Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was a Russian Marxist theorist, revolutionary, and politician. Although initially a Menshevik, he joined the dominant Bolsheviks after the 1917 October Revolution. He rose to become a Soviet leader in the early USSR, was close to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and was the first leader of the Red Army. He was seen as a probable successor to Lenin as leader of the USSR, following the former’s death in 1924. However, following Joseph Stalin’s rise to power in the 1920s Trotsky, and his Left Opposition associates, were marginalised. Trotsky was deported in 1929, and was finally assassinated by agents of Stalin in Mexico City in 1940.

During his years in exile, Trotsky was strongly critical of Stalinist policies in the USSR. His attacks on Stalin’s “perversion” of the revolution, and the Soviet totalitarianism, remain influential to this day. Importantly, he remained a committed communist and Marxist-Leninist, but rejected the tyrannical nature of Stalinism.

As such, Trotsky remains a popular figure among the far-left (hence their college nickname: “Trots”). This should, however, be treated with skepticism. Admittedly, Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalinism (and particularly how it did nothing to achieve socialist goals) are powerful. However, as a committed Leninist, Trotsky was, by no stretch of the imagination, a libertarian-socialist. He remained a champion of “democratic” centralism (a strong state, a planned economy, and authoritarian collectivism) and vanguardism (a small group of “intellectuals” have to take control of the revolution and act on behalf of the working class).

In fairness, many anarcho-communists and libertarian-socialists recognise this. It is also true that, before 1917, he was much more consistently critical of authoritarianism. However, far too many modern leftists continue to embrace Trotsky’s legacy as a glowing instance of the salvageability of state-socialism and orthodox Marxism. The following is a collection of quotes to illustrate how Trotsky’s legacy should really be construed.

[Quotes sourced from wikiquote and marxists.org]

1) Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps… Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.

Statement of 1918, as quoted in Trotsky : The Eternal Revolutionary (1996) by Dmitri Volkogonov

 

2) Even if, in one country or another, the dictatorship of the proletariat grew up within the external framework of democracy, this would by no means avert the civil war. The question as to who is to rule the country, i.e., of the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence.

Terrorism and communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920)

 

3) The working class, which seized power in battle, had as its object and its duty to establish that power unshakeably, to guarantee its own supremacy beyond question, to destroy its enemies’ hankering for a new revolution, and thereby to make sure of carrying out Socialist reforms. Otherwise there would be no point in seizing power.

Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920)

 

4) Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands. In this sense, the Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection, the direct continuation of which it represents. The State terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned “morally” only by a man who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence whatsoever – consequently, every war and every rising. For this one has to be merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker.

Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920)

 

5) The question of the form of repression, or of its degree, of course, is not one of “principle.” It is a question of expediency. In a revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.

Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920)

 

6) Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.

Terrorism and Communism : A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920)

 

7) We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right… And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.

Speech at the XIIIth Party Congress, May 1924

 

8) We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life.

The Russian Revolution (1930)

 

9) Dialectic materialism does not know dualism between means and end. The end flows naturally from the historical movement.

Their Morals and Ours (1938)

 

10) Common sense operates on invariable magnitudes in a world where only change is invariable. Dialectics, on the contrary, takes all phenomena, institutions, and norms in their rise, development and decay. The dialectical consideration of morals as a subservient and transient product of the class struggle seems to common sense an “amoralism”. But there is nothing more flat, stale, self-satisfied and cynical than the moral rules of common sense!

Their Morals and Ours (1938)