Trotsky: the Hero as Symbol

...into "the ash-can of History...

...but it hardly needs to be demonstrated...

...In the Diary he says...

...But when all that is said, it remains true—and it is about time that we recognized it—that Trotsky was, in his own terms, a political failure: he lost out in the struggle to preserve the revolution in Russia, and he did not succeed in building an effective new International...

...I would like to suggest that what most characterizes Leon Trostky, and the revolutionary generation he symbolizes, are: 1) the dominance of ideas...

...This was the aspect of Trotsky's personality, indeed of Marxism itself, which most appealed to intellectuals...

...And all the previous struggle toward purity of idea was supposed to be justified because it was needed in actual revolutionary situations...

...Even in the midst of the struggle with Stalin he found time to write Literature and Revolution...

...that by and large his failure was socialism's failure...

...A noble, imaginative conception, which seemed to be the one idea to which all previous notions had tended (especially, it must be admitted, for young intellectuals who were just finding out how deeply troublesome it was to be such...

...But not according to Trotsky...

...and like religion they result in effects in the world of affairs that are too inward, overly symbolic, and at last grotesque...

...and 3) the fanatic belief in ideological purity...

...Malraux fascinates intellectuals for the same reason, even though the connection between Malraux the intellectual and Malraux the activist is frequently obscure...

...Trotsky was aware, and asserts it in his History, this Diary and elsewhere, that the long years of training in right-thinking under Lenin did not make the Bolsheviks "right-thinkers" without Lenin (e.g., Stalin and Kamenev in April 1917 before Lenin arrived in Russia...

...Without Lenin, however, this group revealed the ravages of his tigLt leadership, which relied so much on purism...

...The desire of intellectuals is for symbol, not for the "best" effectiveness (especially if it is mediocre) of idea or act...

...he has risen above a time and a place, a set of circumstances which put an iron limit on what one can do or be without distortion...

...I think Trotsky did not really comprehend what Lenin had done, which perhaps explains why he imitat1 him so ineptly or slavishly...

...An example of this was his mishandling of the opportunities presented to him by the Spanish situation, which was actually and not just potentially revolutionary...

...Unlike Lenin, Trotsky was not politician enough to do this skillfully: his purity was personal...

...These gentlemen think they can cheat history...

...Ideas, indeed, must be religious in function if one is to devote "everything" to them...

...When the idea of class allegiance, for example, can so fully dominate one that a person thought to be without it is said to have entered "individualistic nonexistence," as Trotsky says of Emma Goldman, I suggest that the stage of the grotesque has been reached...

...is the most important work of my life—more important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any other...

...THE FIRST CHARACTERIZING feature, the dominance of ideas in Trotsky's life, is proven once again in the recently published Trotsky's Diary in Exile: 1935...

...This elite utilized ideas as a means of control, first over themselves and then as an avenue to power over others...

...Also, please realize that it is not part of my argument that ideas and ideas-in-ac tion and clear-thinking have somehow become irrelevant or dangerous to the socialist movement...

...but Trotsky appears as the dramatically superior individual who condescended to act with and for the Bolsheviks when, because of Lenin only, they were approximately as correct as he...

...He was, rather, a tribune of the people: he is reputed to have been a magnificent speaker before mass audiences...

...If the genius-leader believes in purity personally, as an element of his own psychic economy, that is his concern...

...For Lenin the politician, and after him Stalin the monster, used purism more or less consciously to create a system of allegiance based on guilt...

...All that was required for membership was a sufficiently profound hatred of American life to frighten the isolated individual, and enough involvement in that life to facilitate the transposition of that hatred and fear into guilt...

...I simply wish here to urge a proposition concerning revolutionary purism which, it seems to me, has some relevance to the intellectual reconstruction of socialism...

...Given,, however, the intensity of the first two that one would expect in the life of a genius like Trotsky, together with the circumstance of isolated frustration of the revolutionary, and it seems to me that the pressure of all this on the third element would create—and in Trotsky's case, did create— a highly distorted revolutionary purism, which in turn contributed substantially to his political failures...

...Freud thought that guilt had created the first brotherhood...

...But labor politicians, who also are supposed to act on "ideas," do not inspire because both their ideas and their acts are mediocre...

...There is a transcendant irony in the fact that Trotsky's intellectual purity, which he believed in passionately as an indispensable requirement for political action, should have contributed to his failure as a political activist and his success as— the phrase would have choked him— a moral symbol...

...I think this fact should be accepted as a tenet of socialist reconstruction...

...The commander of the military train remained a literary man...

...He was the last of the great revolutionary Marxists, and we may never see their like again...

...U THE IDENTIFICATION with History, the use of the idea of history in such a personal fashion, typifies the worst uses and effects of ideational purity— which is the third, and most important and distinctive Trotskyan element...

...Describing a somber landscape, he reflects: "Life is not an easy matter...

...Their effort was to wring as much power-utility out of ideas as they could, and by sparing no one and nothing they did indeed create a new political technique...

...It is the fate of many heroes...

...Now let us grant the highest motives to Trotsky and the revolutionary elite of his generation...

...To assert that the human being loses something essential, even in politics, by this deadly overemphasis on ideas and the ideological is not at all to hold a brief for mindlessness...

...But when he insists that non-geniuses be pure, and defines purity for them, we are concerned with the social efficacy of purism, not the inner nature of leadership...

...Any of these can be overdone and lead to distortions...

...In this system of revolutionary ideology, workers are never wrong, they are merely backward or misguided...

...Influences of this kind, enmeshing themselves in the early emotional sources of ideals, tend to persist— no less for those who have loudly negated the ideal than for those who still harbor it quietly and tenderly...

...And if the point is always to be right, then we are all murderers...

...but he also felt that it had been carried to unbearable lengths in the modern world...

...2) the need and willingness to act on them...

...Purism should be seen as an emotional, inutile factor in socialist thinking and organizational control, certainly in all but the most immediately revolutionary situations...

...or the waywardness of history itself, no one of which, however, is irrelevant to political ideas and action...

...We should recognize, however, that in the end this is not a certificate of truth but rather a literary quality...

...This is an eloquent statement of the almost religious utility of ideas in his life...

...then picked up momentum in the violently symbolic world of the emigre...

...Trotsky was the impresario of this music of revolutionary action, the symphonic development of which occurs in his History as nowhere else...

...This distinction is especially relevant to Trotsky, whose intellectual purity of character is perhaps in itself magnificent, but as an element projected by him into political action and control, I am suggesting, was disastrous...

...But great heroes remain vital as symbols—never more true than of Trotsky—if we can understand and forgive them for their errors and excesses...

...In this, however, we will not oblige...

...Whatever else it achieved, Trotsky's orientation toward action is undoubtedly responsible for the magnificently vibrating sense of urgency and authority in his writing...

...Many important human and intellectual qualities or possibilities were lost to them as individuals through the rigor of their intellectuality, the exclusive focus of thought on action, and through the relentless devotion to ideological purity —to "right-thinking": but no sacrifice was too great for them...

...The modes of ultimate devotion and fanaticism, which have achieved both magnificence and horror in history, are religious, if religion is the area of the ultimate in man...

...This process began slowly, with the choice of "scientific" Marxism rather than romantic anarchism...

...I do not emphasize the difference between purity by virtue of one's own thought and what might be called "delivered" purity because this is, really, only the difference between leader and led...

...Stupidity was generated by the nature of the Stalinist movement where it was not given freely by the membership...

...One more preliminary word: I beg the partisan reader to recognize that with such a man and such a subject, detailed argument is impossible in anything less than a fat book...

...This was and is its chief justification or "proof...

...He is aware of this himself, and suggests as a reason that "politics and literature constitute in essence the content of my personal life...

...It is only the intellectuals coming from petty bourgeois backgrounds—which is all of them, including Lenin and Trotsky and you and me—who are ever wrong...

...many times he merely pastes newspaper clippings, with underlinings and marginal comments, in the notebooks in which he kept the Diary...

...only so much can be achieved by means of them, even in the hands of a master...

...If he could speak to us now I think he would in self-disgust insist on being swept into the dust-bin of History...

...Because the diary is so personal a form of expression, Trotsky's impresses us by the absence of expected elements, by revealing the extent to which his entire being had become intellectually political...

...His nickname, in the early emigre days, was "The Pen...

...Can anyone who has had a good look at the middlebrow Stalinists in America really question that their group was, to invert one of their favorite phrases, an association by guilt...

...Purity is better than baseness by definition, but it is not necessarily more effective: and both compete in the same arena...

...Lenin is seen as the genuinely superior political strategist, creator and leader of the Bolshevik group...

...and finally became a "proven" article of faith with the collapse (or sell-out) of the Second International in 1914—which shattering event, they believed, was a direct result of the day-to-day disuse of ideas, the unwillingness to act on ideas, and the impurities introduced into the realm of ideas by reformism, all of which had preceded the debacle...

...Intellectuals are the ones who have so much to gain from right-thinking, so much to lose by a fall from grace...

...he alienated one not-quite-right-thinker after another...

...The power he left them was ultimately inherited by a man under whose jurisdiction right-thinking quickly became unabashed thoughtcontrol...

...It is more important to point out, simply, that ideas do not save one from either life or history...

...Trotsky was so great a figure that one can say that history might have been different if he had been more of a political leader and less of a pure symbol: his was a grandiose political failure...

...THE SECOND TROTSKYAN element—the need and willingness to act on ideas— also shows up in the Diary...

...And learn from their errors as well as their magnificence...

...Trotsky served as a hero to intellec tuals because of his capacity for action, his belief in it, and the fact (or illusion: it makes no difference) that action for him proceeded from ideas...

...That was the true donkey's end of revolutionary purism...

...His literary attack on the Third International and the monster at the head of it, carried on without the aid of peers and at the ultimate cost of his own life and the lives of most of his family, was—again in his own terms—an intellectual and moral victory only...

...But according to Lenin and Trotsky it is the only thing in history that, apparently, can be overcome by a pure act of will...

...What did revolutionary purism actually succeed in, viewed pragmatical ly...

...A dangerous and extreme device in any event, inducing guilt by purism is also a destructive waste of time unless you are doing so as a means of building an organization...

...And we are long past the time when, relying on the basically sentimental feeling that "it all could have been different," we can ignore this Stalinist caricature of revolutionary Marxism...

...The idea that class background, a continuing historical fact, can be transcended initially and then indefinitely by class allegiance, a continuing personal act, all accomplished by means of right-thinking, is called the "Vanguard" theory in revolutionary parlance...

...They will only cheat themselves...

...It does not make any difference if the guilt is derived from a true crime—namely, a falling away from class allegiance, a dissolving into class background: a time comes when there is no longer any advantage at all in the increase of guilt even of a murderer, and especially not to the murderer himself...

...They were forced to this, most obviously, because ideas were what they had at hand, they wanted political power, and so they determined to make ideas as effective an instrument as possible in achieving power...

...Trotsky then suggests that his may "take the form of a review of newspapers and periodicals...

...but with the emphasis on writing directed toward action and effect, suffused with the dream of action...

...that it was a political and certainly not a moral or literary failure...

...When the Diary begins to serve its personal function, he inhibits the impulse and diverts it to politics: at one point he feels his life to be like a prison, describes it as such for a few sentences, then abruptly interrupts himself: "But all this is trivial detail compared with the realization that the fascist reaction is moving closer every day...

...Since I realize that tempers are quickly touched when old political coals are raked over, let me try to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding by stating immediately that I consider Trotsky to have been magnificent in failure...

...You cannot live through it without falling into prostration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness...

...Under their stewardship, the mind of man had now at last been conscripted in toto to serve the socialist revolution...

...In this he achieved nothing, and in fact destroyed or ignored many possibilities which were his because of his commanding reputation and genius...

...And, again, it is not dependent on the truth for its effectiveness...

...still, the issue was power over people...

...One becomes a rightthinker by "overcoming" one's class background, and all failures in rightthinking are explained by reference to petty bourgeois factors—the "return of the repressed," more or less...

...So what began as a materialistic interpretation of life completed itself as one of the most original ideational penetrations of life in the history of man, a unique triumph of intellectually willed activity...

...He identified the excess of guilt in the maintenance of social adhesion as basically bourgeois and Christian...

...One explanation is that he never really succumbed to being a politician, in the organizational sense...

...I assume, moreover, that the reader has had some experience of the pull of ideological purism (and not necessarily in connection with Stalinism...

...While there are many affecting and even some revealing personal references, the pages of this desultory diary do indeed consist mostly of political comment on newspaper reports...

...And still he imitated Lenin in attempting to establish a system of right-thinking in the Fourth International...

...To which one cannot help but reply, perhaps softly, out of respect, And where is your party now...

...I think that the work in which I am engaged now...

...Nor does the assertion rest exclusively on a belief in spontaneity, recognition of the heterogeneous nature of man...

...The hero by his very essence is a distortion...

...THE Diary affords us something of an opportunity to reflect on the present relevance of our dead hero...

...And one should perhaps add, a kind of indigenous eagerness to substitute for thinking all those rituals for the alleviation of guilt which the movement provided...

...The image of Trotsky had a great influence at one time on many young radicals...

...In Trotsky's case we should learn, make indelible in our minds, the inefficacy of purism in radical politics: in a sense, he lived and died to teach this to us...

...The world was there to be changed, and only ideas-acted-on could change it...

...Now class background, let us remember—it used to be lost sight of—is an historical fact, not a matter of choice: it is not the same thing as class allegiance...

...It is typical of this mode that his opponents— whether bourgeois reformers, labor leaders, socialists, Stalinists, or whosoever—are assigned for their wrong-thinking to the ash-heap of History or, depending on the venom of the moment, to their place beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of History...

...We know now (or should) that one can purify oneself out of the possibility of political action, that perhaps Trotsky did just that with his attempted imitation of Lenin in the creation and management of the Fourth International...

...There will be no "socialism" worth having until we learn how to be wrong, with dignity...

...These brief notes begin inauspiciously with the statement: "The diary is not a literary form I am especially fond of...

...For him, purity saves: the vanguard is the vanguard...

...Even his famous or infamous identification of himself with History as a discrete essence is a literary or (if you prefer a term closer to politics) rhetorical creation...

...That is particularly the reason why we should be inspired by heroes, but never imitate them...

...Observing the bluff tactics of the Popular Front, he says: "In the good old days Victor Adler used to be a past master of such tactics, and where is his party now...

...Workers have either come to their inevitable class-consciousness (the only form of consciousness worth a damn), or they have not yet arrived there, but inevitably will...

...By means of it, Lenin was able to forge a tight-knit clique which under his brilliant leadership proved competent, using the ancient technique of a minority coup, to take power in a rapidly deteriorating situation...

...Even more than Lenin, he was the hero of the Bolshevik Revolution, that fabulous seizure of power which proved the efficacy of ideas—more the hero because of his superior literary ability, his intellectual arrogance, even the absence of those talents for organizational maneuvering that characterize the real politician, which Lenin certainly was and Trotsky just as certainly was not...

...It is almost as if the more these select revolutionaries repeated to themselves the tenets of the materialistic interpretation, the more fiercely they resolved to disprove them ("Yes, yes, but not really me"), until at last in the heart of their feelings that interpretation became the Great Lie and their willed activity became the Great Truth...

...The revolutionary Marxists became disastrously doctrinaire because they believed that right-thinking was an important historical force, like the historical determinants identified by Marx, but differing happily from the latter in that one could by an act of will join up with Inevitability...

...A hero is an artist in life, his work of art is his career, and like the artist he emphasizes and selects, lie distorts the material of life in favor of a fuller expression...

...WHATEVER ELSE IT IS, politics is always the attempt by some people to exercise power over other people, for particular purposes or for the pure joy of it...

...After a point, guilt—even in the service of the vanguard of the proletariat—becomes selfdefeating and thus an illegitimate means of control...

...The unique thing about Trotsky is that so profoundly literary a person ever became and remained so involved in politics...

...The end of a great tradition, he is, dead, a hero still...

...The publication of the Diary is a good occasion to rethink the Trotsky influence, for all the old chords are sounded in it, including what may be the chief one—that there was a nonpareil among men...

...Ideas are all...

...A revolutionary thinker may be very correct in his analyses and still accompany the reformists, Stalinists, etc...

...and certainly when he was not in Russia— twenty-five of his sixty years—his chief efforts were devoted to writing...

...But now we must understand what happened, that he became, contrary to his own most deeply felt design, a great moral symbol—one of the greatest of our century...

...and that, in failure, he remains one of the better reasons yet offered by the twentieth century for maintaining one's integral humanity...