Anti Imperialists

"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."

"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."

"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"

"Lenin and Trotsky killed millions of Russian citizens right after the Civil War, when they were consolidating State power, which preceded Stalin’s bloody rule. The lesson is that we should not be tricked into surrendering the grassroots people’s power to dictators who pose as our friends or leaders."

"Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet."

"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."

"Maxim Gorki, supposedly citing a quote from Trotsky, told some journalists in 1924: "From Mussolini's governmental actions I have got to know his energy and I admire him, but I prefer Trotsky's opinion: Mussolini has made a revolution, he is our best student.""

"The Jews practically always backed the wrong horse. The Jews of Russia who worked for the destruction of monarchy found themselves finally in the grips of a brutal religious persecution which hit them harder than the Christians. Their most brilliant exponents among the Communists were exiled, slaughtered, or assassinated in exile. The fate of Trotzki [sic] is symbolic for Russian Jewry. The Jews, with their ardent sympathies for the Soviet Union, had the same grim awakening when they learned of the Stalin Hitler pacts as the Spanish Jews who had backed the Moors instead of the Christians."

"This ego-maniac firebrand is running through a world full of war-explosives, applying his torch wherever he may, hoping for nothing so much as a new world war from which alone he sees his hopes of glory and power."

"On reading Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution we are struck by a fundamental contradiction: as an honest historian he shows us just how much the Party lagged behind the masses, and as a Bolshevik theorist he must reaffirm that the Party was necessary for the succession of the revolution."

"Lenin and Trotsky were the men of the hour and under their fearless, incorruptible and uncompromising leadership the Russian proletariat has held the fort against the combined assaults of all ruling class powers of earth. It is a magnificent spectacle . It stirs the blood and warms the heart of every revolutionist, and it challenges the admiration of all the world."

"As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!"

"In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission."

"Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service."

"Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies."

"I believe that the fundamental things Trotsky relied on were wrong, that his later performance was wrong and even obscure in his last decade. And that the Trotskyists have not contributed anything to the revolutionary movement anywhere and where they did more, which was in Peru, in short, they failed because the methods were wrong."

"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!"

"Capital was really safer in Russia than anywhere else. ... No true Marxist would allow sentiment to interfere with business."

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

"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."

"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!"

"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.""

": 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."

"The pressure in the Soviet Union for a realpolitik in international relations that represented the normalisation of relations with other states was not linked to the abandonment of the Communist cause, but, rather, to a focus on the pursuit of Socialism (ie. Communism) in one state (the Soviet Union). This was a course presented as leading to the strengthening of the cause. This emphasis was associated with Stalin who dominated the state after Lenin’s death in 1924. However, Stalin was also interested in world revolution and committed to the spread of Communism. Thus, his difference with the more volatile Leon Trotsky’s demand for permanent and global revolution was more one of tactics than goals, although that was still a highly significant difference. At a meeting of the Politburo in 1926, Trotsky accused his rival Stalin of becoming ‘the gravedigger of the revolution’. Trotsky was to be forced into exile, first internal (1927), and then external (1929), by Stalin. A major element of Stalinist policy, both before and after World War Two, was suppressing those held to be Trotskyites. This was a rift that fed Stalinist paranoia and gave potent force to the idea of the enemy within. This idea was brutally enforced in Communist and allied movements abroad, as with the hunting down of those in the Republican camp considered suspect during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Sentenced to death in absentia in 1937, Trotsky himself was murdered in Mexico in 1940 in a plot by Soviet Intelligence, the NKVD."

"In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses -- of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted -- but there was not party capable of taking the power. As a reaction came fascism."

"The economically powerful big bourgeoisie, in itself, represents an infintesimal minority of the nation. To enforce its domination, it must ensure a definite mutual relationship with the petty bourgeoisie and, through its mediation, with the proletariat."

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

"In order that the social crisis may bring about the proletarian revolution, it is necessary that, besides other conditions, a decisive shift of the petty bourgeois classes occurs in the direction of the proletariat. This gives the proletariat a chance to put itself at the head of the nation as its leader."

"Italian fascism was the immediate outgrowth of the betrayal by the reformists of the uprising of the Italian proletariat. From the time the [first world] war ended, there was an upward trend in the revolutionary movement in Italy, and in September 1920 it resulted in the seizure of factories and industries by the workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat was an actual fact; all that was lacking was to organize it and draw from it all the necessary conclusions. The social democracy took fright and sprang back. After its bold and heroic exertions, the proletariat was left facing the void. The disruption of the revolutionary movement became the most important factor in the growth of fascism. In September, the revolutionary advance came to a standstill; and November already witnessed the first major demonstration of the fascists (the seizure of Bologna)."

"In case of actual danger, the social democracy banks not on the "Iron Front" but on the Prussian police. It is reckoning without its host! The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among social-democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker. Of late years, these policemen have had to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi students. Such training does not fail to leave its effects. And above all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the police remains."

": This was attributed to Trotsky in an epigraph in Night Soldiers: A Novel (1988) by Alan Furst but it may actually be a revision of a statement earlier attributed to Trotsky: "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you." Only a very loose translation of "the dialectic" would produce "war.""

"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."

"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."

"The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a "self-made" man arising from this movement."

"The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie. In italy, it has a very large base -- the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, and the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for fascism...."

"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."

": 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."

"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."

"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."

"(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!""

"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 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."

"After several rather dull speakers Trotsky was introduced. A man of medium height, with haggard cheeks, reddish hair, and straggling red beard stepped briskly forward. His speech, first in Russian and then in German, was powerful and electrifying. I did not agree with his political attitude; he was a Menshevik (Social Democrat), and as such far removed from us. But his analysis of the causes of the war was brilliant, his denunciation of the ineffective Provisional Government in Russia scathing, and his presentation of the conditions that led up to the Revolution illuminating. He closed his two hours' talk with an eloquent tribute to the working masses of his native land. The audience was roused to a high pitch of enthusiasm, and Sasha and I heartily joined in the ovation given the speaker. We fully shared his profound faith in the future of Russia."

"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."

"Lenin's methods [of "hard" centralism and mistrust of the working class] lead to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a "dictator" substitutes himself for the central committee. … The party must seek the guarantee of its stability in its own base, in an active and self-reliant proletariat, and not in its top caucus … which the revolution may suddenly sweep away with its wing."

"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."

"According to Leon Trotsky, in an article published in late 1939, and to my personal knowledge based on a careful collation and analysis of statistics published in the Soviet press, the upper 11% or 12% of the Soviet population now receives approximately 50% of the national income. This differentiation is sharper than in the United States, where the upper 10% of the population receives approximately 35% of the national income."

"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."

"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."