-· ,.. rD C. er c.c :c --· - - rD --·I -· -· r, ::r 0J - rD r, 0 X The Ideas of Leon Trotsky Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox The Ideas of Leon Trotsky Porcupine Press Published by Porcupine Press, 10 Woburn Walk, London WClH 0JL 1995 Porcupine Press © Text processing and interior layout by Paul Flewers Cover by Catlin Harrison Photograph processing by Lesley Thompson Printed in Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford ISBN 1 89 943804 1 Contents Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox, The Ideas of Leon Trotsky ..................... 1 Political Economy Hillel Ticktin, Leon Trotsky and the 'Russian Mode of Production': The Political Economy of Taking Power in the Russian Empire .......... 23 Hillel Ticktin, Leon Trotsky and the Social Forces Leading to Bureaucracy, 1923-29 .............................................................................. 45 Hillel Ticktin, Leon Trotsky's Political Economic Analysis of the USSR, 1929-40 ........................................................................................ 65 Hillel Ticktin, Leon Trotsky's Political Economy of Capitalism ............. 87 Politics, Philosophy and Culture Lynne Poole, Lenin and Trotsky: A Question of Organisational Form? 111 Antonio Carlo, Trotsky and the Party: From Our Political Tasks to the October Revolution ............................................................................. 147 Stephen Dabydeen, Trotsky, the United States of Europe and National Self-Determination .............................................................................. 163 Michael Lowy, From the Logic of Hegel to the Finland Station in Petrograd ............................................................................................. 187 David Gorman, The Political Economy of Defeat: Leon Trotsky and the Problems of the Transitional Epoch .............................................. 201 Alan Wald, Literature and Revolution: Leon Trotsky's Contributions to Marxist Cultural Theory and Literary Criticism ................................ 219 History David Law, The Left Opposition in 1923 ................................................ 235 Richard Day, The Myth of the 'Super-Industrialiser': Trotsky's Economic Policies in the 1920s ............................................................ 253 Susan Weissman, The Left Opposition Divided: The Trotsky-Serge Disputes ................................................................................................ 269 Debating Trotsky Michael Cox, The Revolutionary Betrayed: The New Left Review and Leon Trotsky ........................................................................................ 289 Michael Cox, Trotsky's Misinterpreters and the Collapse of Stalinism ... 305 David Law, How Not to Interpret Trotsky ............................................. 317 John Molyneux, How Not to Interpret Trotsky-Again ...................... 329 Loren Goldner, Trotskyism and Trotsky: Pierre Broue as Biographer ... 333 Trotsky and the World Economy Leon Trotsky, Two Speeches on Developments in the World Economy 341 Leon Trotsky, On Party Education ......................................................... 371 Index ......................................................................................................... 377 Notes on Contributors The Editors Hillel Ticktin was educated at Cape Town and Moscow Universities. He is Reader at the Institute of Russian and East European Studies and Chairman of the Centre for the Study of Socialist Theory and Movements at Glasgow University, where he has taught for 30 years. He is the author of numerous articles on the So viet Union, in which he argued well before 1991 that it was doomed to collapse. His book The Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System, appeared in 1992. He has also written a book on South Af rica, and various articles on the nature of modern capitalism. He is the editor of the journal Critique, which was founded in 1973. Michael Cox was educated at Reading and Glasgow Universities. He was Reader in Politics at Queen's University in Belfast until he transferred to the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth in September 1995. He is Chairman of the Irish Slavists Association, and is on the editorial boards of a number of journals. He has written extensively on the nature of the Cold War and on US foreign pol icy in relation to the Soviet Union and Russia. He is one of the founding editors of Critique. His analysis of the Cold War as a system is one of the most important pieces to have been published on the subject. The Authors Antonio Carlo is a Professor at the University of Cagliari, Italy, and author of many works on the former Soviet Union. Stephen Dabydeen is writing his thesis on Trotsky's views on nationalism. Richard Day is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Toronto University, and author of many works on Trotsky, Soviet economic thought and Soviet economic history, including Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Eco- nomic Isolation and The 'Crisis' and the 'Crash': Soviet Studies of the West, 1917- 1939. Loren Goldner lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has written extensively on political, historical and economic issues. David Gorman is a member of the editorial board of Radical Chains. David Law is an historian at the University of Keele. He wrote his PhD on Trot sky and the Soviet Union. John Molyneux has written a number of books and articles on Marxist themes, including Leon Trotsky's Theory ofR evolution. Lynne Poole taught at the Department of Social Administration and Social Work at the University of Glasgow, and now teaches at the Department of Social Work at Edinburgh University. Alan Wald teaches at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is a member of the editorial board of Against the Current, and has written a number of substan tial works on literary and intellectual themes, including The Revolutionary Imagi nation: The Poetry and Politics ofJ ohn Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan; James T Far rell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years; The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and De cline of the Anti-Stalinist Left and The Responsibility of the Intellectuals: Selected Es says on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment. Susan Weissman is Associate Professor at St Mary's College, California, and author of many works on the former Soviet Union, Victor Serge and socialism. She is a long time member of the editorial board of Critique, and is also an editor of Against the Current. · The Illustrations The photographs reproduced in this book were taken by Alexander Buchman, an aeronautical engineer and amateur photographer, during a five month stay at the Trotsky household in Coyoacan, Mexico, in 1939-40. During this period, he was enlisted to improve the security system of the premises, and he served as a guard to fill a temporary vacancy. His motion pictures and still photographs of Trotsky are amongst the last taken prior to his assassination. Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox The Ideas of Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein, or Trotsky (1879-1940), was arguably the greatest ora tor of the twentieth century, certainly one of its finest writers, and undoubtedly one of its most influential revolutionary theoreticians. His talents were by any measure considerable; certainly quite extraordinary in comparison with those who have stood in judgement of him over the years. He was a brilliant organiser, and was in fact, according to Lenin, 'too much drawn to the administrative side of things'. He had an enormous intellectual range, making important contributions to the study of Tsarist Russia, literary theory, revolutionary history and our un derstanding of fascism in a world turned upside down by war and depression. Trotsky was also a principled and brave human being who refused to compromise with Stalin, something that cost both him and his family dear. He was no political saint, of course. As one of the two men bearing the greatest responsibility for the defence of the early Soviet state, that would have been nigh impossible. Nor was he always correct. In fact, some of his arguments now seem plainly bizarre, espe cially his mature characterisation of the USSR as a workers' state, and his strangely upbeat discussion about what was being achieved economically in the Soviet Un ion in the 1930s. Some have even argued, with some justification (though with lit tle understanding of revolutionary psychology) that Trotsky was too much of an optimist as well. Yet even at his most optimistic, he never lost his objectivity. And when he was wrong or ambiguous, he was generally more interesting than those who are always right, but never actually say anything. Indeed, frequently locked away within some of his less assured assessments (notably those written in exile about the Soviet Union), there was more often than not a rational kernel of truth straining to get out. Even his mistakes live on in the works of those who might