From May 6 to May 8 of this year
I participated in the first International Academic Meeting on Trotsky in Havana, Cuba. Its official title was , ‘Leon Trotsky: life and contemporaneity - a critical approach’. The
Conference was a historic occasion, marking the first time any such international gathering devoted to the life and ideas of
Leon Trotsky had taken place in this country, where his legacy has been a topic
of intense interest and occasional repression.
The fact that it took place at all in spite of bureaucratic opposition
from certain sectors of Cuban officialdom hostile to Trotsky owes everything to the energy and
enthusiasm of the main organizer of the Conference, Frank García Hernández. Frank, supported by his partner Lisbeth and a
few friends achieved an almost impossible task with hardly any resources –
gathering approximately 100 delegates from 15 different countries to
participate in the Conference, arranging for accommodations for participants,
personally meeting every individual arriving at the airport, arranging for the venue for the event, arranging
for sponsors for the event, planning the different panels, arranging many other
cultural events for Conference participants and dozens of other tasks that made
the Conference possible. And he managed
to do all this with only occasional access to the Internet, severely limiting
his ability to communicate with Conference participants. Sponsors of the event included the Juan Marinello Cuban Institute of Cultural
Research where Frank works as a researcher, the Cuban Institute of Philosophy, Casa Museo León Trotski in Coyoacan, Mexico, and the Karl Marx Center for Socialist Studies in Mexico City. The sponsorship of the event by the Casa Museo León Trotski was
particularly noteworthy. The Museum contributed a photographic exhibition to
the event and also made a generous donation of books by Trotsky in Spanish. (Unfortunately the books and other material donated
by the Museum were being held by Cuban Customs.) In addition, Trotsky’s
grandson and for many years head of the Museum until his retirement, Esteban
Volkov, gave his greetings and enthusiastic support for the Conference by video.
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| Frank García Hernández opening the conference. |
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| Museo de Beníto Juárez |
The
First Day of the Conference
The venue for the Conference was the Museo de Beníto Juárez in old Havana. This colonial era villa has been re-purposed as a public
cultural center dedicated to the Mexican Revolution and its great hero. One
cannot imagine a more appropriate location for a Conference dedicated to one of
the leaders of the Russian Revolution. Frank, followed by the director of the
Museum, made some introductory remarks welcoming the delegates to Cuba and to
the Conference.
It is not possible in a short
space to provide a comprehensive review of this Conference. Given the large number of presentations at
the Conference and the difficulties of concentrating on talks interrupted by
translations from Spanish into English and from English into Spanish I can only
provide a very short and limited review. One of the other participants at the
Conference, Paul LeBlanc, wrote a more comprehensive review of the Conference. Readers
who are interested can find his account of the Conference together with
personal reflections about his visit to Cuba posted here: Trotsky
in Cuba, 2019
Of the participants at the Conference,
the largest delegations came from Brazil, the United States, Canada, Mexico and
of course Cuba. In addition there were participants from Peru, Venezuela,
Turkey, Austria, Belgium, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Costa Rica and a number of
other countries. The topics covered in the Conference were as diverse as the
list of participants. Broadly speaking
they can be divided into several categories: An assessment of Trotsky major
contributions to Marxist theory and revolutionary politics, Trotsky’s struggle
against Stalinism, revisiting old political disputes in which Trotsky was
involved, reflections on cultural issues inspired by Trotsky, disputes and
splits within the organization founded by Trotsky, the Fourth International,
and historical accounts of the Trotskyist movement in several different
countries.
I can only mention the
presentations I found most interesting. The caveat here is that I undoubtedly
missed some presentations and it was sometimes difficult to follow the talks
due to problems with acoustics and translations. Also, with a couple of exceptions, the
presentations were invariably a compressed version of a longer essay which I
did not have the benefit of reading.
The first panel, consisting of
Paul LeBlanc, Suzi Weissman, Robert Brenner from the U.S. and Eric Touissaint
from Belgium, had as a broad theme Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism. Paul LeBlanc and Eric Touissaint gave very
eloquent presentations on this topic. LeBlanc in particular gave a very moving account
of the heroic defiance against Stalinist tyranny by Trotsky’s followers in
Russia as they were exiled, tortured, starved and eventually murdered in camps
like Vorkuta. To quote from LeBlanc’s summary of his presentation,
I noted
Trotsky’s assertion that Stalin represented a more serious assault on the
socialist and communist workers’ movements than Hitler – the Nazi leader’s
assaults were from the outside, whereas Stalin’s were from within, with
practices that would pollute, disorient and discredit the struggle for
socialism. He went on to discuss the resistance in Soviet Russia of Left
Oppositionists associated with Trotsky, especially their heroic struggles in
the face of certain destruction in 1937-38, inside the Stalinist gulag.
Referring to Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy and related theory of
permanent revolution, and to the program of the Left Opposition – explications
of these were dropped from the talk for time reasons – he emphasized their
relevance for today.
Suzi Weissman defended Victor
Serge against Trotsky. She pointed out
that the differences between Serge and Trotsky were deliberately stirred up by
a Stalinist agent who had managed to infiltrate the Trotskyist group in
Paris. This person, then known as
“Etienne”, later exposed as Marc Zborowski, had won the confidence of Trotsky’s
son Leon Sedov and became the Secretary of the international Trotskyist group.
Undoubtedly Weissman was correct to emphasize that Zborowski’s malevolent influence
made it far more difficult for Serge to communicate with Trotsky, and was
partly responsible for the personal break between the two. But that is not to
say there were not real and fundamental political differences between Serge and
Trotsky. I felt that Weissman underestimated the breadth of these differences
and also overestimated the importance of Serge, whom she tended to view as
someone of almost equal stature to Trotsky in the fight against Stalinism and
the defense of the October Revolution.
Robert Brenner gave a
presentation on the Left Opposition in Russia and the economic theories upon
which their founding document, The New
Course, was based. Brenner believed that Trotsky and the Left Opposition,
and for that matter Lenin, made a fundamental mistake in their analysis of the Soviet
economy, particularly in their assessment of the role of the peasantry. Whereas the Left Opposition saw the rise of
the middle peasants following the introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy)
as a strengthening of capitalist forces within the Soviet economy and thus a
danger to the very foundations of the October regime, Brenner feels this was
based on a misunderstanding. His contention is that this layer of the peasantry
had no interest in the accumulation of surplus value but was only interested in
working their plot of land. Therefore
the danger to the Soviet Union from this sector did not exist and had the Left
Opposition recognized that fact they could have in good conscience made an
alliance with Bukharin, who advocated a policy that favored the continuation of
the NEP and who encouraged the growth of the middle peasants. Brenner thinks that due to their mistaken
analysis of the Soviet economy, Trotsky and the Left Opposition assessed the
Bukharin faction as Right wing and more dangerous than the so-called Center
faction of Stalin. They thus rejected
the possibility of an alliance with Bukharin which could have prevented the
victory of Stalinism. As it turned out Stalinism was by far the more serious
danger to the Soviet Union.
This is a thesis that Brenner has
argued for many years. While I find that
thought experiments based on possible alternative paths in history can
sometimes provide useful insights, this particular one raises at least as many
questions as it tries to answer. Was there a realistic possibility of such an
alliance? Even had it been possible, would Bukharin’s participation in the
Opposition have made any substantial difference in the struggle against
Stalinism? Finally, how could the Left Opposition possibly know without the
benefit of a crystal ball, just how destructive Stalin and the bureaucracy
would become as they were organizing in 1923-1924? I am sure I am not doing justice to Brenner’s
arguments as he did not have sufficient time to develop them.
Following the opening session
there were a great many presentations, perhaps too many in the limited time we
had. I can only comment briefly on a few
of these.
Of the panels in the second
session on day one the only presentation that drew my attention was one by
Andrew Gittlitz from the U.S., who gave a brief, but interesting presentation
on the politics of Juan Posadas. Posadas
was a seminal figure in Latin American Trotskyism in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and
he is particularly important for the history of Trotskyism in Cuba. Posadas was the head of the Latin American
Bureau of the Fourth International in 1953, at the time when there was a split
in the Fourth International. Posadas was allied with the majority faction
headed by Pablo, but soon parted ways with him and any connection with the
Fourth International. Posadas trained
the initial cadre of what was to become the Trotskyist movement in Cuba in this
period. He was also very influential in
Argentina and a number of other countries in South America.
Gittlitz noted that Posadas is
remembered today mostly as a figure worthy only of mockery due to his
idiosyncratic positions. He tended to believe in conspiracy theories and thought
that UFO’s could be the savior of humanity if we could only make contact with the aliens. He
also believed in the conspiracy theory, then popular among some radicals in the
period when Che Guevara dropped out of public life in the 1960’s, that Fidel
Castro had Che Guevara assassinated because Castro would not go along with
Guevara’s attempts to spread the revolution.
Needless to say such “theorizing” did not help the situation of the Cuba
Trotskyists in that period.
But Gittlitz contention is that
this concentration on the idiosyncrasies of Posadas does not address his main
political problem, one that still haunts many groups calling themselves
Trotskyists. And that problem was
Posadas’ tendency towards catastrophism – i.e. basing one’s politics on the
belief that a word-wide catastrophe is just around the corner. For Posadas, the catastrophe he saw coming
was an inevitable nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Seeing such a catastrophe as inevitable,
Posadas in fact welcomed it and thought that the working class revolution would
finally triumph only after this holocaust.
Gittlitz point was that there is
a lesson to be learned from an examination of Posadas that is relevant to left
politics today. Apocalyptic scenarios of
imminent catastrophe that determine a perspective – always with the disclaimer
“unless our tiny group quickly wins the leadership of the working class” - are not alien to many groups coming out of
the traditions of Leninism and Trotskyism.
Posadas may have presented an exaggerated form of catastrophism, and
therefore easy to dismiss, but the politics of catastrophism is far from dead
today.
Second Day of the Conference
The second day of the Conference
was largely devoted to cultural and theoretical issues. Many of the
presentations by the delegates from Brazil dealt with cultural issues
associated with Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Noteworthy among these was a discussion of
the Russian avant-garde by Clara de Freitas Figueiredo and another discussion
about Eisenstein’s film “Strike” by Marcela Fleury. Both presentations relied heavily on slides
to illustrate their themes and neither had sufficient time to develop their
thesis properly. The following is Paul
LeBlanc’s summary of their presentations:
Presentations by
two young Brazilian comrades (friends who were collaborating in their efforts),
both on fascinating topics, would have required a half a day for adequate
presentation and discussion. Clara de Freitas Figueiredo utilized slides to
give a sense of the Soviet artistic avant-garde – Mayakovsky, Rodschenko,
Eisenstein and others, combined in a radical artistic grouping, the Left Front
of the Arts, referred to as LEF. LEF defined artistic realism as dealing with
the materiality of the construction of a work, not as any attempt of an
artistic work to create the illusion of reality. She asserted, without time to
make her case, that concerns of LEF’s concerns coincided with cultural issues
that Trotsky dealt with in his essays of the early 1920s, Problems of
Everyday Life. She also argued that the quasi-religious cult of Lenin, that
developed after his death (despite the opposition of Lenin’s widow Krupskaya,
as well as Trotsky and some others) had a profound and “liturgical” cultural
impact that – if I understood her correctly – was a thorny issue with which the
avant-garde had to deal, but there was insufficient time for this idea to be
developed clearly.
No less
frustrating was the inability (given the time constraints) of the next speaker,
Marcela Fleury, to develop her fascinating thesis on the correspondence between
Eisenstein’s first major film, “Strike” (1925), with Trotsky’s theorizations of
uneven and combined development and permanent revolution. She also utilized
slides but would have been better served by showing clips from the film – for
which, of course, there would not have been time. She appropriately emphasized
the actual historical context of the film – which included worker
dissatisfaction with the capitalistic impacts of the New Economic Policy, and
also debates in the Communist International on the possibility of
bourgeois-democratic revolution in China (positing two separate and distinct
“democratic” and “socialist” stages of revolution – in contrast to Trotsky’s
theory). She argued that Eisenstein’s film – contrasting the collectivism and
solidarity associated with the working class and both the individualism and
selfishness associated with the capitalist class, and the incompatibility of
the two – connected with the contemporary sentiments and debates in Soviet
Russia, tilting in Trotsky’s direction.
These panels were followed by a
presentation by Armagan Tulunay from Turkey on Trotsky’s period of exile in the
Turkish island of Prinkipo. Tulunay
mentioned that “Prinkipo” is actually the Greek-Byzantine name of the island. Büyükada is the proper name of this island in
Turkish. Tulunay, a member of Workers Revolutionary Party of Turkey
(DIP), maintained that the period of Trotsky’s exile, while presenting a number
of challenges from the point of view of security, was one of the most
productive of his career. It was also an imposed isolation from his comrades in
France, Germany and other parts of Europe.
His requests for visas to these countries were all denied partly due to
the hostility of the bourgeois regimes to this “dangerous man” and partly as a result
of pressure from the Soviet government. A taste of this period of Trotsky’s exile
was captured by the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura in his magnificent historical
novel, The Man Who Loved Dogs:
Throughout that
first year of exile, the most tiresome task facing his guards charged with the
revolutionary’s security had been to deal with the journalists intent on
getting a scoop, that of welcoming editors from around the world (who had
offered contracts for various books and made generous advances capable of
alleviating the family’s economic difficulties) and verifying that the
followers who began to arrive were who they said they were. At the margins of
these interferences, life on an island lost to history, inhabited throughout
most of the year only by fishermen and sheepherders, seemed so primitive and
slow that any outside presence was immediately detected. And although he was a
prisoner, Lev Davidovich had felt almost happy for having found that place
where a car had never driven and where things were transported as they were
twenty-five centuries before, on the back of a donkey.
Whereas his isolation from his
political comrades was deeply felt, another side of this period of Trotsky’s
exile was that the lack of distractions – occasionally interrupted by visitors
- allowed him the time to work intently on his classic, History of the Russian Revolution, as well as his autobiography, My Life and his Permanent Revolution. He kept up a lively correspondence with his
comrades throughout the world during this period and continued the regular
publication of the Bulletin of the
Opposition.
Tulunay, shifting to a discussion
of Trotsky’s influence on Turkey, maintained that there was some evidence that
the great Turkish poet and an early supporter of the Russian Revolution, Nâzım Hikmet, was sympathetic to
Trotsky. She also noted that there was
some evidence that Trotsky may have had a direct influence on the launching of
the Trotskyist movement in Turkey, although the evidence is not conclusive. We do not know for instance if any of the
founders of Trotskyism in Turkey ever visited Trotsky while he was in Prinkipo.
The final talk in this session
was given by Helmut Dahmer from Austria.
Dahmer’s thesis was that there was a certain aesthetic affinity between
Trotsky and the great German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. I cannot do any
justice to Dahmer’s presentation as I did not take detailed notes, but I can
mention that he backed up his surprising thesis – after all one rarely puts
Trotsky together with Benjamin – with textual evidence suggesting that Benjamin
was likely influenced by Trotsky’s historical masterpiece, History of the Russian Revolution, as well as some of his writings
on Britain.
The next panel featured more
cultural motifs. Most notable were talks
by two Brazilians, Flo Menezes and Edson Luiz de Oliviera. I will once more quote LeBlanc’s summary of
their contributions:
Flo Menezes
offered remarks on Trotsky and art, literature and culture. He began with a
focus on the 1930 suicide of the revolutionary poet Mayakovsky, and Trotsky’s
comments that linked this act to negative pressures in the increasingly
bureaucratic-authoritarian atmosphere of Soviet Russia. This led to an assault
on that analysis by Anatoly Lunacharsky, a highly cultured Bolshevik of some
prominence who was adapting to (and thereby distorting himself) the
now-dominant Stalinism. Discussing Marxist conceptualizations of ideology and
knowledge, Menezes emphasized that art and politics cannot be understood in the
same way. Basing himself on the work of Marx, Trotsky was able to advance
theorizations Marx had never had an opportunity to develop. Terming the
Stalinist-backed artistic development of “Socialist Realism” anti-Marxist,
Trotsky – while not uncritical of surrealism – allied himself with surrealists
in efforts to push back Stalinism’s deadening cultural incursions. Menezes was
about to enter into discussion about the Brazilian Marxist theorist and Left
Oppositionist Marío Pedrosa – at which he ran out of time and concluded his
presentation. Fortunately, the next speaker – Edson Luiz de Oliviera – dealt
with Pedrosa, with a focus on the Brazilian Trotskyist’s appreciation for the
work of the great German artist Käthe Kollwitz.
This cultural panel also featured
a decidedly non-cultural presentation by Dan La Botz from the U.S., who strongly defended Boris Souvarine
against Trotsky. Souvarine, an early
supporter of the Russian Revolution and one of the founders of the French
Communist Party initially sided with Trotsky and the Left Opposition against
the Stalinist leadership of the French CP. But he soon parted ways with Trotsky
and the Left Opposition over their differing analysis of the nature of Soviet
Union. Souvarine considered it to be a “state capitalist” society rather than a
degenerated workers state as Trotsky had. To quote Paul LeBlanc’s summary,
La Botz’s
contention was that Souvarine was superior to Trotsky in regard to his analysis
of the Russian peasantry, his analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy, and his
positions on democracy in the Soviet Union and the Communist movement.
La Botz’s point seemed to be
similar to Suzi Weissman’s – that the Left Opposition and the struggle against
Stalinism could have been strengthened if Serge on the one hand, and Souvarine
on the other hand, would have been able to join forces with Trotsky in a common
battle. No doubt I am missing the nuances of their arguments but that seemed to
be their main themes. However, this speculative alliance would have required of
one of the sides (Trotsky’s mostly in the opinion of Weissman and La Botz) to
abandon their political differences with the other side. While it was of some interest for me to learn
more about the political biography of Souvarine and earlier of Serge, I did not
find the speculation about how things might have turned out differently to be
even remotely credible. Not that I am maintaining that Trotsky did not make any
mistakes, sometimes serious ones, in his struggle against Stalinism. He was after all a fallible human being and
not a god. But when assessing the errors of a great historical figure such as
Trotsky - as for instance his acceptance of the ban on factions – the larger
historical context in which he worked should always be kept in mind. Monday
morning quarterbacking for those not facing those same conditions is just too
easy and often leads to superficial and simplistic condemnations.
La Botz’s discussion was followed
by a presentation from two Italian delegates. I was unfortunately not able to
get very much out of these presentations because of the difficulties of
translating from Italian to English. (There was a translation into Spanish.)
Their topics covered the history of the Left Opposition in Italy and their
relationship to Bordiga and other dissident communists. There was also a
discussion of Trotsky and Gramsci. For my part further reflection on these
important presentations will have to wait for the publication of an English translation
of their talks.
My Presentation
Finally it was my turn to speak.
The subject of my talk was “Trotsky as a
Marxist Theoretician: The Evidence in the Notebooks.” The presentation was
meant to provide an introduction to some of the main themes Trotsky discussed
in what has been called his “Philosophical
Notebooks”, an unpublished manuscript exploring a variety of philosophical
issues that were only discovered in the 1980’s. I prepared a much shorter
version of a long essay I had written, but once I got to the podium I realized
that I did not have nearly sufficient time to complete even this shorter
presentation. I therefore decided to only mention the highlights of my talk and
illustrate them with a few quotes from Trotsky’s Notebooks.
I noted that Trotsky embarked on
a study of Hegel’s Logic during his
period of exile in the 1930’s, in some ways paralleling Lenin’s study of
Hegel’s Logic during the dark days
following the betrayal of Social Democracy at the start of World War I.
Although each man faced very different circumstances, what tied these two
events together, separated by two decades, was the impetus to unearth the
theoretical basis behind the abandonment of revolutionary principles.
A recurring theme Trotsky
pinpoints in the Notebooks is the
importance of the “flexibility” of concepts. By this he did not mean that you
can stretch the meaning of a concept in any direction you wish. Rather he was
pointing to the dangers in rigid and ossified modes of thinking. A good example
of the latter was the notion, accepted as dogma prior to Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution, that there is linear progression in stages from the bourgeois
democratic revolution to the socialist revolution. The fact that this “stages”
theory of Social Democracy had been resurrected by Stalin gave impetus to
Trotsky’s turn to a study of dialectics. He regarded a review of Hegel’s Logic as a kind of inoculation against
the trap of falling into rigidity and dogmatism.
I noted that the immediate
impulse for Trotsky’s turning, or rather returning, to a study of dialectics
was the encounter with his American supporter and translator, Max Eastman. Eastman was one of those left intellectuals
who considered the dialectic an unfortunate growth upon the Marxist edifice
that needed to be rooted out. Trotsky
reacted strongly to Eastman’s dismissal of the dialectic. Trotsky considered an
ongoing engagement with and study of dialectics a necessary element in the
training of a revolutionary cadre. He said on more than one occasion that he
knew of no instance in which an opponent of dialectical philosophy had been
able to consistently maintain a revolutionary practice.
Among the topics I highlighted
from the Notebooks was a discussion
of psychoanalysis and its relation to dialectics. The subject of psychoanalysis
comes up as a natural extension of a consideration of the relationship between consciousness
and physiology which itself arises out of the philosophical problem of the
relationship between Thought and Being.
Trotsky rejected the thesis of vulgar materialism that collapses Thought
into Being, that sees consciousness as determined by physiology, a way of
thinking typified by the Russian psychologist Pavlov. He did so without falling
into the trap of subjective idealism as he always insisted that neither can consciousness
be completely divorced from physiology.
Trotsky asks at one point in the Notebooks,
“The brain is
the material substrate of consciousness. Does this mean that consciousness is
simply a form of ‘manifestation’ of the physiological processes in the brain?”
Trotsky’s answer to this question
was a ringing “NO”. Throughout his life
his understanding of materialism was marked by a strong anti-reductionism. One can imagine what Trotsky would say to
some of our contemporary neurophysiologists who base their theories on an ever-expanding
form of reductionism. (The title of a recent popular book on the subject says
it all, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures.) Trotsky’s anti-reductionist bent was
undoubtedly influenced by his study of the Italian Marxist Labriola, who had a
much deeper appreciation of dialectics than his German and Russian counterparts.
This philosophical approach goes a long way to explaining Trotsky’s lifelong if
not uncritical sympathy for Freudian psychoanalysis, which he viewed as a
method of explaining the psyche, “…basing itself upon the inner determinism of
psychic phenomena.”
Another theme explored in the Notebooks
was evolution and the role of sudden qualitative leaps in the evolutionary
process. Trotsky emphasized that
evolution must include sudden leaps as well as changes through gradual
accumulation. He may not have been aware of it, but his thinking in this area
went against the grain of Darwinian fundamentalists, who viewed then and still
view today evolution as a process that takes place only through imperceptible
gradual changes. In emphasizing the role of leaps in the evolutionary process
Trotsky anticipated the work of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge whose
theory of “punctuated equilibrium” broke with the prevailing anti-dialectical
prejudices of the community of evolutionary biologists.
Closely tied to his discussion of qualitative leaps is a consideration of
the role of Catastrophes in the formation of the Earth. According to the prevailing geological
theories of his time, pioneered by Darwin’s friend Charles Lyell, the formation
of the Earth is the result of very gradual changes over long periods of
time. Like Darwin, Lyell did not
recognize a role for sudden catastrophic upheavals. Trotsky on the other hand
speculated that catastrophes must play a role both in biological evolution and
the formation of the Earth. In fact catastrophes
as one of the explanations for the formation of the Earth were until the last
three or four decades considered a pseudo-science. That began to change with the acceptance of
the theory of Continental Drift. We now know that catastrophes are a regular
occurrence and sometimes a determining factor in the history of the solar
system, the geological formations of our planet, and the evolution of
life. The KT asteroid that collided with
the Earth 65 million years ago and caused the extinction of most of the species
on the planet, a discovery that was only made in the 1980’s, is just one of the
most well-known examples of the role of catastrophes.
I noted in passing that Trotsky
has been accused by certain left intellectuals, notably Slavoj Zizek, of being
tone deaf to the dialectic. I thought
that anyone who has read Trotsky’s Notebooks,
not to mention many of his other writings, could not possibly justify that
position.
I concluded my talk by expressing
my appreciation for the work of Frank García Hernández and the different sponsors
for making this Conference possible. I was very happy to be in Cuba and to participate
in this historical event.
During the Q&A period
following my talk the Canadian author of the biography of James Cannon, Bryan
Palmer, asked if the Notebooks can be
considered in some ways an anticipation of the theoretical critique Trotsky
would undertake in 1939 of the positions of Shachtman and Burnham, who preceded
their rejection of the defense of the Soviet Union, a political question, by a
rejection of dialectics, a philosophical
question. I responded to Bryan by
affirming that his point was a confirmation of my argument. I noted that when
Trotsky began to work closely with his American followers, he repeatedly
emphasized to them the importance of training working class militants in the movement
in the art and science of dialectics. I mentioned that Trotsky had in
particular entrusted George Novack, a leading intellectual in the Socialist
Workers Party, with the educational task of delineating the difference between the
philosophical approach of Marxism and that of pragmatism, the mode of thinking
that emerges spontaneously in the American working class. And while Novack did some important work in
this area, the focus of the Socialist Workers Party in the years following
Trotsky’s assassination shifted away from these theoretical issues, an
eventuality which I believe played a role in the political disintegration of
the SWP in the following decades.
Conclusion of Day Two
The program for the second day of
the Conference concluded with two more presentations. One was by Morgana Romao from Brazil and was titled,
Leon Trotsky’s perception of the Soviet
bureaucracy: Counterpoint to Hillel Ticktin. Unfortunately, I am not able to
comment on this presentation without having read Romao’s text. The second talk was by Niloofar Moazzami from
Montreal. This is Paul LeBlanc’s summary of Moazzami’s talk:
Moazzami’s
attention was drawn to Trotsky’s classic History of the Russian Revolution,
which showed the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy resulted in the unstable
alliance and growing conflict between two power-blocs, one dominated by
bourgeois forces, the other consisting of a worker-peasant combination. She
then suggested the value of comparing Trotsky’s analysis with works of other
scholarship on revolution, such as Barrington Moore’s classic of historical
sociology, Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Of course, the worker-peasant
triumph, with the October Revolution culminating in the creation of the Soviet
Republic, soon led to crisis. Trotsky saw the early Soviet Republic, according
to Romao, as a society in transition to socialism – but the problems facing it
(economic underdevelopment, devastating impacts of world war and civil war, the
relative isolation in a hostile capitalist world, etc.) caused it to develop
into what became known as Stalinism, with its extreme
bureaucratic-authoritarian distortions.
The proceedings of the day did
not end with these presentations. Frank
had arranged for a special screening of a documentary that was still a work in
progress, a 45 minute segment of the production by Lindy Laub of Trotsky:
the most dangerous man in the world. Suzi Weissman has elsewhere
written of the problems Frank had in finding a venue to screen this film:
When we (I am
the co-producer of the film) first told Frank we would like to show an excerpt
at the conference, he was jubilant - he wanted the film to have its premiere in
Cuba, imagining a huge and enthusiastic audience. We settled on showing a
21-minute trailer and a 24-minute segment of Trotsky in exile in Prinkipo,
Turkey, from 1929-33 - that included his fight to get German social democrats
and communists to unite against Hitler, his speech in Copenhagen and the
suicide of his daughter, Zina, in Berlin.
Frank was in
high gear trying to secure a venue - only to find nearly every screen in Havana
closed to him and this film. Finding a public place to show it proved to be an
impossible hurdle. No one wanted to take responsibility for allowing a portion
of an unfinished, sympathetic documentary about Trotsky to be
screened in their theatres. Finally, when it seemed the segment would not be
projected at the conference, Frank got permission to screen it in a small
theatre in the Centro Cultural Cinematográfico (ICAIC). Publicity for the
showing was confined to a small announcement and word of mouth at the
conference. But every seat was filled, and people stood and sat on the floor on
every available inch of space - the audience was electric with excitement. (
Neither Kings nor Bureaucrats ).
