Hagiography (2015)

Book Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Leon Trotsky’, by Paul Le Blanc. Reaktion Books. 2015

Yet another hagiography but what’s the point? Only Trotskyists are interested in Trotsky these days and they know his life by heart.

Trotsky was a political failure and left a dubious political legacy. Apart from scores of squabbling Trotskyist sects, there’s the justification for reformist practice called ‘transitional demands’.  His History of the Russian Revolution is worth a read as written by somehow who played a prominent part in it. As is The Revolution Betrayed which, though mistakenly identifying Russia as a ‘degenerate workers state’ with an economy superior to capitalism because of its nationalisation and planning, at least initiated discussions on ‘the nature of the USSR’ which led to some of his followers realising that it was a class-ruled society and even state capitalism, even if he himself never did.

Le Blanc, a Trotskyist himself, is one of those who have been trying to paint Lenin as an orthodox left-wing Marxist operating in the specific conditions of Tsarist Russia rather than as the originator of a quite different theory and practice, Leninism. He claims the same for Trotsky but says virtually nothing in his book of Trotsky’s ideas and activities up to 1917 before he became a Bolshevik and which might have given some plausibility to this view.

Adam Buick