Andrew wrote "Trotsky unfortunately alienated himself from the Soviet leadership by the mid-Thirties*
Very strange! It would have been better for Trotsky not to have been sent into exile and been exterminated by Stalin in Russia like all the other Old Bolsheviks. Stalin never saw a revolution he liked while It was actually being made. One can debate the reasons for revolutionary cycles or proclaim with abstract objectivity that Stalin was the Saturn of the Russian Revolution, eating the revolution's children; the basic fact is that Stalin killed all of the Old Bolsheviks and then he killed Trotsky. The rest of the statement I'll leave aside for now. But it is a weird interpretation fit for 1946, but not for this long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The defeat of revolutions doesn't disprove Marx, though the final.destruction of human civilization might prove Rosa Luxemburg, much to our children's regret. If the working classes of the world don't gain class consciousness and organize to win then it means that we lost in our fight at this time. Then if humanity survives we will have to find another way to fight for all oppressed peoples. Still, as a matter of practical power, the working classes of the world are our last and best hope for socialism. On Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 17:24 Andrew Stewart <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 (#7933): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7933 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
