Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was paranoid. Perhaps his deepest fears
centred around his great rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik
movement, Leon Trotsky. Stalin went to extraordinary lengths to obliterate
not only Trotsky but also the ragtag international fellowship known as the
Left Opposition, which supported Trotsky's political program. In the late
1920s, Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Communist Party and deported him
from the Soviet Union. Almost instantly, other Communist parties moved to
excommunicate Trotsky's followers, notably the Americans James P. Cannon
and Max Shachtman.
In 1933, while in exile in Turkey, Trotsky regrouped his supporters as the
Fourth International. Never amounting to more than a few thousand
individuals scattered across the globe, the Fourth International was
constantly harassed by Stalin's secret police, as well as by capitalist
governments. The terrible purge trials that Stalin ordered in the late
1930s were designed in part to eliminate any remaining Trotskyists in the
Soviet Union. Fleeing from country to country, Trotsky ended up in Mexico,
where he was murdered by an ice-pick-wielding Stalinist assassin in 1940.
Like Macbeth after the murder of Banquo, Stalin became even more obsessed
with his great foe after killing him. Fearing a revival of Trotskyism,
Stalin's secret police continued to monitor the activities of Trotsky's
widow in Mexico, as well as the far-flung activities of the Fourth
International.
- - -
More than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, Stalin's war
against Trotsky may seem like quaint ancient history. Yet Stalin was right
to fear Trotsky's influence. Unlike Stalin, Trotsky was a man of genuine
intellectual achievement, a brilliant literary critic and historian as well
as a military strategist of genius. Trotsky's movement, although never
numerous, attracted many sharp minds. At one time or another, the Fourth
International included among its followers the painter Frida Kahlo (who had
an affair with Trotsky), the novelist Saul Bellow, the poet Andr� Breton
and the Trinidadian polymath C.L.R. James.
As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky, consider
the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East crisis that
are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers deeply shaped by the
tradition of the Fourth International.
In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush administration
(notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Dick
Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan Makiya, an
Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear is considered
to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule.
As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is "known to veterans
of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of the Fourth
International." When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has a voice of
authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who is influential
in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly interventionist
policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens has been invited
into the White House as an ad hoc consultant.
Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged past. On the
left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book called Terror and
Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who want a more muscular
struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman counts the Trotskyist
C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among neo-conservatives, Berman's
counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian whose new book, The Two Faces
of Islam, is a key text among those who want the United States to sever its
ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish
Trotskyist group.
To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" and
"L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). "To
a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of
L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the
ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a
new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about
Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.
"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had this
discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of
it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon
Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link
between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.
To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S.
expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman,
Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career provides the
definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left
Opposition to support for the Pentagon.
Throughout the 1930s, Shachtman loyally hewed to the Trotsky line that the
Soviet Union as a state deserved to be defended even though Stalin's
leadership had to be overthrown. However, when the Soviet Union forged an
alliance with Hitler and invaded Finland, Shachtman moved to a politics of
total opposition, eventually known as the "third camp" position. Shachtman
argued in the 1940s and 1950s that socialists should oppose both capitalism
and Soviet communism, both Washington and Moscow.
Yet as the Cold War wore on, Shachtman became increasingly convinced Soviet
Communism was "the greater and more dangerous" enemy. "There was a way on
the third camp left that anti-Stalinism was so deeply ingrained that it
obscured everything else," says Christopher Phelps, whose introduction to
the new book Race and Revolution details the Trotskyist debate on racial
politics. Phelps is an eloquent advocate for the position that the best
portion of Shachtman's legacy still belongs to the left.
By the early 1970s, Shachtman was a supporter of the Vietnam War and the
strongly anti-Communist Democrats such as Senator Henry Jackson. Shachtman
had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour
unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the
Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties
with hard-nosed Cold War liberals who also advised Jackson, including
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz; these two had another tie to the
Trotskyism; their mentor was Albert Wohlstetter, a defence intellectual who
had been a Schachtmanite in the late 1940s.
Shachtman died in 1972, but his followers rose in the ranks of the labour
movement and government bureaucracy. Because of their long battles against
Stalinism, Shachtmanites were perfect recruits for the renewed struggle
against Soviet communism that started up again after the Vietnam War.
Throughout the 1970s, intellectuals forged by the Shachtman tradition
filled the pages of neo-conservative publications. Then in the 1980s, many
Social Democrats found themselves working in the Reagan administration,
notably Jeanne Kirkpatrick (who was ambassador to the United Nations) and
Elliott Abrams (whose tenure as assistant secretary of state was marred by
his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal).
The distance between the Russia of 1917 and the Washington of 2003 is so
great that many question whether Trotsky and Shachtman have really left a
legacy for the Bush administration. For Christopher Phelps, the circuitous
route from Trotsky to Bush is "more a matter of rupture and abandonment of
the left than continuity."
Stephen Schwartz disagrees. "I see a psychological, ideological and
intellectual continuity," says Schwartz, who defines Trotsky's legacy to
neo-conservatism in terms of a set of valuable lessons. By his opposition
to both Hitler and Stalin, Trotsky taught the Left Opposition the need to
have a politics that was proactive and willing to take unpopular positions.
"Those are the two things that the neo-cons and the Trotskyists always had
in common: the ability to anticipate rather than react and the moral
courage to stand apart from liberal left opinion when liberal left opinion
acts like a mob."
Trotsky was also a great military leader, and Schwartz finds support for
the idea of pre-emptive war in the old Bolshevik's writings. "Nobody who is
a Trotskyist can really be a pacifist," Schwartz notes. "Trotskyism is a
militaristic disposition. When you are Trotskyist, we don't refer to him as
a great literary critic, we refer to him as the founder of the Red Army."
Paul Berman agrees with Schwartz that Trotskyists are by definition
internationalists who are willing to go to war when necessary. "The Left
Opposition and the non-Communist left comes out of classic socialism, so
it's not a pacifist tradition," Berman observes. "It's an internationalist
tradition. It has a natural ability to sympathize or feel solidarity for
people in places that might strike other Americans or Canadians as
extremely remote."
Christopher Phelps, however, doubts these claims of a Trotskyist tradition
that would support the war in Iraq. For the Left Opposition,
internationalism was not simply about fighting all over the world.
"Internationalism meant solidarity with other peoples and not imperialist
imposition upon them," Phelps notes.
Though Trotsky was a military leader, Phelps also notes "the Left
Opposition had a long history of opposition to imperialist war. They
weren't pacifists, but they were against capitalist wars fought by
capitalist states. It's true that there is no squeamishness about the
application of force when necessary. The question is, is force used on
behalf of a class that is trying to create a world with much less violence
or is it force used on behalf of a state that is itself the largest
purveyor of organized violence in the world? There is a big difference."
Seeing the Iraq war as an imperialist adventure, Phelps is confident
"Trotsky and Shachtman in the '30s and '40s wouldn't have supported this war."
This dispute over the true legacy of Trotsky and Shachtman illustrates how
the Left Opposition still stirs passion. The strength of a living tradition
is in its ability to inspire rival interpretations. Despite Stalin's best
efforts, Trotskyism is a living force that people fight over.
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