Two thoughts: a-Isaac Deutscher says in the Afterword of THE PROPHET OUTCAST that Trotsky would have been unable to regain power had he lived because of the shortcomings of his analysis and framework. Even though he was a Communist, he was still wed to the Marxist schema of the Second International. He even asks in his notes whether Marxism was disproved by the inability of German workers to reject fascism and the Soviet workers to reject Stalin. And then within a decade you have the Chinese revolution, ten years after that the Cuban revolution, and then in the following twenty-five years the Latin American and African revolts against colonialism and imperialism.
b-Trotsky unfortunately alienated himself from the Soviet leadership by the mid-Thirties. Regardless of his brilliance as a writer, he was extremely haughty, elitist, and self-important to the point of being a nuisance. He used to flaunt his brilliance by quoting Flaubert in the middle of Central Committee meetings, annoying everyone by saying how smart he was. Deutscher said that the Fourth International was stillborn. So if he had lived, it is possible to imagine him ending up roughly akin to Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, exiled dissident Jews who used to sympathize with the Russian revolution but ended up writing polemics with limited shelf life. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#7929): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7929 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/82013043/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
