I only thought of this later. As well as asking ourselves what is the
relevance of Trotsky’s writings for today, which writers of that time are still
read today? Which writers of that time should we be promoting?
ken h
Andrew Stewart said:
a-Isaac Deutscher says in the Afterword of THE PROPHET OUTCAST that Trotsky
would have been unable to regain power had he lived because of the shortcomings
of his analysis and framework. Even though he was a Communist, he was still wed
to the Marxist schema of the Second International. He even asks in his notes
whether Marxism was disproved by the inability of German workers to reject
fascism and the Soviet workers to reject Stalin. And then within a decade you
have the Chinese revolution, ten years after that the Cuban revolution, and
then in the following twenty-five years the Latin American and African revolts
against colonialism and imperialism.
b-Trotsky unfortunately alienated himself from the Soviet leadership by the
mid-Thirties. Regardless of his brilliance as a writer, he was extremely
haughty, elitist, and self-important to the point of being a nuisance. He used
to flaunt his brilliance by quoting Flaubert in the middle of Central Committee
meetings, annoying everyone by saying how smart he was. Deutscher said that the
Fourth International was stillborn.
So if he had lived, it is possible to imagine him ending up roughly akin to
Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, exiled dissident Jews who used to
sympathize with the Russian revolution but ended up writing polemics with
limited shelf life.
Ken Hiebert replies:
The note about Trotsky’s thoughts on the rise of Hitler and Stalin, as well as
the account of his participation in Central Committee meetings, were they from
the Deutscher trilogy, or from another source? It’s been decades since I read
that.
Trotsky’s brilliance as a writer was widely agreed on. George Bernard Shaw
referred to him as the “prince of pamphleteers.” I thought his History of the
Russian Revolution might have been written for a film maker with its vivid
images.
Do his writings have a limited shelf life? I cannot say. Does anyone on this
list know of recent reprints of his works? Are they still taken out of
libraries? Or are they read only by specialists? I’d like to know.
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