En Passant

On the 75th anniversary of the assassination of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Sue Caldwell in Socialist Worker UK asked last year if his ideas could help activists fighting for another world today

As fascism organises in Australia today, Trotsky’s thinking about the squaddism of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s seems to me to contain important lessons for the left today.

Trotsky: Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity—one’s own and that of other people.

We socialists are not and cannot be fundamentalists. We are scientific socialists and Marxism is the science of proletarian revolution, not the unthinking repetition of sacred texts.

Sometimes as we beaver away at our lives, and in my case my writing, studying and working, and as we engage in the political debates and struggles of the day, we can lose sight of our ultimate objective, a society where we can be fully human at last.

The ultimate defeat of the Russian revolution has little to do with the Bolsheviks at all. Debate about this or that policy of Lenin or the Bolsheviks in the period following the revolution is really a bit of a sideshow to the much more significant fact that the Russian working-class was simply unable to hold onto power.

Trotsky’s defense of the soul of Marxism–that socialism must be the self-emancipation of the working class–in the face of Stalin’s distortions preserved the tradition for a new generation to discover, first in the 1960s and ’70s, and later after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. [And now, I might add, as resistance sweeps the globe from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe and the US and onto Russia, China and Chile, to name a few, we might add to that list those being radicalised by the events of 2011 and to come in 2012. JP.]

There was a reason why Stalin wanted to kill Trotsky, even in exile. Trotsky and his ideas represented a real alternative to the dictatorship against the workers that Stalin had set up.

Ainsi la vie et l’oeuvre de Trotsky nous permet d’envisager deux voies alternatives : le pouvoir des travailleurs aurait pu se maintenir, Hitler aurait pu être écrasé dans l’oeuf. C’est pourquoi les écrits de Trotsky restent importants pour l’anticapitaliste duXIe siècle.

Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.