Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The ... - Indymedia

Telling Fortunes to the Doomed 107less than coherent fashion as simultaneously an eclectic who falls short oftheory and a doctrinaire who suffers from a stifling excess of it. Moreover,McNeal critiques Trotsky for his failure as a Marxist: “Trotsky struggled toavoid making a Marxist analysis of Stalinism.” 104 McNeal’s complaints againstTrotsky for both his excess and deficit of “Marxism” are inconsistent, but alsosymptomatic of a certain academic habit of elevating oneself above politics.This is not a problem with Beilharz’s book, which in most other respects,however, recapitulates the weaknesses of the literature being reviewed here.As in the previous cases, Trotsky’s arguments are dismissed as self-evidentlyincorrect against the background of a historical sentence that allows for noappeal. But Trotsky’s inadequacy rests on the common sense of a slightly differenthistorical moment from Kolakowski or Volkogonov’s. This particularbook is a product of the 1980s, when, even in far-away Australia, Beilharz’simagination was captured not by the muscular prose of the cold warrior, andnot yet by the end-of-history effluvia, but instead by the allure of “democratic”socialism as a self-evident imperative. Trotsky is inadequate becausehe does not conform to categorical imperatives such as a commitment toa peaceful (if not pacifist) reformism, to the existing consciousness of theworking class, and so on: “It has now become commonplace on the Westernleft to insist that socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.”Like revolutionary movements in general, “Trotskyism” is “mistaken. . . misleading [and] dangerous” because “its democratic impulse is weak,and is structured by the Jacobin legacy; this is why Trotskyism is an obstacleto the cause of socialism. The problem with Jacobinism, stated plainly, is thatit is a form of politics which seeks human elevation but kills people: it seeksto improve humanity from above, whether they like it or not. It kills people,or justifies murders by others, and then blames History.” 105As in Volkogonov’s case, but from a different standpoint, this sort ofmoralizing is hardly decisive as a criterion to assess Trotsky or anyone else. 106Even assuming that Trotsky can be regarded as a representative of this “formof politics,” historically Jacobinism has had many competitors in the businessof killing people. Capitalism has killed and continues to do so, and infact, so have the mealy-mouthed “democratic” socialists that cling to it. Theyhave done so on a grand scale—as in the case of the German SPD’s vote insupport of war credits at the outbreak of World War I, or the Mensheviksupport for the provisional Russian government as it continued the war—orin more modest numbers, as in the case of the political assassination of RosaLuxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. “Democratic” socialism has killed in thepast, in these oft-forgotten incidents, as well as more recently, as in the caseof the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Indeed, after years of the likes