarization was the only means Trotsky could conceive of organizing production and countering the White Army. The theory of the "Left Opposition" emphasized workers' democracy to correct bureaucracy, in direct opposition to Stalin, who already had enormous executive power. Obviously, it is a futile attempt to implement the theory of permanent revolution at a time when the organisational capacity of the working class has been damaged by the civil war and weakened by the Nea NFRP. However, the organisational basis of the working class, which gave rise to the theory of permanent revolution, no longer exists, and it is therefore entirely impossible to acquire power in the same way as it did in the first place by consolidating the collective will of the workers. Trotsky's only strategy for victory in the political struggle can only be to act like Stalin, and if so, he will only become "Stalin of the theory of permanent revolution" even if he wins.
Thus, Trotsky's main theoretical legacies – the theory of permanent revolution and the discussion of the nature of the Soviet state – correspond to the process of the rise to the weakening of the organisational power of the Russian workers. Like any communist revolutionary, the occasions for Trotsky's theory to exert its power were always outside academia, and never automatically exerted "its original power." If we brush off the Karisma sentiments about the "armed prophet", it is clear that Trotsky's real strength as a "prophet"— the political leader of the common people — always came when the collective will of the working masses came together and came into line with his personal vision. This unity is not an unattainable omen, but the inevitable result of the long and meticulous organisation of the political groups represented by the political leaders of the civilian population in the working masses. The only thing that can be considered accidental and cannot be created is the opportunity for social conflict to intensify into a "revolutionary moment".
In the history of the Russian Revolution, the Social-Democratic Labour Party has a certain political basis for the organisation of workers. The development of Russian capitalism has created the bourgeoisie and has turned the Russian peasantry into wage-workers. Before the systematic emergence of populists or social democrats, a certain degree of self-organization had begun to emerge in the Russian working class. No far-sighted politician can single-handedly create such self-organizing forces.
For example, the 1905 revolution was sparked by the strike at the Petersburg Puttilov factory, which began at the end of 1904. According to New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury in Black Night, White Snow, 382 factories and about 150,000 workers in Petersburg eventually participated in the sympathy strike. The Russian Factory Workers' Association (St. Petersburg Russian Factory Workers' Congress), a legal organization registered as early as the beginning of 1904, came to the fore. The leader of the association, Father Georgy Gapon, led the association with a bipose of favor between the revolutionaries and the tsarist system, but the bloodshed of 22 January 1905 marked the complete disillusionment of Father Gabang's vision that his 30,000-strong workers' petition group was bloodily suppressed by the police and the association was outlawed. The workers who followed Father Gabon to petition were by no means Marxists. Most of them were Catholics, and the petitioners still held icons, but the effect of their actions far exceeded their subjective limits.
From the point of view of the "Left", such an association can no doubt not be pure: it not only explicitly selects its members on the basis of orthodox belief, but also receives the patronage of the Russian Police, whose aim, of course, is to bring the workers' movement under the control of the Tsarist system. But the sharp edge of the association is now directed at the tsarist system itself. Lenin's newsletter for The Forward on 21 January of that year (8 January in the Julian calendar), "Strikes in St. Petersburg," pointed out very practically that although the original purpose of the association was undoubtedly to improve the living conditions of the workers within the framework of the tsarist system, once such a workers' organization grew, its spontaneous action was inevitably driven by labor conflicts, and inevitably took on the political character of anti-Tsarist System and anti-capitalism. In fact, this confirms the classic Marxist thesis that whether class struggle takes place or not, of course, does not depend on the subjective attitude of the workers towards Marxism.
Thus any activist interested in the realization of the Marxist programme must, under the condition of joint workers' organisations, starting from the joint struggle of workers who are "not ideologically advanced" or "not pure enough", draw the workers to the side of the political programme in which they are pursued; in the absence of such organisations, such organisations must be established. In the 1905 revolution, the emerging Social Democratic Labour Party did exactly that. At the time of the Strike at the Putilov factory, the Bolsheviks immediately printed a large number of leaflets and, following the rapidly changing situation since January, constantly reiterated the slogan of overthrowing the tsarist system and carrying out a proletarian revolution. But the workers' movement at that time did even more than the Bolsheviks had expected. By October, soviets spontaneously elected by the working class had emerged in Petersburg. Although the Soviets existed for only fifty days, they taught all the Bolsheviks an important lesson. It learned the attitude towards this spontaneous democratic organ. The Bolsheviks in Petersburg were at first suspicious of the Soviets, and they did not trust the democratic apparatus that attracted opposing factions, but Lenin persuaded them to take an active part in such an organization, "turning the Soviets into the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government." This eventually became the basis for the success of the Bolsheviks in 1917.
The struggle between all factions of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party actually has such an organisational basis. It is difficult to detach from the workers' movement in which they are rooted, and to simply regard the ideological differences of the leaders of the different factions as something that precedes the emergence of the workers' movement, as something that is doomed to be right or wrong in the first place. In contrast, the Trotskyist movement after World War II did not enjoy such an organizational basis at all. Trotsky's and the respective soviet supporters argued about the historical merits of Trotsky and Stalin, apparently for a very realistic purpose: to influence the working class. However, when Trotsky died, the Fourth International under the leadership of Michel Pablo only emphasized that "Trotsky was the orthodox successor to the spirit of the October Revolution", which was clearly unattractive among the working class. Their judgment of the national character of the Soviet Union and its satellite states at that time unswervingly adhered to the provisions of the Trotsky texts, and were therefore unable to defend their theories in the rise of Stalinism after World War II, and naturally even less able to move against the trend of workers and left-wing intellectuals leaning towards the Communist Party. The different factions in the Fourth International are very divided as to whether to work within the control of the socialist countries. In order to defend their legitimacy, the factions soon fell into a split (Doycher said bluntly: if such an illusory organization could also split... ）。
Of course, the Trotskyites' errors in judgment and lack of appeal are not entirely due to their incompetence and the disconnect between their understanding and reality: under the attack of the traditional political elite of the West and the Soviet Union, under the capture of the working class by the welfare state policy, it is naturally difficult for them to carry out effective organizational work among the workers, so they have to fall into this kind of external propaganda work and fall into a vicious circle of misfortune. The preference of most Trotskyist groups for theoretical discernment and emphasis on "purity" should be traced back to this practical reason. In fact, the Trotskyist movement did not rise slightly until the secret report of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU caused a slight upsurge of ideas, and it was not until the end of the 1960s , when the rising New Left movement and the workers' movement were the east winds – that they recovered. Many of the most influential Trotskyist organizations today (such as the French Workers' Struggle Party) were born at that time. This also illustrates once again the basic significance of mass movements for left-wing theory.
But at least as far as European and American societies are concerned, the rise of social movements in the late 1960s gradually stopped within a few years, and its political response was delayed for more than a decade. Not only were marginal left-wing currents such as Trotskyism limited in influence, but even European Communist Parties, which had followed the same path toward the Soviet Union in the past, declined rapidly in the mid-to-late 1980s. The once-growing Communist Parties of France and Italy rapidly withdrew and lost control of the trade unions. Today, the Communist Parties in Western Europe no longer have the strength of the 1960s to branch the country's factories and control the unions. This is not because the working class in these countries has "freed itself from the ideological rigidity of the left-wing parties"; in fact, the numerical indicators that directly reflect the bargaining power of the working class have declined significantly after the 1980s, and they are completely powerless to stop the gradual disintegration of welfare state policies, so most political parties with working-class platforms are bound to suffer setbacks. In the United States, where left-wing parties never dominated, the strength of unions within the establishment also fell off a cliff during this period: union membership coverage fell from 30% in the late 1970s to about 10% today, and the number of strikers, which directly reflects the balance of labor forces, also fell significantly (the number did not increase slightly until the small wave of strikes in the United States in the spring and summer of 2018); because of the characteristics of the American labor law itself, it is more difficult for American workers to survive on their own. This, of course, has a lot to do with the decline in the bargaining power of traditional workers' organisations under the neoliberal wave.
Therefore, in contrast to the line differences or factional controversies that emerged mostly after the Trotskyist-Stalin-Democratic Socialism controversy in 1905 and 1917, when the core theory of Trotskyism was first born, they lack the considerable basis of reality in the history of the Russian Revolution. Not only do the left-wing groups lack the organisational strength of the workers, but even the organisational forces of the working class within the establishment or the self-organising forces outside the organisation are extremely dispersed. Thus the nature of the factional controversies is similar to Trotsky's autobiography of his earliest participation in revolutionary work: at that time he encountered mostly small-scale and loose controversies "from the doctrines of the religious opposition", and his small group needed to carefully identify those who were only interested in doctrine and who were genuinely interested in the political and economic problems behind them, and hoped for change in this regard. Such a controversy is far from the polemics between Lenin or Trotsky, as communist revolutionaries, which have a solid basis for the work of workers' organisations. The difficulty of crossing from the former to the latter, the patience and persistence of the organizational work required, is far greater than the effects of demonic works such as the Trotsky episodes.
In short, the ideas of the communist revolutionary Trotsky, in the context of later reality, could not directly show its power. This is not because his ideas lack sharpness—ideas born of revolution rarely lack sharpness—but because the real conditions under which they can exert their power do not yet exist. With knowledge and theory this real condition can be recognized, but it cannot be created. The day-to-day experience and organisational work required to activate the workers' movement is much more trivial and tedious than the exciting "revolutionary theology" or "revolutionary theology", but that is the premise on which the question of theoretical differences can be put on the agenda, and it is also the premise that the theory of the "prophet" Trotsky can lead to armament.
Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin
Proofreader: Luan Meng