When Trotsky was a Leninist

This pamphlet contains a translation of an address given by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky at the “Communist University for Toilers of the East” in 1924. Curiously, the speech was republished in 1973 by a British Trotskyist group, the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Curiously, since Trotsky's speech doesn't sound very “Trotskyist”. Rather, it sounds Leninist in the narrow sense of that term, Trotsky still basing himself on the “anti-imperialist united front” rather than “the permanent revolution” when discussing revolution in the Third World. For instance, he believes that Chinese Communists should join the nationalist Kuomintang!

Like Lenin in his later years, Trotsky believes that the revolution will break out in Asia before it breaks out in Europe. Indeed, he seems to write off Europe (except Britain) completely, seeing the United States as more important among Western nations. Trotsky spends most of his address attempting to explain why developments in relatively backward nations tend to be more revolutionary than developments in advanced industrial nations such as Britain. Classical Marxism, on most interpretations, rather suggested the opposite. Trotsky's explanation (which seems to be correct, empirically speaking) is that Britain's capitalist evolution took place gradually over a long period, which tended to make even the workers and their organizations “conservative” (he means “reformist”). In Czarist Russia and even more in colonies such as India or China, industrialization and modernization takes more “catastrophic” forms due to its rapidity. This creates severe social stress, a rapid change in consciousness and hence more potentially revolutionary situations. For this reason, the epicenter of revolution is in Asia or the global South more generally, not in Europe or the United States.

Of course, Trotsky hopes for a revolutionary home-coming of sorts, and therefore calls for unity between British workers and the toilers of the East. He also warns the students that the revolutionary movements in Asia might degenerate into pure and simple “bourgeois” nationalism, using the Balkans as an example. Trotsky claims that many establishment politicians in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia were once Marxists or anarchists, but moved sharply to the right when independence seemed assured. Of course, Lenin warned about the same thing. Later events in China, when the Kuomintang (including its “left” wing) turned on the Communists and literally massacred them, would convince Trotsky that Lenin's warnings didn't go far enough, and that a closer political alliance with nationalist forces was therefore impossible. He therefore dusted off an old theory which he had developed long before becoming a Bolshevik, “the theory of permanent revolution”. However, Trotsky never broke with the notion that, in some sense, the most oppressed are also the most revolutionary. That was left to certain post-Trotsky Trotskyists, who preferred “conservative” labor unions in Britain to the toilers of the East…

And yes, I'm being somewhat facetious here, since I'm not a Trotskyist of any stripe. I'm just a nasty little outsider-Menshevik looking in on the show. I'm quite happy with my “conservative” labor union here in imperialist Sweden, thank you!

Why Gerry Healy's WRP published pamphlets of this sort, I don't know. I do know that the Healyites eventually began to support certain nationalist movements in the Third World, including the PLO, Gaddafi's regime in Libya and the Iraqi Baathists, so perhaps they wanted to use Trotsky's old speeches to prove that this was the way to go? Another possibility is that they simply loved to reprint cool old Bolshie pamphlets…