Leon
Trotsky: Discussions with Max Shachtman
March
1930
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 13. Supplement (1929-1933), New York 1979, p.
24-29]
During
our brief stay, we talked at some length about the situation in
Russia and the movement in the United States. Trotsky had just
finished writing his articles on the new course in Soviet economy and
the prospects for the five-year plan. Just about the same time, the
news began to arrive from Russia reporting the latest turn begun by
Stalin towards the moderation of the plan. The question arose: How is
it that Stalin, and even Bukharin of late, after having conducted a
furious campaign for years against the Opposition by accusing it of
being “super-industrialist,” finally adopted and began to carry
out a plan for industrialization and collectivization which, at least
on the face of it, was far more radical than any previously proposed
by the Opposition? Comrade Trotsky explained it in this way:
The
requirements of the economic situation that developed in the country
after the presentation of the platform and countertheses of the
Opposition, and the latter’s subsequent expulsion from the party,
soon demanded the formulation of a much more radical and far-reaching
program than had originally been conceived. The centrist faction of
Stalin, which had first adopted the timid and worthless plan of
Rykov, rejected it under the pressure of the situation and proceeded
with a five-year plan of considerably greater breadth. The startling
successes of the first year — startling to the centrists, who never
really believed such a rapid tempo possible — not only demonstrated
the enormous latent possibilities for industrial development under a
proletarian dictatorship (nationalization of industry, banks, etc.,
etc.), but immediately produced an extreme boldness born precisely
out of centrism’s previous timidity. Almost overnight, the initial
successes of the plan gave rise to the wildest kind of exaggerations.
The kulak was going to be liquidated as a class. The five-year plan
was to be realized in four years — or three and a half, or three as
some said. Agrarian collectivization was now definitely accomplished
in half of Russia. The NEP
was to be abolished. Socialism was being completed in isolated
Russia. These were only a few — and among the mildest —
exaggerations contained in the Soviet press and repeated in the
official Communist press abroad. The achievements of the first
year were utilized to “prove” that the entire Opposition platform
was bankrupt, the previous accusations of “super-industrialism”
were converted into “Trotskyist pessimism,” and on these
foundations, a number of capitulations were realized out of the ranks
of the Left.
But
the very first signs of difficulties transformed the cocksure
braggarts of centrism back again into timid, cautious bureaucrats.
The rapid pace of collectivization and industrialization ran its head
into the brick wall of a proletarian state isolated in a sea of
capitalist world economy, proving not in abstract theory but in cold
practice the absolutely untenable position of Stalin’s and
Bukharin’s theory of national socialism. A crisis began to develop
in agriculture, exactly along the lines indicated by the Opposition.
Stalin forthwith sounded the retreat. So long as uninterrupted
progress had been made, Stalin sedulously cultivated what he now,
when obstacles were encountered, sought to unburden responsibility
for: “dizziness of success.”
That
a retreat was necessary was already evident. It was already proposed
by Comrade Trotsky to ward off an impending crisis in the country,
the danger of which is by no means averted yet. At the same time he
raised a warning against the retreat going too far. It now becomes
increasingly clear that Stalin, who is on the road leading away from
the recent ultraleft zigzag in Russia, will not come to a halt until
he has reached the other extreme and accepted the original program of
the right wing. That is now the great danger in the Russian
situation.
It
is equally clear that Stalin will not be able to gain the support of
the whole party for this new bureaucratic turn about face. In the
zigzag to the left, mass forces were of necessity unleashed which it
will not be easily possible to put in chains again. The proletarian
core of the party will resist the sharp turn to the right which has
already begun. That is why Comrade Trotsky spoke with the greatest
confidence of the re formation of a strong Left Opposition inside the
Communist Party.
It
is in connection with the big journalistic bluff and exaggerations
about the five-year plan, and the capitulation of many Oppositionists
who pleaded the “successes of socialist construction” as their
pretext for leaving the Opposition, that a humorous but pointed
conversation took place. A copy of the New York Nation
had arrived one morning, containing an article, “Russia’s New
Revolution,” written by Louis Fischer, one of the innumerable
liberal journalists commuting between New York and Moscow and earning
a livelihood by writing publicity for the Stalin faction.
We
showed Trotsky a passage in the article which read: “Stalin’s
ultra-radical revolutionary policy has won the hearts of the
Trotskyists and they have come rushing back from Siberian, Caucasian
and Volgan exile to participate in the pressing business of
reconstruction. They have come back humbly, with clipped wings,
acknowledging Stalin’s talents and Trotsky’s mistakes. …
Stalin, my ex-Trotskyist friends tell me, had done more than they
wanted of him, and more even than they expected of Trotsky.”
“You
see,” we said jokingly while Trotsky was scanning the paragraph,
“everybody is saying that Stalin has gone much further than you
ever proposed.”
“That’s
true,” he replied immediately. “When a man has a boil on his
neck, a capable surgeon will simply lance the boil. A shoemaker will
go much further and sever the man’s head from his shoulders. Yes,
there is no doubt that Stalin has also gone ‘much further’ than I
proposed!”
And
the [ex-Oppositionist] capitulators? Would they play any considerable
role in the resurgence of the Opposition within the party? Comrade
Trotsky does not believe they will.
“The
revolution is a great devourer of people,” he said. “It has
burned out these men, used them up, exhausted them. They cannot even
play an important part in the centrist faction. It must not be
forgotten that these men are not newcomers in the movement. On the
contrary. Many of them have gone through two, three revolutions. They
spent a large part of their lives in czarist prisons and exiles. They
were the militants who organized and led the Bolshevik revolution in
1917 and for years afterwards. They passed through the rigorous years
of the civil war and intervention, then through the period of
reaction after the death of Lenin, and finally through prison or
exile under Stalin.
They
have lived through the intensest years of history. Very few have come
out of them unscathed to one degree or another. The others have been
burned out or the revolutionary fires in them quenched.”
Of
course this phenomenon is chiefly noticeable and widespread in the
ranks of the ruling apparatus. Trotsky mentioned one name after
another of comrades in the most prominent party and Soviet positions,
all of them imbued with the profoundest hatred for the “permanent
revolution.” That formula runs against the grain of every
self-contented bureaucrat who has squeezed his bottom firmly into a
chair after the consolidation of the revolution’s initial political
victories. All of them have sought to put themselves beyond criticism
by the religious title of “Old Bolsheviks” or the “Old Guard.”
Yet the overwhelming majority of the members of the present Central
Committee of the Russian party are men who, inside or outside of
Lenin’s party before the revolution, never went beyond the
conceptions of revolutionary democrats or Mensheviks. Trotsky
recounted an incident which adequately characterizes the “Old
Bolshevism” of nine-tenths of the present party spokesmen.
It
was during a meeting of the party Central Control Commission, where
Trotsky was being “tried” and his “non-Bolshevik past”
brought out against him. During his speech, he quoted from an issue
of the Sotsial
Demokrat,
a journal edited and published in Yakutsk jointly by the Mensheviks
and a number of now prominent “Old Bolsheviks”: Ordzhonikidze,
Petrovsky (of the Ukraine), and the peerless Yaroslavsky. This paper
was issued not in 1905, nor in 1912 or 1914, but in 1917, after the
Kerensky revolution
and on the eve of the October uprising!
He
read from some of the articles written by these “old guardsmen,”
all of which were penetrated by the most vulgar kind of
bourgeois-democratic notions conceivable. The Kerensky revolution —
if only it would introduce a few reforms — was hailed as the great
people’s democratic government. When Trotsky mentioned the trio of
“Bolsheviks” who wrote these articles, there was a sensation even
in the Control Commission. Yaroslavsky tried to bluster and bluff it
out, but the blunter Ordzhonikidze simply replied: “Well, what of
that? We wrote lots of stupid things in those days.”
“Yes,”
said Trotsky, “but I would let my arms and legs be cut off and my
head taken from my shoulders if in all of my writings you could find
anything half so bad as this!” A little while later, the copy of
the paper from which Trotsky had quoted, which he had found after
considerable effort, was stolen from his room. The Yaroslavskys, so
meticulous about literary records, real and forged, of Comrade
Trotsky, had no intention of letting their own shameful records lie
around where Oppositionists could make use of them. Fortunately, the
protocol of the Control Commission still records the damning excerpts
— unless that too has been put into the furnace reserved for
everything embarrassing to the Stalinist regime! It is precisely such
types that are now doing the job of corrupting a whole generation of
revolutionists with their shoddy substitute for Leninism.
A
considerable part of our conversation was devoted to the situation in
the United States and the perspectives for the movement here. He
asked about every detail of our work, our numerical strength, the
circulation of The
Militant,
our work in the trade unions, the influence of the party, the
strength of the Lovestone faction, etc., etc. The establishment of
the weekly Militant,
which he follows closely, he considers the greatest achievement of
the American Opposition. When we spoke of the difficulties of the
paper, to which every labor and revolutionary journal is subject, he
even wrote to the American comrades urging that the greatest efforts
be exerted to maintain and strengthen the weekly.
Trotsky
does not know the American situation as well as he does, let us say,
the Russian, or even the French, but he is very far from being
unacquainted with it. Of the American party leaders, he is “best”
acquainted with Pepper. He told of how Pepper came to him during the
days of the great “farmer-labor party boom” in the United States,
and tried to convince him that the revolution in this country would
come about by winning over the revolutionary farmers, allying the
Communist Party with the petty bourgeoisie, and neutralizing the
working class! The question of a farmer-labor party (i.e., a party of
two classes)
had come up then for the first time in the Political Bureau of the
party in Moscow. Everybody spoke hesitantly or tentatively about it.
Stalin even said: “I am sure that if Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] were
present he would be for it.” Trotsky intervened immediately and
spoke sharply and at length against the whole idea. Kamenev,
who
has a flair for the left in a theoretical discussion, picked up the
thread right away and as a result of the subsequent decision, the
American party was, in part at least, dragged by the hair out of the
opportunist swamp into which Pepper had led it.
Trotsky
outlined — we repeat them here briefly — his ideas of the
perspectives for developments in this country. “In my work on the
Russian revolution of 1905,” he said, “I remarked on the fact
that Marx had written that capitalism passes from feudalism to the
guild system to the factory. In Russia, however, we never knew the
guild system, with the possible exception of the kustari
[handicrafts
men]. Or one might compare the development of the working class in
England and Germany with that in Russia. In the first two countries,
the proletariat has gone through a long period of parliamentary
experience. In Russia, on the other hand, there was very little of a
parliamentary system for the workers. That is, the Russian
proletariat learned its parliamentary history from an abridged
handbook.
“In
many respects, the history of the development of the United States is
akin to that of the Russian working class. It is nowhere written, and
theoretically it cannot be substantiated, that the American workers
will perforce have to pass through the school of reformism for a long
period of time. They live and develop in another period, their coming
to maturity is taking place under different circumstances from that
of the English working class, for instance. That is, the stage of a
labor party or a powerful socialist party is by no means inevitable.
The rapidity of the development of the American workers, of course,
also depends to a large extent upon the degree of preparedness of the
Communist movement and its clarity. The Socialist Party in the United
States need by no means and will by no means ever reach the position
of the British Labour Party or the German Social Democracy.
“It
is not at all permanently established that the United States will be
last in order of revolutionary primacy, condemned to reach its
proletarian revolution only after the countries of Europe and Asia. A
situation, a combination of forces is possible in which the order is
changed and the tempo of development in the United States enormously
accelerated. But for that it is necessary to prepare.”