by DAVID NORTH
This is the preface for the upcoming book by David North, Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. North is the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and the National Chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US).
The print and epub version of the book will be published on June 30, 2023, and is available for pre-order here from Mehring Books.
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The material compiled in this volume was written over a period of forty years. The first essay, Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism, was initially published in the late autumn of 1982. The last item, a letter to a youth organization founded by Trotskyists in Russia, Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR, was written in February 2023.
Despite the many years that separate the first and last document, they are connected by a central argument: that Leon Trotsky was the most significant figure in the history of socialism during the first four decades of the twentieth century, and that his legacy remains the critical and indispensable theoretical and political foundation of the ongoing contemporary struggle for the victory of world socialism. The events of the last forty years have powerfully substantiated this appraisal of Trotsky’s place in history and his enduring political significance.
Let us begin with the fact that Trotsky’s condemnation of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary force has been vindicated by history. But when the first essay was written, the Soviet Union and the associated Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe still existed. Stalinist political parties affiliated with the Kremlin bureaucracy boasted of millions of members. Trotsky’s prediction that the Stalinist bureaucracy would restore capitalism, and that the rotten structure of the regime would collapse beneath the weight of national economic autarky, incompetence, and lies was dismissed as “Trotskyite sectarianism” and even “anti-Soviet propaganda” by the many political apologists for “real existing socialism.”
Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism was written precisely during the months when the long-time and increasingly senile Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev passed from his sickbed to the Kremlin Wall necropolis in Red Square. The Stalinist bureaucracy transferred its allegiance first to Yuri Andropov and then to Konstantin Chernenko—who, within little more than two years, joined their predecessor alongside the Kremlin Wall— and, finally, in March 1985, to Mikhail Gorbachev.
For all the latter’s promises of a new “openness” [glasnost] in the study of Soviet history, the Kremlin continued to denounce the struggle waged by Trotsky against the Stalinist regime and its betrayal of the October Revolution.
As late as November 1987, as the Stalinist regime was careening toward collapse, Gorbachev included in his address on the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution a defense of Stalin and a venomous denunciation of Trotsky. But as Trotsky had once noted, the laws of history proved to be more powerful than even the most powerful general secretary.
The only political tendency that foresaw and warned that Gorbachev’s policies were directed toward the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism was the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). As early as March 1987, amidst the global adulation, known as “Gorbymania,” of the new Soviet leader, the International Committee warned:
For both the working class in the Soviet Union and the workers and oppressed masses internationally, the so-called reform policy of Gorbachev represents a sinister threat. It jeopardizes the historic conquests of the October Revolution and is bound up with a deepening of the bureaucracy’s counterrevolutionary collaboration with imperialism on a world scale.[1]
Two years later, in 1989, in an analysis of Gorbachev’s policies titled Perestroika Versus Socialism, I wrote:
During the past three years, decisive steps have been taken by Gorbachev to promote private ownership of the productive forces. The bureaucracy is ever more openly identifying its interests with the development of Soviet cooperatives organized along entirely capitalist lines. Thus, to the extent that the bureaucracy’s own privileges are no longer bound up with, but hostile to, the forms of state property, its relations with world imperialism must undergo a corresponding and significant change. The principal goal of Soviet foreign policy becomes less and less the defense of the USSR against imperialist attack, but rather the mobilization of imperialist support—political and economic—for the realization of the domestic goals of perestroika, that is, the development of capitalist property relations within the Soviet Union. Thus, the counterrevolutionary logic of the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country finds its ultimate expression in the development of a foreign policy aimed at undermining Soviet state property and reintroducing capitalism within the USSR itself.[2]
I cannot claim exceptional credit for this appraisal of Gorbachev’s policies, which was verified by subsequent developments. The perspective of the International Committee was based on the analysis of the contradictions of Soviet society and the counterrevolutionary trajectory of the Stalinist regime made by Trotsky a half century earlier in his Revolution Betrayed. Moreover, the ICFI’s understanding of the post-Soviet process of capitalist restoration was facilitated by the fact that it proceeded along the lines anticipated by Trotsky.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not result, as Francis Fukuyama had predicted, in the “End of History,” which the Rand Corporation analyst defined as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[3] It is quite clear that Fukuyama did not foresee the accession of Donald Trump to the American presidency.
In fact, neither in post-Soviet Russia nor in the advanced capitalist countries did developments conform to the schema of the sage from the Rand think tank. Within Russia, all the sunny predictions with which the restoration of capitalism had been justified were refuted by events. Rather than prosperity, the fire sale of state assets to former Soviet bureaucrats and other criminal elements produced mass poverty and staggering levels of social inequality. Rather than nourishing the blossoming of democracy, the new Russian state rapidly assumed the form of an oligarchic regime. And the claim that Russia, once it had irrevocably repudiated its historical association with the October Revolution, would be welcomed by its new “Western partners” with tender embraces and integrated peacefully into the brotherhood of capitalist nations, proved to be the most far-fetched and unrealistic of all the predictions.
Within the major imperialist countries, the events that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union—the succession of economic, geopolitical and social crises that have characterized the last three decades—have substantiated the Marxist analysis of the contradictions that drive capitalism, as a world system, to destruction. The founding document of the Fourth International, written by Trotsky in 1938, defined the historical epoch as that of capitalism’s “death agony” and described the contemporary situation on the eve of World War II:
Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth. Conjunctural crises under the conditions of the social crisis of the whole capitalist system inflict ever heavier deprivations and sufferings upon the masses. Growing unemployment, in its turn, deepens the financial crisis of the state and undermines the unstable monetary systems. …
Under the increasing tension of capitalist disintegration, imperialist antagonisms reach an impasse at the height of which separate clashes and bloody local disturbances … must inevitably coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions. The bourgeoisie, of course, is aware of the mortal danger to its domination represented by a new war. But that class is now immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of 1914.[4]
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