The Revolutionary Economics of Leon Trotsky with Adam Tooze | Ones and Tooze Ep. 223

Hi Cam.

I was with the—we'll come on to it at the end, but like with the Tony Cliff strand of Trots in Britain, in this Socialist Working—the SWP—

So I learned my—I got my political education, well, my party political education, some of it, in that context, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's four—you know, obviously slightly trite in the manner of these kind of biographical exercises—there's four kind of ways in which you might hook Trotsky's biography up with his ideas. I mean, the first is his what you might call his marginality. He's born in 1879 to a prosperous Jewish farming family in Ukraine. He was Lev Bronstein. So he's a product of the Pale of Settlement in Russia. This is a prosperous family, but still he's Jewish in the Russian Empire. This marks you in a certain way. He's never likely to be a peasant radical, for instance. That option is not really open to him as an identity position. He then goes into underground activity, finds himself under arrest, is in exile for large parts of his life, spends time in London, in New York even, and of course is ultimately killed, assassinated in Mexico City in 1940. So this is a man that lives a life of marginalization. He's peripatetic. He's constantly moving around, and his politics is internationalist. One of the things that's profoundly attractive in Trotsky's Marxism is precisely this commitment to internationalism as an absolutely base position. And we'll see this then of course leads him into clashes, notably with Stalin and his project of socialism in one country. So that's I think one way in which you can think of it.

The other is he's a product of actual revolutionary action and its failure, and its repeated failure. The first failure is 1905, which he has in common with Luxemburg and with Lenin. You know, this revolution that's triggered in the Russian Empire by the underlying political tensions in Russia and by Russia's defeat at the hands of the Japanese. Another moment of kind of globalization. This is not politics played out on the small scale. It's played out on the global scale right from the very beginning. And that drives him to start thinking about ideas like permanent revolution, uneven and combined development. Because you have to start theorizing why revolutions are happening in places where you might not necessarily expect if you take a standard 19th-century Marxist schema. They're supposed to happen in the most advanced societies. Russia evidently isn't, but on the other hand, they are happening and then they're failing. So how do you think about that? And it's out of that experience in 1905—I mean, he literally was the leader of the revolutionary upheaval in Petrograd, in St. Petersburg in 1905. So he's an incredibly prominent figure of that revolution, a star you might say, and so then has to digest in the aftermath that experience.

Then in exile, he's in exile throughout the first phase of World War I, and then he's in America when the Russian Revolution begins in 1917. And he returns hastily to Russia and immediately is catapulted—he commits to the Bolshevik wing of Russian radical politics. That makes him an associate of Lenin. And really from the fall of 1917 onwards, Trotsky is at the absolute center of the struggle for survival of the Soviet revolution. And at this point, he acquires real experience as a military commander, as a radical tactician, a strategist, a diplomat. He represents the Soviet side at the infamous Brest-Litovsk treaty negotiations in early 1918. He becomes the organizer of the civil war, this brutal struggle for control both against interventionist forces from outside Russia and rival Russian factions. He really is the face of War Communism, of the dramatic effort to stabilize the Soviet regime in the face of what then becomes a really horrendous famine in '21. Ends up also then being very deeply involved in the discussions around liberalization after having been responsible for the repression of workers' revolts against the Bolshevik regime, most notably in Kronstadt in the spring of '21. And then, despite having really emerged from that early phase as one of the key figures of the Bolshevik regime, of course loses the factional struggle against Stalin. By the late '20s, he's in exile again. Well, he's in internal exile within the Soviet Union and then is driven out of the Soviet Union by way of Turkey and France. He ends up in Mexico and becomes the theorist to that extent of—and hugely influential as a thinker of revolutionary failure, and what happens to revolutions when they don't go the way you direct.

You could think of him as like a Marxist analog to a Tocqueville or somebody like that, who has to provide an account of the very different reality produced by the revolution than the one that in his case, of course, a key figure in the revolutionary politics actually envisioned and fought for and staked their lives for. And he is a tragic figure to that extent—not that he accepts a kind of passive, quiescent tragedy, but a resilient—it's a little bit like Gramsci with the famous quote of 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.' There's an element of that about Trotsky's persona that marks his really very interesting writing in exile in the 1930s, where he then also becomes of course an associate of Diego Rivera, André Breton. Like, Trotsky is—unlike Lenin, who remains a very Russian figure, Trotsky is a truly cosmopolitan, global intellectual star. People make pilgrimage to Mexico City to interview him, because you can interview a leader of the Russian Revolution. He's right there in Mexico and is giving interviews. You know, he's really an extraordinary, quite contemporary figure in that way as well, unlike Lenin, who feels as though he belongs very much more to the 19th century and very much to the distinctively Russian context, though in his intellectualization of the revolution, Lenin, like Trotsky, is committed to a very global, international view. This is of course something they all have in common—Rosa Luxemburg as well. All of these are thinkers of a globalized world.

Yes. I mean, Trotsky I think has to be understood—the more I go back to him now, it was a while since I'd read Trotsky, and going back now, the more I'm struck by just how radical his conception of history is. Because I think the permanent revolution idea, it was actually launched by Marx himself writing in 1850 after another failed revolution, the 1848 revolutions, which had not gone the way that they anticipated. And part of the problem is the bourgeoisie, the European business upper-middle class, is not playing its assigned role and is slipping back into a variety of reactionary, timid, terrified alliances with aristocracy. And so Marx is trying to spell out what the revolutionary agent is going to look like. Who is it that's going to drive history forward? And that, on the one hand, is a story about economic and social structure, and on the other hand, it's a question about political will and agency and the development of a dynamic of historical change.

And the idea in Marx in 1850 and in Trotsky 50, 60 years later is that you can't get too hung up on this schema of stages, and you can't get too hung up on national stage theories to label progressive and unprogressive countries, to label places which are the cutting edge and places that are behind, and then assign roles accordingly. You have to think of history as far more open-ended than that. And you have therefore to be willing to contemplate the possibility, in fact the necessity, of revolution to take the form of, not stages, but a kind of permanent upheaval of the existing conditions in which workers, peasants, various types of alliances of this type are essential to exploding the framework of the existing order of things. And so what you cannot do, which is precisely where Stalin retreats to, is look at the Russian revolutionary situation of the aftermath of the civil war—so this is in 1921, after there has been a kind of rolling violent struggle for control of what used to be the territory of the Tsarist Empire between the summer of 1918 and the summer of 1921—and say to yourself, 'Right, we've got our grip on this situation. So far so good. Hunker down, build socialism here. We've got control of this territory, we should build out from here.'

And Trotsky's far-sighted, but also in some senses Sisyphean kind of endless revolutionary energy says, 'Well, no. If you do that, you'll end up regressing within the national framework. This revolution is ultimately a claim to some kind of new universality. We can only get there by constantly expanding the framework. And if we don't, reaction is going to come in and crush us from the outside. And so we must be looking continuously for the possibility of expanding the horizon of the revolution.' Trotsky was key as military commissar to the attempt to break out of the encirclement of the Russian revolution in 1920. After they more or less dealt with the White resistance within Russia, they launched the Red Army towards Germany, which means going through Poland, newly established after World War I, in part as a cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union and between the Germans and the Russians. And they launched this invasion, which famously runs up against Polish resistance backed by the French notably outside Warsaw in the late summer of 1920. And it's a decisive turning point in European history because the Poles prevail, Poland is stabilized, and the Red Army tumbles back towards the Soviet Union.

And then the next question is, okay, so what next? And there's a huge and elaborate conversation then about revolutionary engagement, both in the West, but above all in China, where Stalin and Trotsky fall out over the tactics and strategy to be pursued with regard to what they all understand as the really decisive factor in 20th and 21st-century history, which is going to be the fate of the Chinese republican experiment after the revolution of 1911. And so it's this kind of horizon of thinking which distinguishes Trotsky's understanding of revolution and the permanent revolution from Stalin's hold-and-build kind of approach to revolutionary politics.

So it's a very demanding—there's an element in Trotsky which is psychological, which is existential. He's a keen reader of Freud, amongst other influences. And you can see in Trotsky's thinking an effort to really grasp the radicalism that's going to be essential to understanding what this new world will come out of. There's a particular passage—I'll read it out because it's so extraordinary—from some of his writing about literature. This is Trotsky on—he doesn't say, 'This is my thinking about permanent revolution,' but this carries some of the flavor: 'Life in a revolution is camp life. Personal life, institutions, methods, ideas, sentiments, everything is unusual, temporary, transitional, recognizing its temporariness and expressing this everywhere, even in names. Hence the difficulty of an artistic approach.' This is his comment about art. 'The transitory and the episodic have in them an element of the accidental, and the accidental bears the stamp of insignificance. And yet, nevertheless, that's exactly what the revolution will look like. The revolution, taken episodically, appears quite insignificant. Where is the revolution then? Here lies the difficulty. Only he will overcome it who fully understands and feels the inner meaning of this episodic character, and who will reveal the historic axis of crystallization that lies behind it.' Right? Okay.

So this is someone trying to grasp revolution not just as a stage theory or a kind of socioeconomic Lego building block kind of, 'We put the peasants here, the workers there, we add a little bit of that, and then we've got our coalition.' This is somebody who's trying to describe revolution as an existential state, as being in a condition of camp life. Right? When we embark on revolution, we embark on essentially a kind of permanent upheaval of society. There may be a distant promise of restabilization, but to get there quickly is philistinism. To get there quickly is the promise really of just sliding back into reaction. You have to understand the need and find ways of thinking and existing in this state of permanent flux.