Workers' Liberty

When the great powers of Europe went to war in August 1914, Leon Trotsky was living in Vienna. Fearing arrest, he fled to Switzerland for three months. In November 1914 he moved to France as a war correspondent for Kievskaya Mysl, a liberal newspaper for which he had worked since 1909, including during the Balkan wars (1912-13). Trotsky was a participant in the anti-war socialist conferences of Zimmerwald (September 1915) and Kienthal (April 1916), which laid the basis for a new international. He was deported from France in October 1916, travelling through Spain, where he was briefly imprisoned, arriving in New York in January 1917. He left for Russia at the end of March 1917, and there, with Lenin, helped lead the revolution that created the world’s first workers’ state.

This book by Ian Thatcher is an ambivalent contribution to our understanding this period of Trotsky’s life. Thatcher provides an account of the 16 articles Trotsky wrote for Kievskaya Mysl, and information about Trotsky’s articles in socialist newspapers such as Nashe Slovo (published in Paris) which has not appeared in English before.

But Thatcher also claims that when Trotsky, after the Russian revolution of 1917, put together a collection of his writings against World War 1 (War and Revolution, 1922), he deliberately excluded most of the articles in which he polemicised with Lenin, and “falsified” other articles to make it appear that Lenin’s views converged with his own. Thatcher says that an examination of the documents reveals “a story of almost continuous opposition between Trotsky and Lenin”.

Whether Trotsky’s editing was suspect or not — and I think Thatcher makes too much of it — could only be judged by comparing the text of War and Revolution with the original articles. In any case, the differences between Lenin and Trotsky are very well known even from the collections currently available — the Stalinists certainly made sure Lenin’s polemics against Trotsky were widely available in print.

Trotsky did not accept Lenin’s slogan of “defeatism”, and promoted slogans for peace and for the United States of Europe which Lenin rejected at times during the war. Whether their views fundamentally diverged is a different matter altogether.

Lenin argued that Russia’s defeat in the war would be a lesser evil for Russian socialists. It was a formula Lenin used to demarcate the Bolsheviks from other socialist opponents of the war. By contrast, Trotsky wrote that, “under no condition can I agree with your opinion, which is emphasized by a resolution, that Russia’s defeat would be a ‘lesser evil’. This opinion represents a fundamental connivance with the political methodology of social patriotism, a connivance for which there is no reason or justification, and which substitutes an orientation (extremely arbitrary under present conditions) along the line of a ‘lesser evil’ for the revolutionary struggle against war and the conditions which generate this war” — “Open Letter to the Editorial Board of Kommunist”, June 1915 (Pearce 1961: p. 32).

Trotsky never came round to Lenin’s view on this. When he came to write the theses War and the Fourth International in 1934, Trotsky omitted the slogan of “defeatism” from his first draft. Under pressure from his comrades, he then incorporated the term, with a content different from Lenin’s original use but compatible with Trotsky’s own old views (Joubert, 1988). He wrote that, “Lenin’s formula ‘defeat is the lesser evil’ means not that the defeat of one’s own country is the lesser evil as compared with the enemy country but that a military defeat resulting from the growth of the revolutionary movement is infinitely more beneficial to the proletariat and to the whole people than military victory assured by civil peace.”

Did Lenin come round to Trotsky’s opinion on “defeatism”? We know only that Lenin never again took up “defeatism” systematically after 1917; and, as Hal Draper pointed out, there is “not even a hint of any kind of the defeat slogan in any of the documents of the first four congresses of the Comintern… It played no part in the programme, policy, and principles of the Communist International under Lenin” (2001: pp. 98, 99).

We also know that during 1916, Lenin’s attitude towards the slogan of peace began to change as war-weariness became more evident among the soldiers.

And the United States of Europe? Both Trotsky, in his pamphlet War and the International, and the Bolsheviks’ first manifesto in November 1914, called for a Republican United States of Europe (p. 43). It was part of the culture of the Social Democracy before the war — Kautsky had formulated the slogan as early as 1908. At the Bern conference (1915), Lenin advocated the slogan politically, but also said it needed to be evaluated more fully from an economic point of view.

By the middle of 1915, Lenin had decided against the slogan. He wrote in Socialism and War that, “Either this is a demand that is unrealisable under capitalism, proposing the establishment of a regulated world economy under a share-out of colonies, spheres of influence and so on. Or this slogan is reactionary, signifying a temporary alliance of the great powers of Europe for a more successful exploitation of the colonies and for robbing the more quickly developing Japan and America.” (p. 67).

Trotsky accepted Lenin’s distinctions between the political and economic sides of the question, and between a bourgeois and a socialist United States of Europe. He agreed that in conditions of imperialist war, the bourgeois unification of Europe was a utopia, or it would be partial and reactionary from an economic point of view (e.g., following a German victory). Nevertheless, he argued that, “If the capitalist states of Europe succeeded in merging into an imperialist trust, this would be a step forward as compared with the existing situation, for it would first of all create a unified, all-European material base for the working class movement” — The Peace Programme (1916).

Trotsky also criticised Lenin’s inconsistency on the political side: Lenin was willing to accept the possibility of the right of nations to self-determination (i.e., the demarcation of states) as realisable in the present epoch, and yet refusing to allow for the possibility of a democratic unification of states. He also argued that the slogan of a United States of Europe emphasised the interdependency of the European working class, and the necessity of international coordination in making a proletarian revolution. The slogan for Trotsky was a bridge between the conditions of war which divided the European working class, and the aspirations for a socialist revolution across the continent.

In 1923, during the Ruhr crisis, Trotsky raised the slogan of a United States of Europe once more (Pravda, June 30, 1923). Again he defined it as a transitional slogan, like the demand for a workers’ government, a bridge between the crisis situation and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Executive of the Comintern took up the political line shortly afterwards on Trotsky’s proposal and in the teeth of opposition (although not from Lenin). It was not until the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI (November-December 1926) that the slogan was finally cast out of the Comintern. Trotsky made its omission the starting point of his critique of Bukharin’s draft programme at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (1928), and included the slogan in his later major programmatic documents.

Although he admires Trotsky’s foresight and appears to accept the slogan, Thatcher does not even take us as far as the Comintern discussion, and only alludes to its present day prescience. Support for the slogan does not equate with support for the organisation of the European Union, in fact it points to the limited, partial development of bourgeois institutions, and demands their democratisation. But it recognises that the EU is fundamentally a reflection of the drive by capitalism to knit the world together into larger economic units, and it points to international working class unity as the answer to capitalist integration, as opposed to the reactionary separation into national states.

I think Thatcher is fundamentally wrong on the divergence between Lenin and Trotsky. The disagreements on “defeatism”, as on other matters, were revived artificially in 1924, by Zinoviev and others, as part of the campaign of the Stalinist bureaucracy to discredit Trotsky. Unfortunately the author of this book lacks any sympathy with Trotsky’s rationale for subsequently seeking to minimise his wartime differences with Lenin, and writes as if the fight against Stalinism was merely an argument among epigones. Thatcher’s sneers about Trotsky’s delay in joining of the Bolshevik party, “What kept him so long?” (p. 213), and about why he worked for Kievskaya Mysl (Trotsky never enjoyed the comforts of the university chair, but still had to earn a living) are hardly in keeping with the seriousness of the subject matter. That, together with Thatcher’s tendentious interpretation of Trotsky’s relations with Lenin, undermines what might have been a very interesting book.

Paul Hampton