Trotsky

More than just a protagonist, Trotsky is also a philosopher, an historian and a critic of the Revolution. Naturally, no leader of the Revolution can lack a clear and panoramic vision of its roots and genesis. Lenin, for example, set himself apart with his singular faculty for perceiving and grasping the direction of contemporary history and the meaning of its events. But Lenin’s penetrating studies were limited to political and economic questions. Trotsky, on the other hand, has taken interest in the consequences of the Revolution in philosophy and art as well.

Trotsky grapples with the writers and artists who announce the advent of a new art, the birth of a proletarian art. Does the Revolution already possess its own art? Trotsky shakes his head. “Culture,” he writes, “is not the first phase of well-being, but the final result.” The proletariat currently spends its energies on the fight to take down the bourgeoisie and resolve its economic, political and educational problems in work. The new order is still too embryonic, too incipient; it remains in a period of formation. A proletarian art cannot appear just yet. Trotsky defines the development of art as the highest testimony of an age’s value and vitality. The art of the proletariat will not be occupied with describing episodes of the revolutionary fight, but rather describing the life emanating from the revolution, of its fruits and creations. It is not, then, the time to be speaking of a new art. Art, like the new social order, is undergoing a period of trial and error. “The revolution will find its image in art once it ceases to be a cataclysm foreign to art.” The new art will be produced by men of a new type. The conflict between the dying reality and the nascent one will last for many years. These years will be years of combat and discomfort. Only once these years have run their course, when the new human society has been cemented and secured, will the necessary conditions exist for the development of a proletarian art. What will the essential traits of this future art be? Trotsky offers some predictions. In his judgment, the art of the future will be “irreconcilable with pessimism, skepticism, and all other forms of intellectual grovelling. It will be full of creative faith, a limitless faith in the future.” This is certainly not an arbitrary thesis. The hopelessness, nihilism, and moroseness that contemporary literature exhibits in various doses are characteristic signals of a fatigued, worn out and decadent society. Youth is optimistic, positive and cheerful; old age is skeptical, negative and quarrelsome. The art and philosophy of a young society will consequently also have a different tenor than the art and philosophy of a senile society.

Trotsky’s thought penetrates other conjectures and interpretations along these lines. The efforts of bourgeois culture and its intelligentsia are mainly directed at the improvement of production’s methods and technology. Science is applied, above all, to the constant perfection of mechanization. The interests of the dominant class are incompatible with the rationalization of production; and incompatible, therefore, with the rationalization of customs. Humanity’s preoccupations are ultimately utilitarian. Profit and savings are this epoch’s ideal. The accumulation of wealth emerges as human life’s ultimate end. So be it. The new order, the revolutionary order, will rationalize and humanize customs. It will resolve the problems which the bourgeois order, due to its structure and purpose, is impotent to solve. It will make way for women’s liberation from domestic servitude, assure children’s social education, liberate marriage from economic concerns. Socialism, so often accused and branded as materialistic, turns out to be, from this point of view, a vindication, a rebirth of the spiritual and moral values oppressed by capitalist methods and organization. If material interests and ambitions prevail in the capitalist epoch, the proletarian epoch’s modalities and institutions will draw from ethical interests and ideals.

Trotsky’s dialectic leads us to an optimistic vision of the future of the West and Humanity. Spengler heralds the total decadence of the West; according to his theory, socialism is but one more stage in the trajectory of a civilization. Trotsky affirms only the crisis of bourgeois culture, the retreat of the capitalist order. This old and worn out society and culture are disappearing; a new culture, a new society are emerging from its entrails. The rise of a new dominant class, more extensive in its roots, more dynamic in its content than the previous one, will rekindle and nourish the moral and mental energies of mankind. Human progress will then appear divided into the following principle stages: antiquity (the slave system); middle ages (the system of servitude); capitalism (the salary system); and socialism (the system of social equality). The twenty, thirty or fifty years the proletarian revolution will last, says Trotsky, will mark an age of transition.

Is this man, such a subtle and profound theorist, the same man who rallied and reviewed the red army? Some people may only know the martial, uniformed Trotsky of so many portraits and caricatures, the Trotsky in the armored train, Trotsky, Minister of War and Generalissimo, the Trotsky who threatens Europe with a Napoleonic invasion. But in reality, this Trotsky does not exist. The press has invented this Trotsky almost entirely out of whole cloth. The real, true Trotsky is revealed through his writings. A book always gives a more precise and truthful image of a man than a uniform. Above all, a generalissimo cannot philosophize so humanly and humanely. Can you imagine Foch, Ludendorf, or Douglas Haig with Trotsky’s mental attitude?

This fiction of a martial, Napoleonic Trotsky, proceeds from a single aspect of his role as the celebrated revolutionary of Soviet Russia: the commando of the red army. Trotsky notoriously first occupied the Commissary of Foreign Affairs, but the eventual inclination of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations obligated him to abandon this ministry. Trotsky advocated a Tolstoyan posture in Russia’s opposition to German militarism: he would have had Russia oppose the peace imposed upon it and cross its arms, defenseless, before the enemy. Lenin, with greater political sense, preferred capitulation. Transferred to the War Commissary, Trotsky was handed the charge of organizing the red army. In this undertaking Trotsky displayed his capacity for organization and producing results. The Russian army was dissolved. The fall of czarism, the revolutionary process, the liquidation of the war, all produced its elimination, and the Soviets lacked the elements to reconstitute it. There remained, if anything, some scattered war materiel. The monarchist bosses and officials, due to their obvious reactionary mood, could not be tapped. Trotsky tried momentarily to serve in the capacity of technical aide to the Allied military missions, exploiting the Entente’s interests in recouping Russia’s help against Germany. But the Allied missions longed, above all, for the fall of the Bolsheviks. If they pretended to ally themselves with the Soviets, it was merely to better undermine them. Trotsky would find only a single loyal collaborator in the Allied missions: captain Jacques Sadoul, member of the French embassy, who would end up standing by the Revolution, seduced by its men and principles. In the end, the Soviets had to throw the soldiers and diplomats out of Russia, and Trotsky, overcoming all the difficulties, went on to build a powerful army that victoriously defended the Revolution from the attacks of all its internal and external enemies. The initial nucleus of this army was two hundred thousand volunteers from the vanguard of the communist youth. However, in the period of greatest risk for the Soviets, Trotsky would command an army of more than five million soldiers.

What is more, like its generalissimo, the red army is a novel case in the military history of the world. It is an army that senses its role as a revolutionary army and remembers that its purpose is the defense of the revolution. Any specifically and militarily imperialist sentiment is therefore excluded from its spirit. Its discipline, organization and structure are revolutionary. While the generalissimo was writing an article about Romain Rolland, perhaps the soldiers were discussing Tolstoy or reading Kropotkin.