Anti Imperialists

"Every social stratum has its own "common sense" which is ultimately the most widespread conception of life and morals. Every philosophical current leaves a sedimentation of "common sense": this is the document of its historical reality. Common sense is not something rigid and static; rather, it changes continuously, enriched by scientific notions and philosophical opinions which have entered common usage. "Common sense" is the folklore of philosophy and stands midway between "folklore" proper (that is, as it is understood) and the philosophy, the science, the economics of the scholars. "Common sense" creates the folklore of the future, that is a more or less rigidified phase of popular knowledge a certain time and place."

"The long march through the institutions."

"We can see that in putting the question "what is man?" what we mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he "make himself," can he create his own life? We maintain therefore that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions. If you think about it, the question itself "what is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others, and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether we really are, and if so to what extent, "makers of our own selves," of our life and of our destiny. And we want to know this "today," in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man"

"History is at once freedom and necessity."

"Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution)."

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

"My practicality consists in this: in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall … that is my strength, my only strength."

"La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati."

"All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals."

"For two years I have lived outside the world: in a dream world. One by one, I let each strand tying me to the world and to my fellow men be cut. I live entirely for the mind, for the heart not at all …. I turned myself into a bear, inside and outside … other people did not exist for me. For perhaps two years, I didn’t laugh once and I didn’t cry … but I never hurt anyone but myself."

"I can’t think why Delio [son] has not been told that I’m in prison, and why no one reflected that he might then find out about it indirectly, that is, in the most disagreeable way for a child, who then begins to doubt the truthfulness of those educating him, to think about it on his own account and draw apart. At least, that was my experience as a child: I remember it perfectly . . . I believe in treating children as rational creatures with whom it is possible to discuss even the most serious matters. This makes a very profound impression on them, it strengthens their character and above all it avoids leaving their development at the mercy of random environmental pressures and casual, impersonal encounters. It really is very strange how grown-ups forget they were children themselves, and make no use of their own experiences. For my part, I recall vividly how offended I was at every discovery of a subterfuge, even if it was meant to keep painful facts from me, and how this shut me up within myself and made me withdraw."

"I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."

"Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works."

"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."

"History teaches, but it has no pupils."

"To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act."

"The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem."

"It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother."

"We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years."

"When I was a child the boys of the town never came near me except to make fun of me. I was almost always alone. Sometimes, finding me by chance among them, they hurled themselves against me, and not only with words. One day – and while he told me this his great eyes shone with an inner light - … they started to throw stones at me with more violence than usual, with the evilness which is found among children and the weak. I lost patience, and grabbing stones I too started to defend myself with such energy that my attackers were put to flight. Mario, I succeeded in beating them: I terrified them to such an extent that from that day they respected me and no longer annoyed me. I ran to my mother … and told her of my first victorious battle: she kissed me tenderly and it was the best prize that I could have wanted."

"Joseph Stalin's rise was the result of Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin's policies which undermined working class democracy in favour of the Party bureaucracy. Before he was in power, Trotsky even warned of the dangers of Lenin's strategy, warning in 1904 that "these methods lead, as we shall see below, to the Party organisation 'substituting' itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee". But while he was in power, he supported these methods, for example banning all other political parties, banning factions in the party in 1921, and purging and executing rivals. In the end he was outmanoeuvred, purged, and himself assassinated on Stalin's orders."

"Trotsky explained that a nationalised planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen."

"Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s 93-year old grandson, has recently denounced the series as “a political assault, masked as historical drama” and “a justification of the murder of the ‘monster’ called Trotsky.” The Latin American edition of the Spanish newspaper El Pais has described the series as the “second assassination of Leon Trotsky” and rejected its portrayal of the revolutionary “as a sadist, a complete traitor, and as a puppet.”"

"Trotsky carried to excess the weakness of the intellectual in politics. He was ruthless in stating principles; he was soft and indifferent in questions of personality."

"Any scrap of Trotsky's writing is worth having. He can always provide the biting comment, the brilliant pen-portrait."

"It was Trotsky who created the armies; chose the officers; determined the strategy; and inspired the soldiers. Every interference by the Soviet Government was a mistake; and the greatest mistake was the campaign against Poland, which Trotsky opposed. The achievement was not only one of organization. It was the impact of a fiery personality, the sparks from which flew round the world."

"The glories of his revolutionary triumph pale before the nobility of his later defeats. The spirit of man was irrepressible in him. Colonel Robins, the American Red Cross representative in Petrograd, pronounced history's verdict: "A four-kind son-of-a-bitch, but the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ.""

"When Victor Adler objected to Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke revolution in Russia, even if not in the Habsburg monarchy, he replied: "And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein [Trotsky] sitting over there at the Cafe Central?""

"When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly."

"[Trotsky] knew Yiddish, and if at a later date, in his autobiography, he pretends to know nothing about Jews and Judaism, then this is nothing but a plain lie. He who had visited at Cafe Arkaden [in Vienna] for years on end must have mastered both these matters to perfection. The language in greatest use at that Cafe was - besides 'Viennese-German' - Yiddish."

"The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books."

"Socialist authors promise not only wealth for all, but also happiness in love for everybody, the full physical and spiritual development of each individual, the unfolding of great artistic and scientific talents in all men, etc. Only recently Trotsky stated in one of his writings that in the socialist society "the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” The socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. All socialist literature is full of such nonsense. But it is just this nonsense that wins it the most supporters."

"Reference to the conditions that have developed in Russia and Hungary under Soviet rule proves nothing. What we have there is nothing but a picture of the destruction of an existing order of social production, for which a closed peasant household economy has been substituted. All branches of production depending on social division of labor are in a state of entire dissolution. What is happening under the rule of Lenin and Trotsky is merely destruction and annihilation. Whether, as the liberals hold, socialism must inevitably draw these consequences in its train, or whether, as the socialists retort, this is only a result of the fact that the Soviet Republic is attacked from without, is a question of no interest to us in this context. All that has to be established is the fact that the Soviet socialist commonwealth has not even begun to discuss the problem of economic calculation, nor has it any cause to do so. For where things are still produced for the market in Soviet Russia in spite of governmental prohibitions, they are valued in terms of money, for there exists to that extent private ownership of the means of production, and goods are sold against money. Even the government cannot deny the necessity, which it confirms by increasing the amount of money in circulation, of retaining a monetary system for at least the transition period."

"All essential items in Trotsky's programme were in perfect agreement with the policies of Stalin. Trotsky advocated the industrialization of Russia. It was this that Stalin's Five-Year Plans aimed at. Trotsky advocated the collectivization of agriculture. Stalin established the Kolkhoz and liquidated the Kulaks. Trotsky favoured the organization of a big army. Stalin organized such an army. Neither was Trotsky when still in power a friend of democracy. He was, on the contrary, a fanatical supporter of dictatorial oppression of all "saboteurs." It is true, he did not anticipate that the dictator could consider him, Trotsky, author of Marxian tracts and veteran of the glorious extermination of the Romanovs, as the most wicked saboteur. Like all other advocates of dictatorship, he assumed that he himself or one of his intimate friends would be the dictator... The truth is that Trotsky found only one fault with Stalin: that he, Stalin, was the dictator and not himself, Trotsky. In their feud they both were right. Stalin was right in maintaining that his regime was the embodiment of socialist principles. Trotsky was right in asserting that Stalin's regime had made Russia a hell."

"[Trotsky] was an intellectual who never asked himself such a simple question as: ‘What reason do I have to believe that the economic condition of workers under socialism will be better than under capitalism?’"

"When Trotsky, in the first weeks of his regime, threatened opponents with an ingenious gadget that shortens a person "only by the length of a head," one may have dismissed the remark as a bad joke from a temperamental orator trying to cut the figure of a Robespierre. A few months passed and the tasteless joke became harsh reality, the difference being that, in "liberated" Russia, now instead of the chop of the bourgeois guillotine, "socialist" bullets whistle from Latvian rifles."

"Mussolini called attention to the fact that Lenin—a prisoner of circumstances, some of which he had himself created—was fully prepared to reconstruct the state, with all its appurtenances, after its initial destruction at the hands of his “socialists.” In opposition to all that had been said by Marxism’s foremost theoreticians, Lenin gave every evidence, not only of reconstructing the state, but of recreating an army, as traditional in form and function as any that supported “bourgeois” rule throughout modern history. **The Red Army of Leon Trotsky was sent not only to defend the political boundaries of the new state—like every bourgeois army before it—but it forcibly, and without compensation, requisitioned goods from the people in order to sustain its deployments.**"

"After 1905 thousands of Bundists and other revolutionaries (from socialist-Zionists to Bolsheviks) made their way to New York and infused the existing Jewish labor movement with new energy and ideas...Even die-hard opponents of independent Jewish political movements, such as Leon Trotsky, could not resist the pull of New York's Jewish labor movement. In early 1917 one could often see Trotsky holding forth among immigrant Jews in Café Monopole on Ninth Street or read his articles in the daily Forverts and monthly Di tsukunft"

"The tacit assumption underlying the Lenin-Trotsky theory of dictatorship is this: that the socialist transformation is something for which a readymade formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice. This is, unfortunately or – perhaps fortunately – not the case."

"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."

"Widespread public perceptions about the role of Jews in the new government [of the Bolsheviks in the early Soviet Union] led to aggressive surveillance and repression of anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior, including the execution of Russian nationalists who expressed anti-Jewish attitudes. These public perceptions also motivated Jews to adopt a lower profile in the regime, as with Trotsky, who refused the post of commissar of internal affairs because it might lend further ammunition to the anti-Jewish arguments."

"Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!"

"Raya Dunayevskaya says Natalia Trotsky went further than Trotsky"

"It is clear from the relevant writings of the leaders -- in particular Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin -- that they all envisioned this economic policy [of ‘war communism’ from 1918-1921] (the abolition of free trade, coercive requisitioning of ‘surplus’ -- i.e., whatever the local leadership considered to be surplus -- from the peasants, universal rationing, forced labour) as a permanent achievement of the new society, and that it was eventually abandoned not because the war conditioned which had made it necessary no longer existed, but as a result of the economic disaster it had caused. Both Trotsky and Bukharin were emphatic in their assurances that forced labour was an organic part of the new society."

"Trotsky, and all that Trotsky represented, was Stalin's real fear."

"It is obvious to anyone who thinks dialectically that actions which are ostensibly the same kind of actions can be right or wrong depending on the circumstances -- or rather, on the cause in the name of which they were performed. Both Lenin and Trotsky were quite explicit on this point. Is there, for instance, anything wrong with slaughtering children? No. It was right, argued Trotsky, to slaughter the children of the Russian czar because it was politically expedient. (Presumably it was not right to kill Trotsky’s sons, however, because Stalin did not represent the historical interests of the proletariat; Trotsky, as far as I know, did not deal with this question directly, but such an answer would be in keeping with his fanatical mentality). If we reject the principle that the end justifies the means, we can only appeal to higher, politically irrelevant moral criteria; and this, Trotsky says, amounts to believing in God."

"Stalin, aware of the state of his regime and in what a tottering world he lived, did not count Trotsky’s meagre following and then sit back in comfort. He knew that as long as Trotsky lived and could write and speak, the Soviet bureaucracy was in mortal danger. In a conversation just before war broke out. Hitler and the French ambassador discussed the perils of plunging Europe into conflict and agreed that the winner of the second great war might be Trotsky. Winston Churchill hated him with a personal malevolence which seemed to overstep the bounds of reason. These men knew his stature, the power of what he stood for, and were never lulled by the smallness of his forces."

"To the very end Trotsky remained a blind, pitiless (even when pitiable) giant, defending the right of the minority vanguard of the proletariat -- the Party -- to exercise its dictatorship over ‘the backward layers of the proletariat’ -- i.e., those who disagreed with the self-designated vanguard."

"Quite in keeping with Trotsky’s passion for ideas, his generous indignation at injustice, was his sense of personal rectitude, his idealistic approach to life. All who knew him intimately even when he was one of the rulers of Russia speak of it. Max Eastman and also Souvarine, who, a fierce opponent of Trotsky’s politics, has said of him that there was nothing “mesquin” in his character, not a trace of rascality. It is a noticeable characteristic of many great writers and philosophers, but a fatal weakness in a politician."

"Comrade Trotsky completely misinterpreted the main idea of my book, What Is To Be Done? when he spoke about the Party not being a conspiratorial organization. He forgot that in my book I propose a number of various types of organizations, from the most secret and most exclusive to comparatively broad and ‘loose’ organizations. He forgot that the Party must be only the vanguard, the leader of the vast masses of the working class, the whole (or nearly the whole) of which works ‘under the control and direction’ of the Party organizations, but the whole of which does not and should not belong to a ‘party.’ Now let us see what conclusions Comrade Trotsky arrives at in consequence of his fundamental mistake. He had told us here that if rank after rank of workers were arrested, and all the workers were to declare that they did not belong to the Party, our Party would be a strange one indeed! Is it not the other way round? Is it not Comrade Trotsky’s argument that is strange? He regards as something sad that which a revolutionary with any experience at all would only rejoice at. If hundreds and thousands of workers who were arrested for taking part in strikes and demonstrations did not prove to be members of Party organizations, it would only show that we have good organizations, and that we are fulfilling our task of keeping a more or less limited circle of leaders secret and drawing the broadest possible masses into the movement."