Restoration or Totalization

Some Notes on Trotsky's Biography of Stalin and on the Revolutionary Problem of Our Time
(By Karl Korsch, Boston)

This book on Stalin, the man and his influence, [Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, by Leon Trotsky. Edited and Translated by Charles Halamuth. $5. Harper, New York, 1946] is much more than just another contribution to the history of the Russian revolution by an author who has excelled in the writing of history almost as much as in its making. In this respect Trotsky's latest work does not match the former masterpieces of his pen on the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. A mere biography of that "mediocrity though not a non-entity" that is Stalin, could not have attained the significance of those works dealing with great historical events and the action of the revolutionary masses, even if it had been brought to conclusion by the author himself. As it happened, this last great work of Trotsky remained uncompleted merely in its literary form. Its real conclusion was brought about by history itself, when the pickaxe of Stalin's assassin plunged into Trotsky's head in Coyoacan in August, 1940. If we accept Trotsky's description of his lifelong struggle with the forces that created Stalin and are focussed in his position to-day, there could not be a more fitting symbol of the permanent conflict between the "idea" and "the machine that had grown out of ideas, but had become an end of itself," than this violent termination of the unending controversy between the two chief claimants to Lenin's heritage in the protracted aftermath of the Russian revolution.

If we were to sum up, in a few words, the main importance of Trotsky's book and of the tremendous mass of material presented in it, we would call it a great book on revolution, and on revolutionaries, a "school for revolutionaries" rather than a piece of historical scholarship. The impressive amount of scholarship that actually is contained in this last effort of Trotsky to revindicate the true nature of the Russian revolution against more than twenty years of increasingly more flagrant distortion and falsification will not assert its full importance until that future epoch when the historical truth about all the relevant facts, documents, and personalities of the great revolution of our time will be gradually re-established.

The historical truth about the Russian revolution will then be re-discovered by a sequence of critical historians just as the truth about Danton, Robespierre, and the still more leftist undercurrents of the great French revolution were re-discovered after the final collapse of the Napeolonic [sic] myth in the second half of the nineteenth century through the work of several generations of historical scholars.

At the present moment only a few people outside the dwindling ranks of the various Trotskyist factions will be able and willing to check page by page, document by document, the official History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as written by Stalin in 1938 [Edited by a Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B). International Publishers, New York, 1939.] with the facts and arguments presented by Trotsky in its painstaking refutation. For the ordinary reader it is even necessary to keep constantly in mind the physical cruelty represented by the pickaxe of Stalin's emissary to counteract the impression of a certain "mental cruelty" which is inevitably created by the constant display of the crushing superiority of Trotsky over the narrow-minded "practico" who certainly was no orator, no scholar and no tribune, but nevertheless contrived to "survive" all his competitors in that ignominious struggle for leadership that began before Lenin's death and has not ended to-day. There was, of course, no possibility even for "Pero" to keep his obnoxious comparison between the writer and his subject completely out of the picture. He has done what he could to refrain from that endless self-quotation and self-glorification and incredibly poisonous vilification of the rival and enemy that runs through Stalin's "History" of the Russian party. He would say at most that he has to admit, in retrospect, the rightness of the Opposition of 1926-27, and the "intellectual and political superiority of the representatives of the Opposition over the majority of the Politburo" that is clearly apparent in each line of the Oppositionist documents (p. 399). Rather than comparing the person of his antagonist to his own, he would compare Stalin's relationship to Lenin with that of Sverdlov or, in an impressive number of cases, confront Stalin's behavior in a definite historical situation with that of Lenin himself. Thus, when he tries to answer the particularly relevant question "What did Koba (Stalin) really do in 1905" he quotes a speech made by Stalin after the events of January the twenty-second (Bloody Friday), and confronts it with the words written at the same occasion by Lenin. Says Stalin:

Let us hold out our hands to each other and rally around our Party's committees. we must not forget even for a minute that only the Party committees can worthily lead us, only they will light our way to the Promised Land. . . .

And this is, in contrast, the appeal that was addressed to the defeated masses during those very days from far-off Geneva, by Lenin:

Make way for the anger and hatred that have accumulated in your hearts throughout the centuries of exploitation, suffering, and grief!

This, incidentally, also serves to illustrate what was said before about the real significance of Trotsky's work as a great book on revolution and on revolutionaries.

Every action, or failure to act, every word or written document, are duly connected with the full content of a given situation and with the concrete decision to be made in that situation. in this manner even a few words, like those quoted, which were written into an article of one of his collaborators by Lenin, the exile, in 1905, reveal those tremendous forces which were just then entering into the mortal struggle that has not been decided even to-day, after forty years' duration.

II.
In spite of the pragmatic value of its detailed analysis of an impressive array of revolutionary phenomena and developments, this great book of Trotsky does not give an unambiguous account of the underlying historical process as a whole. It is amazing to see that just when he frees himself from the crippling obligation to discuss the course of the obligation to discuss the course of the Russian revolution in terms of the biography of an individual person and proceeds to a theoretical analysis of the process as a whole, the author seems to relapse into the old schematic concept imposed on the thinking of all nineteenth century revolutionary theorists by the impact of the great (bourgeois) revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. According to this concept, every revolution, with the possible exception of the ultimate and completely victorious world revolution of the proletarian class, had to pass through a sequence of more or less definite phases in which the first progressive movement of the ascending phase is afterwards bent back, in the descending phase, to a sort of cycle. After the climax, which was conceived according to the pattern of the capitalistic dictatorships of Cromwell and Robespierre, came "Thermidor," or the first attack of the representatives of a new class that wanted to bring the revolutionary process to a speedy termination.

This first attack, which was still clothed in revolutionary disguise, was then followed by a series of other phases that were to lead, with or without a further postponement by an intervening period of great wars, to an ultimate "Restoration"; the latter being conceived not as a simple return to the pre-revolutionary regime, but as tantamount to the final termination of the revolution and to a new equilibrium of the officially recognized forces of the new society that had emerged from the revolution.

In this manner, also the prospects of the so-called socialist revolution of 1917 and of the attempts at its further and ultimately world-wide extension were conceived by all the factions of the Russian Bolshevist Party, and, in fact, by an overwhelming majority of all revolutionary parties and movements in Europe and in the whole world.

The most urgent question after October was for the victorious faction itself and for all its opponents inside and outside of Russia, and has remained for some of them until the present day, the question whether and when the Thermidor of the Russian revolution would arrive. Trotsky himself, who had far too long continued to speak of "Thermidor" as a threat of the future, changed his mind in 1935 and set the date of the Russian Thermidor back to some time in the middle twenties. Yet even in the painstaking theoretical analysis of "The Thermidorian Reaction" that is contained in his last book, written one year before Pearl Harbor, we do not find any clear answer to the obvious question of why in the world, if "Thermidor" has really arrived, and if the "Thermidorian Bureaucracy" has won its victory only with the support of the surviving remnants of the old bourgeoisie and the newly arisen strata of a new economically privileged minority, the unwinding of the spool of progressive social conquests has not been continued to its next logical step by the overthrow of the Thermidorian Bureaucracy itself. It is certainly not enough to say that "Obviously the bureaucracy did not rout the proletarian vanguard, pull free from the complications of the international revolution, and legitimize the philosophy of inequality in order to capitulate before the bourgeoisie, become the latter's servant, and be eventually itself pulled away from the State feedbag."

The real question is why after paralyzing the last remaining forces of a possible proletarian resistance and thereby destroying the uneasy balance of the conflicting class forces on which its own power had been based until then, the Thermidorian bureaucracy was still able to maintain its ruling position in what had become, in Trotsky's own words, "a direct struggle for power and income"
This is not the place to present in detail a positive answer to this great problem of our time. We can only indicate the direction in which such an answer must be sought. What actually happened in Russia after 1927 can no longer be understood in the traditional terms of the revolutionary "cycle."

Until that date the historical analogy could be applied at least with a semblance of justification. The first phase of the Russian October revolution (or the second, if we count in the period from February to October as its first phase) had really reached its climax and proceeded to its "Thermidor" not later than 1920 or 1921. After the destruction of the revolutionary vanguard at Kronstadt and the transition from the later so-called War Communism of the first heroic years to the Nep and Neo-Nep the whole elan of the first phase of the Bolshevik revolution had actually exhausted itself by 1927 or 1928.

Yet there was no overthrow of the "Thermidorian" bureaucracy and no continuous process towards a "Restoration."

The true reason for this "anomaly" is only vaguely hinted at by Trotsky again by a much stronger emphasis on a number of other, and quite heterogenous reasons, when he says that bourgeois rule had by that time "proved obsolete throughout the world." (P. 406)

What had happened was, phrased in the language of the traditional terms, the fact that many years after Thermidor the backward movement of the revolutionary development towards a full-fledged bourgeois restoration was caught in a new and, in a sense, no less revolutionary world-wide process. "Bourgeois rule" had not "proved obsolete," but had won a new lease on life and a powerful rejuvenation through its transition from 19th century capitalism to 20th century totalitarianism.

This transitional process has been and is being carried out in many different forms in the most highly developed capitalist countries of Asia. Its most original and most far-reaching results have not been achieved by the counter-revolutionary exploits of Mussolini and Hitler and their minor associates. They have been been initiated by Lenin's and Stalin's and, for that matter, by Trotsky's revolution in Russia, and have been carried out in a much more unambiguous fashion by that second phase of the totalitarian revolution in Eurasia that is marked by the three five-year plans, 1928-1941, and by the second world war, 1941-1945. The unexpected failure of all attempts to liquidate this war and to create some kind of a new equilibrium, stability, and, maybe, a new prosperity for the capitalist system without an ever-increasing recourse to totalitarian methods or a new full-fledged totalitarian war reveals, at the same time, the reason why the first great anti-capitalist revolution of the 20th century has ended neither in Socialism nor in Restoration, but in a potentially world-wide Totalization.

(Reprinted from International Correspondence, July, 1946.)

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