Andrew Stewart said: 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. Ken Hiebert replies: The note about Trotsky’s thoughts on the rise of Hitler and Stalin, as well as the account of his participation in Central Committee meetings, were they from the Deutscher trilogy, or from another source? It’s been decades since I read that. Trotsky’s brilliance as a writer was widely agreed on. George Bernard Shaw referred to him as the “prince of pamphleteers.” I thought his History of the Russian Revolution might have been written for a film maker with its vivid images. Do his writings have a limited shelf life? I cannot say. Does anyone on this list know of recent reprints of his works? Are they still taken out of libraries? Or are they read only by specialists? I’d like to know. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#7938): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7938 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
