Anti Imperialists

"It is not true, however, that the solutions proposed by the Zionists, of whatever shade, represented historical realism as against the inconsistent utopianism of the Bund. Certainly the prophets were not numerous, but they have to be given their due: Kurt Tucholsky, for example, who already in the mid-1920s sounded the alarm, in a Weimar Republic prey to the demons of order, nationalism, xenophobia and dreams of revanchism; Leon Trotsky, who in the late 1920s warned that the fate of Europe was being played out in Germany, and understood that the bankruptcy of German communism in the face of Hitler bore within it the inexorable unfurling of horror. At this time they were preaching in the desert, including the desert of Judaea. The rabbis who called for obedience to the temporal power in all circumstances, and the inspirers of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon who at the time paraded in black shirts, are not best placed to cast the first stone at these Jewish visionaries and militants who were struggling at this time for a better world."

"The articulation of universalism with the sense of Jewish identity took varying forms depending on the different revolutionary currents: for internationalists such as Leon Trotsky, Aleksandr Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg, the assimilation of a Jewish revolutionary into the concrete universal party, the dissolution of the 'little difference' into the status of equality of the militant, anticipated the society for which they fought; they did not consider the little difference' as called on to crystallize one day in terms of national identity. Were they blind? Blinkered, certainly, in the sense that they underestimated the national dimension of the Jewish problem in Eastern Europe."

"For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth."

"I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all. However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness."

"Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."

"All anti-Stalinist forces had been wiped out … Trotskyism, Zinovievism, and Bukharinism, all drowned in blood, had, like some Atlantis, vanished from all political horizons … and he himself was now the sole survivor of Atlantis."

"The obliging Trotsky is more dangerous than an enemy! ... Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. At the present moment he is in the company of the Bundists and the liquidators."

"The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means by its very essence strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason epochs of revolution have never been directly favorable to cultural creation: they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state."

"A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified, From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man."

"The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past."

"Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity."

"The Soviet bureaucracy is like all ruling classes in that it is ready to shut its eyes to the crudest mistakes of its leaders in the sphere of general politics, provided in return they show an unconditional fidelity in the defense of its privileges."

"(On the American Civil War) "History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!""

"Reading Trotsky, one is often impressed with how much dishonesty he can pack into a paragraph."

"Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism in incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution."

"Independent character is like independent thought, it cannot be developed without criticism."

"In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality."

"Stalin, through Pravda, openly advised the local organs not to give them [the opposition] work. In a country where the sole employer is the state, this means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: 'who does not obey shall not eat.'"

"Every revolutionary party finds its chief support in the younger generation of the rising class. Political decay expresses itself in a loss of ability to attract youth."

"What, however, is our relation to revolution? Civil war is the most severe of all forms of war. It is unthinkable not only without violence against tertiary figures but, under contemporary technique, without murdering old men, old women and children... There is no impervious demarcation between ‘peaceful’ class struggle and revolution. Every strike embodies in an unexpanded form all the elements of civil war."

": In a later work, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (2000) by Michael Walzer, the author states: War is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." This statement on dialectic itself seems to be a paraphrase, with the original in In Defense of Marxism Part VII : "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party" (1942) — where Trotsky publishes a letter to Albert Goldman (5 June 1940) has been translated as "Burnham doesn't recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net." More discussion on the origins of this quotation can be found at The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: Fair and Balanced Almost Every Day."

"Trotsky's own tragic fate was to illustrate all that I felt and thought about my own inability either to work with or compete with the Comintern leaders on their own ground. If, after the Soviet Republic was consolidated and the factional struggle first began against him, after the Central Committee decided that the time had come to lessen the popularity and self-confidence of the former Menshevik, Trotsky had shown his own superiority to the Jesuitry of his rivals, by refusing to use their methods, how different his fate might have been! It is far more likely that when the moment of disillusion with the bureaucracy came, he would have become the leader of a revolutionary labour movement throughout the world, and that the authority and the number of his disciples would be many times greater than they are now. If from the beginning, he had defended party democracy, fought the repression of honest dissent, the calumny of political opponents by the Party machine, how much more sympathy and solidarity he would have found in Russia from the first day of his persecution to the last shameful campaign against him! But to have denounced those methods consistently, Trotsky should have fought them from the very beginning when he was most powerful, when he was a part of the bureaucracy, and when the Russians themselves were still convinced that the country could not be saved without him. He could not have eradicated the disease, perhaps-this was too inherent in Bolshevism itself-but he could have avoided some of its most monstrous applications and he could have protested far more successfully and aroused others to protest-when he himself became the victim. But not only was Trotsky himself, after 1917, a good Bolshevist, a hundred-per-cent "Leninist," he was also too weak and too self-conscious to have made such a fight while still part of the ruling group. "Too weak?" How can I use that word to describe a man whom I consider one of the most powerful intellects of our time-a man who has done for Russia what no other modern statesman has done for his country (because none has had to work, to destroy and reconstruct under such complicated and unprecedented conditions); who has faced danger and death without hesitation, endured heroically persecution on an unprecedented scale? Yet, there are different ways of being courageous, or rather of being indifferent to what may come. One may defy death but be unable to face reproach or a threat to one's popularity. This was, and still is, the case with Trotsky. He was daring enough, with Lenin, to face the hostile opinion of the whole world. But he was not sufficiently independent to fight those tendencies exemplified in Lenin's puppet, Zinoviev, nor to refuse an alliance with Zinoviev even after the latter had first capitulated to and become the puppet of Stalin. He was afraid of being thought less "revolutionary" than those who attacked him and in the field of demagogy and political shrewdness he was no match for Zinoviev, Stalin, and the whole party apparatus. This fear of being suspected of not having wholly abnegated his original sin-Menshevism-and his immeasurable self-confidence, have continuously projected themselves like a shadow between this brilliant man and the situations in which he is personally involved, so that he has failed to apply to his own movement the criteria he applies to others. It is as though history and logic and the laws of causality which he understands and knows how to handle so well, stopped short before his own personality. It is an attitude which was encouraged, of course, by his matchless success in the early years of the Revolution, the overwhelming popularity he enjoyed. He was so sure in those days that, whatever might be the fate of others, whatever the dangers of popularity and success, for him-Leon Trotsky-life would make an exception. Instead, he has become the foremost victim of the perversion of the Revolution!"

"The [Soviet Union] bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses."

"In January 1928 the working class stood face to face with the shadow of an advancing famine. History knows how to play a spiteful jokes. In that very month, when the kulaks were taking the revolution by the throat, the representatives of the Left Opposition were thrown into prison or banished to different parts of Siberia in punishment for their "panic" before the specter of the kulak."

"Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other."

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

"The owl of wisdom flies, as is well known, after sunset. Thus the theory of a "socialist" system of money and prices was developed only after twilight of inflationist illusions."

"The theory that the struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism is a struggle for influence over an immature proletariat is not a new one. We have been encountering it since 1905 in innumerable books, pamphlets, and articles in the liberal press. Martov and Trotsky are putting before the German comrades liberal views with a Marxist coating."

"Natasha and I said more than once that one may arrive at such a physical condition that it would be better to cut short one's own life or, more correctly, the too slow process of dying … But whatever may be the circumstances of my death I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion."

"Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality."

": Such translation is possible via an intermediate Greek translation, or simply for someone with a knowledge of Greek, where the word πόλεμος carries a dual connotation of both dialectic and war (evident in the adjective form πολεμικός). Compare translations of Heraclitus's Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι ("War is the father of all") by David Myatt and by Martin Heidegger. Also see translation in German Wikipedia. The notability of the Greek connection (between "war" and "the dialectic") is further augmented by the fact that the Heraclitean logic of war underpins Hegelian dialectics, a modern precursor to dialectical materialism and, consequently, Trotsky's doctrine."

"No, the Soviet woman is not yet free. Complete equality before the law has so far given infinitely more to the women of the upper strata, representatives of bureaucratic, technical, pedagogical and, in general, intellectual work, than to the working women and yet more the peasant women. So long as society is incapable of taking upon itself the material concern for the family, the mother can successfully fulfill a social function only on the condition that she has in her service a white slave: nurse, servant, cook,etx."

"Despite the unquestionable greatness of the Anglo-Saxon genius, it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries."

"The concrete is a combination of abstractions — not an arbitrary or subjective combination but one that corresponds to the laws of the movement of a given phenomenon."

"I asked him Bob Edwards] about Trotsky and Stalin. He maintained that the argument wasn't only over the necessity for a world revolution. Stalin believed that the only way to safeguard the Russian revolution was to build heavy industry at tremendous cost and to be able to defend the country. Trotsky believed that a European revolution, particularly in Britain and Germany, would safeguard the Russian revolution. But he also believed that the Russian people should be allowed access to more consumer goods, and this would have been at the cost of building up heavy industry. "Actually," said Bob, "Stalin was right in the event and not Trotsky.""

"Stop sending assassins to murder me... if this doesn't stop, I will send a man to Moscow and there'll be no need to send any more."

"If Stalin had been given another ten or fifteen years, Russia would have become the mightiest State in the world, and two or three centuries would have been required to bring about a change. It is a unique phenomenon! He has raised the standard of living—of that there is no doubt; no one in Russia goes hungry any more. They have built factories where a couple of years ago only unknown villages existed—and factories, mark you, as big as the Hermann Göring Works. They have built railways that are not yet even on our maps. In Germany we start quarrelling about fares before we start building the line! I have read a book on Stalin; I must admit, he is a tremendous personality, an ascetic who took the whole of that gigantic country firmly in his iron grasp."

"Stalin is the best brain in polities today. Rut that does not mean that I have become a Bolshevik."

"Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture."

"Stalin, too, must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is a hell of a fellow! He knows his models, Genghiz Khan and the others, very well, and the scope of his industrial planning is exceeded only by our own Four Year Plan. And there is no doubt that he is quite determined that there shall be in Russia no unemployment such as one finds in such capitalist States as the United States of America."

"Generalissimo Stalin directed every move... made every decision... He is the greatest and wisest military genius who ever lived..."

"I consider him one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as a brilliant personality."

"We think that Stalin's contribution to the revolution is much more important than the mistakes he made. To use the Chinese way, the score for Stalin would be thirty percent to seventy percent: thirty for his errors and seventy for his merits. Furthermore, Chairman Mao agreed with me on the question of Stalin's score, and, after the twentieth Congress of the CPSU, members of the Communist Party of China expressed a very clear judgment of Stalin."

"The prospects of revolution seem therefore quite restriced. For can a revolution avoid war? It is, however, on this feeble chance that we must stake everything or abandon all hope. An advanced country will not encounter, in the case of revolution, the difficulties which in backward Russia served as a base for the barbarous regime of Stalin. But a war of any scope will give rise to others as formidable."

"I confess that I approached Stalin with a certain amount of suspicion and prejudice. A picture had been built up in my mind of a very reserved and self-centred fanatic, a despot without vices, a jealous monopolizer of power. [...] I still expected to meet a ruthless, hard—possibly doctrinaire—and self-sufficient man at Moscow; a Georgian highlander whose spirit had never completely emerged from its native mountain glen. Yet I had had to recognize that under him Russia was not being merely tyrannized over and held down; it was being governed and it was getting on. [...] All such shadowy undertow, all suspicion of hidden emotional tensions, ceased for ever, after I had talked to him for a few minutes. [...] I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia."

"The more power he had, the more power he accumulated and kept in his hands, the more power he wanted."

"I was already a confirmed anti-Stalinist at the age of seventeen .... The idea of killing Stalin filled my thougths and feelings .... We studied the 'technical' possibillities of an attack .... We even practiced. If they had condemned me to death in 1939, their decision would have been just. I had made up a plan to kill Stalin; wasn't that a crime? When Stalin was still alive, I saw things differently, but as I look back over this century, I can state that Stalin was the greatest individual of this century, the greatest political genius. To adopt a scientific attitude about someone is quite different from one's personal attitude."

"The proletarian internationalism of Stalin, as a marxist, wasn't questioned even from his fierce rivals in the ranks of the imperialists (as Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt), while, on this matter, their modern followers still remember the "terrible hand of Moscow", as in the Comintern, in every place on the planet."

"Under the direction of Stalin and the CPSU, the Soviet Union achieved great successes and defeated the most repulsive product of capitalism: the 20th century's fascism."

"As a good marxist, Stalin fought against the bourgeois state, he took charge of its destruction to its very foundations, and then, after destroying the society of exploitation and violence, he built the state of the working class and the farmers on its base."