In Defense of Marxism: In Memory of Leon Trotsky

In Defense of Marxism:
In Memory of Leon Trotsky



Lev Davidovich Trotsky was,
alongside Lenin, one of the two greatest
Marxists of the twentieth century. His
whole life was entirely devoted to the
cause of the working class and international
socialism. And what a life! From his
earliest youth, when he worked through
the night producing illegal strike leaflets
which earned him his first spell in prison
and Siberian exile, until he was finally
struck down by one of Stalin’s agents in
August 1940, he toiled ceaselessly for
the revolutionary movement. In the first
Russian Revolution of 1905, he was
the chairman of the Petersburg Soviet.
Sentenced once again to Siberian exile,
he again escaped and continued his
revolutionary activity from exile. During
the First World War, Trotsky adopted a
consistent internationalist position. He was
the author of the Zimmerwald Manifesto
which attempted to unite the revolutionary
opponents of the War. In 1917, he played
a leading role as the organizer of the
insurrection in Petrograd.
After the October Revolution
Trotsky was the first Commissar for
Foreign Affairs and was in charge of the
negotiations with the Germans at Brest-
Litovsk. During the bloody Civil War
when Soviet Russia was invaded by 21
foreign armies of intervention, and when
the survival of the Revolution was in
the balance, Trotsky organized the Red
Army and personally led the fight against
the counterrevolutionary White armies,
travelling thousands of kilometers in the
famous armored train. Trotsky remained
Commissar for War until 1925. “Show me
another man”, he (Lenin) said, thumping
the table “capable of organizing in a year
an almost exemplary army and moreover
of winning the esteem of the military
specialists.” These lines reproduced in
Gorky’s memoirs accurately show the
attitude of Lenin to Trotsky at this time.
Trotsky’s role in consolidating the
first Workers’ State in the world was not
confined to the Red Army. He also played
the leading role, together with Lenin, in
the building of the Third International, for
the first four congresses of which Trotsky
wrote the Manifestos and many of the most
important policy statements; the period
of economic reconstruction in which
Trotsky reorganized the shattered railway
systems of the USSR. In addition, Trotsky,
always a prolific writer, found time to
write penetrating studies, not just on
political questions but on art and literature
(Literature and Revolution) and even on
the problems faced by people in everyday
life in the transitional period (Problems of
Everyday Life).
After Lenin’s death in 1924,
Trotsky led the struggle against the
bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet
State—a fight that Lenin had already
begun from his death-bed. In the process
of the struggle, Trotsky was the first to
advocate the idea of five-year plans, which
was opposed by Stalin and his followers.
Thereafter, Trotsky alone continued to
defend the revolutionary, democratic
and international traditions of October.
He alone provided a scientific Marxist
analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration
of the Russian Revolution in works like
The Revolution Betrayed, In Defense of
Marxism and Stalin. His writings of the
period 1930-40 provide us with a veritable
treasure-house of Marxist theory, dealing
not only with the immediate problems
of the international labor movement (the
Chinese revolution, the rise of Hitler in
Germany, the Spanish Civil War), but of
all manner of artistic, philosophical and
cultural questions.
This is more than enough for
several lifetimes! Yet, if one were to
examine the life of Trotsky objectively,
one would be compelled to agree with
the appraisal which he himself made of it.
That is to say, despite all the extraordinary
achievements of Trotsky, the most
important period of his life was its last
ten years. Here one can say with absolute
certainty that he fulfilled a task which
nobody else could have fulfilled—namely,
the fight to defend the ideas of Bolshevism
and the spotless tradition of October in the
teeth of the Stalinist counterrevolution.
Here was Trotsky’s greatest and most
indispensable contribution to Marxism and
the world working class movement. It is an
achievement upon which we are building
to this day. The present article does not
pretend to be an exhaustive account of
Trotsky’s life and work. For that, not
an article but several volumes would be
needed. But if this very insufficient outline
serves to encourage the new generation to
read Trotsky’s writings for themselves, my
purpose will have been achieved.
The Early Beginnings
On 26th August 1879, just a
few months before the birth of Trotsky, a
small group of revolutionaries, members
of the underground terrorist organization
Narodnaya Volya, announced the death
sentence for the Russian Tsar, Alexander
II. Thus began a period of heroic struggles
of a handful of youths against the whole
of the state apparatus which was to
culminate on 1st March 1881 with the
assassination of the Tsar. These students
and young intellectuals hated tyranny and
were prepared to give their lives for the
emancipation of the working class, but
they believed that all that was needed to
“provoke” mass mobilizations was the
“propaganda of the accomplished fact”.
In reality, they attempted to substitute
the bomb and the machine gun for the
conscious movement of the working class.
The Russian terrorists actually
succeeded in assassinating the Tsar. In spite
of all this, all the efforts of the terrorists
led to nothing. Far from strengthening the
mass movement, the acts of terrorism had
the opposite effect of strengthening the
repressive apparatus of the state, isolating
and demoralizing the revolutionary
cadres and, in the end, leading to the
complete destruction of the Narodnaya
Volya organization. The mistake of the

“Populists” lay in a lack of understanding
of the fundamental processes of the Russian
revolution. In the absence of a strong
proletariat, the terrorists looked for another
social layer on which to base the socialist
revolution. They imagined that they had
found this in the peasantry. Marx and
Engels explained that the only class which
can carry out the socialist transformation
of society is the proletariat. In a backward
semi-feudal society like Tsarist Russia the
peasantry will play an important role as an
auxiliary of the working class, but cannot
substitute itself for it.
To begin with, the majority of
youth in Russia in the 1880s were not
attracted to the ideas of Marxism. They
had no time for “theory”: they demanded
action. With no understanding of the
need to win over the working class by
patiently explaining, they took up arms
to destroy Tsarism through individual
struggle. Lenin’s elder brother was a
terrorist. Trotsky started his political life in
a populist group and probably Lenin also
got involved in the same way. However,
populism was already in a process of
decline. By the 1890s what had been an
atmosphere permeated with heroism had
become one of depression, discontent
and pessimism among the circles of
intellectuals. And in the meantime, the
labor movement had entered the scene of
history with the impressive strike wave
of the 1890s. Within a few years, the
superiority of the Marxist “theoreticians”
compared to the “practical” individual
terrorists had been proved by experience
itself with the spectacular growth in the
influence of Marxism in the working class.
Beginning first with small
Marxist circles and discussion groups,
the new movement became more and
more popular among the workers. Among
the young activists of the new generation
of revolutionaries, was the young Lev
Davidovich Bronstein, who began his
revolutionary career in March 1897, in
Nikolaev, where he organized the first
illegal workers’ organization, the South
Russian Workers’ Union. Lev Davidovich
was arrested for the first time when he was
only 19 years old and spent two and a half
years in prison, after which he was exiled
to Siberia. But he soon escaped and, using
a false passport, succeeded in getting out
of Russia and joining Lenin in London. In
one of those ironies in which history is so
rich, the name on the passport was Trotsky,
the name of one of the jailers which Lev
Davidovich has chosen at random and was
later to gain world-wide fame.