The
fact that the crisis of capitalism is causing internecine warfare among
conservatives doesn't give even antiwar ones like Justin Raimondo the
right to distort history and slander Leon Trotsky as he does in "The
Essential Dishonesty of Christopher Hitchens: Liar, hypocrite, coward,
drunk."
First, let me make clear this is not a defense of Hitchens, who is
a dishonest liar, hypocrite and coward. I share Raimondo's contempt for
Hitchens and the latter's support for the Iraq war. But I am here to
defend Trotsky. I am here to answer those who attack his legacy by
crudely attempting to connect Permanent Revolution with Leo Strauss's
Permanent Conquest.
Raimondo
takes issue with Hitchens' characterization of Trotsky as the
embodiment of "defiance and dissent": "I'll bet that isn't what they
thought at Kronstadt, where dissent was felled by Trotsky's sword."
It
was a little more than "dissent," Mr. Raimondo. The mutiny by
disaffected sailors at Kronstadt was an attempt at a military coup
against the Soviet government. It occurred in March 1921, just after
the conclusion of a bloody Civil War, an historical tidbit Raimondo
leaves out of his analysis. The Soviet leadership feared that Britain
and France, using the mutiny as an excuse, would deploy their navies to
occupy Kronstadt. The Bolsheviks knew whoever controlled Kronstadt
controlled Petrograd. If that happened, capitalist restoration was
inevitable. The life and death of the young Soviet republic were at
stake. The Bolsheviks were not about to hand
over the Revolution to their class enemies after all that had been
sacrificed during the Civil War.
Documents
from the Soviet archives that were contained in books published in 2000
and 2001 confirm that the Bolsheviks were right, and the authors of
these works were by no means Bolshevik sympathizers ("The Unknown
Trotsky: the Red Bonaparte" [Krasnov VG, Moscow 2000; and "Kronstadt
1921" (Moscow 2001).
These
documents prove that, contrary to the myth pushed by antiBolsheviks
over the years that the Kronstadt mutiny enjoyed widespread support
among Red Army soldiers, there were only two cases where Red Army
troops switched sides or didn't fight. One was during the first
unsuccessful attack on Kronstadt, when soldiers from the 561st Red Army
regiment--largely recruited from former Machno, Wrangel and Denikin
prisoners--joined the rebels. But it was not unusual during the Russian
Civil War for peasants to change sides after military defeats. The
second instance is when peasants in the 236th and 237th Red Army
infantry regiments proclaimed, "We'll not go on the ice," and
"We'll go to our villages." These peasants weren't too keen about
traipsing across the ice to seize the fortress heavily defended by
battleships.
But there were no mass desertions from the Red Army.
These
documents also show that inside Kronstadt there was no mass movement in
support of the rebellion, a fact that even an anticommunist like
Krasnov had to acknowledge. Instead, Kronstadt was beset with fights
between the older revolutionary sailors and the new largely peasant
recruits. Some ships declared their neutrality; others fought against
the rebels.
Further,
the 7th Army intelligence report tells us that many rebel sailors and
soldiers wanted to cross over to the Bolsheviks, but were intimidated
by their leaders.
Statements
by the crews from several ships reflect concern about what was
unfolding: "The men of the White guards that are leading the rebels can
do a lot of damage to the Republic, and they may not even hesitate to
bomb Petrograd!"
Indeed, that's the conclusion the Bolsheviks came to as well. And they were right.
The
documents also showed that workers in the town outside Kronstadt moved
against the mutineers and liberated the town BEFORE the Red Army got
there. And that the sailors knew what they were talking about when they
said, "the men of the White guards that are leading the rebels,"
because we've learned that the true leadership of the mutiny was not in
the Kronstadt soviet but instead could be found in the "Court for the
Defence of the Kronstadt Fortress", led by White generals Koslovsky and
Dmitriev.
Dissent,
Mr. Raimondo? Or was it counterrevolution that was stamped out at
Krondstadt? Documents from these two books showed that the former
Tsarist prime minister and finance minister sent 225 thousand francs to
the Kronstadt rebels. The Russian-Asian bank transferred 200 thousand
more. The French prime minister, Briand, promised "any necessary help
to Kronstadt."
It
appears that the Kronstadt workers and sailors had a better
understanding of the class dynamics unfolding than intellectuals like
Raimondo who have perpetuated the myth of Kronstadt.
As for Trotsky's role in Kronstadt, Ted Grant, in his 1997 book, Russia: from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, wrote:
"Another
lie concerns the role of Trotsky in the Kronstadt episode. Actually, he
played no direct role, although as Commissar for War and a member of
the Soviet government, he fully accepted political responsibility for
this and other actions of the government."
Trotsky's
Red Army did not ruthlessly stamp out "the very possibility of defiance
in Soviet Russia," Mr. Raimondo. The Red Army did ruthlessly stamp out
counterrevolution and the chance for world imperialism to restore
capitalism in the Soviet Union. When harsh measures are needed to save
a revolutionary republic, resolute leaders carry them out. Ask Abraham
Lincoln's spirit why he revoked habeas corpus.
One would have to be "dumb as a stump" to accept at face value Raimondo's description of Trotsky as a "much-feared prophet of 'military communism'" who was also "a totalitarian, a Leninist, and a murderer."
Trotsky
was not a "prophet" of war communism, and to say so is to reveal a
confusion or a conscious distortion about what really happened. War
communism was not a goal but a tactical necessity forced on the
Bolsheviks by the pressures of the Civil War and world imperialism. The
decision to forcibly requisition grain from peasants and subordinate
all aspects of economic life to the needs of the civil war was not
desired by a revolutionary working class leadership seeking to forge an
alliance with the much more numerous peasantry. As soon as the Civil
War was over, the Bolsheviks ended war communism and replaced it with
the New Economic Policy, which was an attempt to mend relations with
the peasantry by resuscitating market forces.
There
was much debate among the Bolsheviks over the implementation of both
war communism and the New Economic Policy. In fact, Trotsky had
originally opposed war communism, but when the Party approved it, he
threw himself behind the policy, recognizing it was a temporary
necessity needed to save the Revolution.
As
for being "a totalitarian, a Leninist, and a murderer," well, one out
of three isn't bad, Mr. Raimondo. Trotsky proudly called himself a
Leninist, as do I. Trotsky is no more or less a murderer than every
other military commander in history.
Totalitarian?
At great risk to himself and his family, Trotsky spent the final two
decades of his existence fighting against Stalin's totalitarianism and
for socialist democracy; a struggle that eventually cost Trotsky his
life.
Raimondo
has been one of those who have disingenuously tried to link Bush's
reactionary policies today with Leon Trotsky, or as Raimondo put it,
"those of us who find the neocons' Trotsky cultism more than a bit
dubious."
There is a link--and Raimondo
alludes to it--between the internal factional debates in the Trotskyist
movement during the 1930s and '40s and contemporary neoconservative
figures like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Elliott
Abrams. The link is Max Schactman, a leader of the SWP during the 1930s
who broke with the Party over the class nature of the Soviet Union,
and, flowing from that, over the question of unconditional defense of
the Soviet Union against any imperialist attack. Schactman and his
colleague James Burnham argued that Stalin's signing the nonaggression
pact with Hitler proved that the Soviet Union was not a workers state
and thus not deserving of the Fourth International's unconditional
defense against an imperialist attack.
Trotsky
sharply disagreed with the Schactmanites, arguing that despite Stalin's
crimes, the social and economic gains of the October Revolution
remained and must be defended by the international communist movement
against any imperialist attack. The Soviet Union was a transitional
society between capitalism and socialism. It would go forward by the
working class overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy in a political
revolution, or be thrown in reverse by the bureaucracy trying to
restore capitalism. We now know how correct Trotsky was.
As
Bill Vann of the World Socialist Web Site stated in a May 2003 article,
"Trotsky showed that those backing Schactman and Burnham would be
propelled far to the right by the logic of both their arguments and
their philosophical method, which was rooted in a rejection of
dialectical materialism. He warned prophetically that those who begin
by rejecting dialectical materialism end up not infrequently in the
camp of reaction."
Events
proved the "Old Man" to be right again. Not long after, Burnham was
writing for the National Review and advocating atomic war against the
Soviet Union.
Schactman
took a little longer, but by 1950 he supported Washington's aggression
in Korea. Soon after he was an advisor to the anticommunist AFL-CIO and
ended up a strong supporter of Senator Henry Jackson from Washington,
an ardent Cold Warrior and military hawk. Schactman endorsed Jackson's
bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Schactman's
followers changed their name several times before settling on "Social
Democrats USA."
It is from this cesspool of militarism and reaction that Schactmanites like Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and Abrams emerged.
As
Vann put it, "Whatever connection these elements may have had with
Schactman were the result not of the latter's former connection to
Trotskyism, but rather their agreement with the politics of
anti-communism, militarism and Zionism that Schactman had embraced over
the course of some three decades following his break with the Fourth
International."
"There
is no doubt that both Schactman and Kristol [Irving] used political
skills that they had gained in the Marxist movement to further the
cause of reaction. Far from being responsible for the political
evolution of these individuals, however, the Trotskyist movement fought
out the political differences and rejected the opportunist tendency
they represented long before it had evolved into an open supporter of
US imperialism...."
So
much for Raimondo's view that "Schactmanism is the 'bridge' between the
'Old Man' and his present-day epigones." Present-day epigones? Are you
saying that Feith and Wolfowitz are direct descendants of Trotsky, Mr.
Raimondo? Are you calling them communists? Or, are you repeating
Stalin's lie that Trotsky was an agent of German, US, British, or
Japanese imperialism?
The
notion that Trotsky's Theory of Permament Revolution paved the way for
Leo Strauss and his neocons' policy of "Permanent Conquest" is one of
the most intellectually dishonest and despicable fabrications in
history. Permanent Revolution explained the dynamics of world
revolution in the epoch of imperialism, holding that the capitalist
classes in the semicolonial nations were too weak to accomplish the
tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution; that only the working
class in alliance with the small and middle level peasants could win
the fight for bourgeois democracy; and that from this revolutionary
struggle for bourgeois democracy the workers and peasants would go all
the way and make a socialist revolution by overthrowing capitalism and
forming a workers and peasants government.
Permanent
Revolution was also Trotsky's conception of the relationship between
the Russian revolution and the world revolution--that the challenges
facing the Soviet working class and all other workers of the world
could only be solved on the basis of the world economy, that is, on the
basis of the most advanced capitalist economies. Permament Revolution
was Trotsky's answer to Stalin's fallacy that socialism could be built
in one country.
Permanent
Conquest is a strategy of US imperialism to subjugate the entire world
under the domination of Washington so that US corporations can more
easily plunder the world's workers and resources.
Permanent
Revolution is a strategy for the working class. Permanent Conquest is a
strategy for the capitalists. The theories have nothing in common.
There is no ?kinship? between them.
As Trotsky himself once said, "even slander should make some sense."
June 16, 2004
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