Trotsky was one of the organisers of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and then became leader of the Red Army. After the Revolution, Russia quit WW1 and Civil War broke out, chiefly between the Communist Reds and the Anti-Revolutionary Whites, with various smaller groups also being involved (many leftwing groups did not like the Bolsheviks). Trotsky was ousted during Stalin's rise, and spent the rest of his life in exile, before being assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940.
In Animal Farm, the character Snowball is largely based on Trotsky, a sympathetic portrayal that follows the narrative that the revolution started well but was ruined by Stalin, represented by Napoleon. One of Trotsky's later books, which seems to have popularised this narrative, is The Revolution Betrayed (1937).
Terrorism and Communism (1920) is Trotsky's defence of political violence - it is also one of the very few of his books that is still in print by a major publisher, and comes with a long introduction by Slavoj Žižek. I posted in a leftist Facebook group that I was reading it, and a few people commented, saying it was 'one of Trotsky's best' and 'an absolute banger'.
This context should hopefully explain why I went it into expecting, despite the controversial title and subject matter, to feel some positivity towards it. Instead, I bounced off it so hard I almost ended up a Thatcherite; indeed, I was left thinking I would much rather have the Tories in power than Trotskyists.
At times, I wanted to hit my head against a wall, and once I imagined myself looking to camera and saying, "Wow, this is garbage."
In hindsight, it should not have been so surprising that I hated it. On the Political Compass, Trotsky is Authoritarian Left. My instincts place me in Libertarian Left: my radical sympathies lie more with anarchism rather than Bolshevism. In leftwing groups, a frequent topic of discussion is uniting the fractious Left against the more united Right, but many argue that there are irreconcilable differences between Authoritarian and Libertarian leftists, which make such an alliance impossible to maintain: anarchists and communists were enemies in both the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars.
(The Political Compass is a simplification, and has probably had negative impacts on political discourse, but it's a fun simplification and has led to some good memes.)
Trotsky is good at describing flaws in parliamentary democracy: the political and legal equality of the wealthy capitalist and the poor labourer, both having one vote in elections, is mystical nonsense. It does not take account of economic realities and the ways the political and legal system is biased in favour of the wealthy, who can use their wealth to influence politics and get away with criminality ('Punishable by a fine' translates to 'Legal for rich people'). Thus, with political power concentrated in the hands of wealthy, and the workers only having insignificant or indeed illusory power, you might describe liberal democracy as a 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' - therefore, the solution is to trash this false democracy and put in place a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', where political power is held by workers, represented by the Communist Party, the only political party.
It is not the job of the communists - the class-conscious and politically advanced vanguard of the working class - to represent majority opinion, but to create it, by elevating the understanding of the rest of the population and proving how good communism is. Eventually, the rest of the working class, and the re-educated remnants of the bourgeoisie, will understand that the communists were right all along.
The criticisms of parliamentary democracy are strong - and you can find echoes of them across all sorts of media right up to the present day. I was specifically reminded of Isabel Hardman's Why We Get The Wrong Politicians (2018) and Martin Williams' Parliament Ltd (2016), among many other works. His explanation of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' made me understand this doctrine better, though I think the flaws in it are quite evident.
Some of Trotsky's arguments in defence of political violence are quite standard, and could be used by adherents of any political position: sometimes, when your political opponents are uncompromising, inconvincible, and repressive, violence is the only way to topple them. When you are a new and fragile regime, surrounded by enemies within and without, violence is inevitably necessary to maintain control and defend the revolution.
Trotsky uses various examples of political violence throughout history to make his point; today, we might use the example of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars. Of course their violence was necessary to overthrow the Galactic Empire! Unfortunately the sequel trilogy did not explore the rebels' difficulties in establishing the New Republic: this is covered in books I have no intention to read.
So we can agree that violence is sometimes necessary. If we were to then agree that liberal democracy is a dictatorship of one class over the rest, and that the interests of the ruling class are directly antagonistic and irreconcilable to those below it, then we can see how easy it is to justify a violent insurrection and subsequent reign of terror.
'As long as class society, founded on the most deep-rooted antagonisms, continues to exist, repression remains a necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side... 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... [There is] in history no other way of breaking the class will of the enemy except the systematic and energetic use of violence.'
It's a recurring theme in history, and popular media, that revolutions end up recreating the old order with new faces in charge. Some descriptions of Tsarist Russia from the 1800s can be mistaken for descriptions of Soviet Russia, for example this one by the Marquis de Custine, who visited in 1838:
'It is a country in which the government says what it pleases, because it alone has the right to speak. In Russia fear replaces, that is paralyses, thought... Nor in this country is historical truth any better respected than the sanctity of oaths... even the dead are exposed to the fantasies of him who rules the living.'
Trotsky defends the Soviets against charges that they are using exactly the same tactics as tsarism by pointing out that the Soviets are doing it to the bad guys, the capitalists, the landlords, the bourgeoisie - not the good guys, the proletariat.
'Do you grasp this... distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.'
'Who aims at the end cannot reject the means.'
The end goal is, of course, a socialist utopia. The Soviet state is described as the transition towards true socialism, when the state 'will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune'. This is where Trotsky sounds most like a religious fanatic awaiting his preferred apocalypse. Actually, 'awaiting' is perhaps the wrong word, since in his mind the Marxist apocalypse is already here: he is living through it. As the Christian Heaven on Earth is preceded by Armageddon, the final battle between Light and Dark, so too is True Socialism preceded by the Revolutionary Epoch, the final battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie:
'The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the state. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction... civilised humanity has entered a revolutionary epoch; all the capitalist countries are speeding towards colossal disturbances and an open class war; and the task of the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat is to prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary spiritual armoury and buttress of organisation.'
During the transitional stage, forced labour is necessary. Trotsky uses a few arguments to justify this. In wartime, it is fairly standard for states to conscript soldiers; it is necessary for the defence of the realm. The communists are extending this principle to the militarisation of labour: as conscripting soldiers in wartime is necessary and acceptable, why not the rest of the labour force? Furthermore, labour under capitalism was wage slavery, made compulsory by the forces of economic necessity: 'freedom of labour' was a lie.
By contrast, forced labour under communism is honest about the compulsion, and besides, at least the workers were now working for the Communist Party, who have their interests in mind, not some heartless capitalist; and at least the compulsion is only temporary during this transitional stage. Once we reach True Socialism 'there will be no compulsion... under socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labour, etc, etc... under socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the state.'
'As all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labour service is sketched into our constitution and our labour code.'
'The worker does not merely bargain with the Soviet state: no, he is subordinated to the Soviet state, under its orders in every direction - for it is his state.'
Trotsky defends the Soviets against the charge that they are slave state no better than the Egyptian regime who used slaves to build the pyramids by pointing out that the Egyptian slaves were working in the Pharaoh's interests, while the Soviet workers are working in the interests of the workers, as represented by the Communist Party.
Parts of this book make Trotsky sound like someone who has never organised any industry or enterprise before, trying to explain why practices he and his mates had previously being railing against have persisted after the revolution. These are the funniest parts of the book, because he's defending practices associated with capitalism while desperately trying to rebrand them.
For example, he describes the importance of 'rivalry' in boosting economic production. He wants us to believe that this 'rivalry' is different to capitalist competition. Under socialism, 'rivalry will acquire an ever less selfish and purely idealist character. It will express itself in striving to perform the greatest possible service for one's village, region, town, or the whole of society, and to receive in return renown, gratitude, sympathy, or just internal satisfaction from the consciousness of work well done. But in the difficult period of transition... rivalry must inevitably be to a greater or lesser degree bound up with a striving to guarantee for oneself one's own requirements.' He also explains why some people need to be paid more than others, if they've 'done more for the general interest' than the lazy, careless, or disorganised.
Elsewhere, he defends 'One-Man Management' of factories against critics who argue the factories should be under the control of the workers themselves. Trotsky argues that (a) the factories are controlled by representatives of the Communist Party, who represent the working class, therefore the factories are actually under worker control; and (b) one-man management is more efficient, because it means a single person is ultimately responsible and accountable for the factory; and besides, if a worker is interested in management, perhaps one day when they're a bit more experienced they can earn a promotion and become a manager themselves!
'The foremost, intelligent, determined administrator naturally strives to take the factory into his hands as a whole, and to show both to himself and to others that he can carry out his work.' Gee, I wonder what it would be like if that administrator owned the factory.
To understand how Trotsky got to these views, we do need to understand him in historical context. This book was written during the Russian Civil War, after the great conflagration of the First World War. His views were shaped by the traumas of war and political repression under the Tsar. After the revolution, the Bolshevik regime was fighting off enemies on multiple fronts while trying to figure out how to govern effectively and bring about socialism. It is also worth reflecting on how terrible the conditions of the working classes were globally at that time, and also specifically in Russia under the Tsar. Add in Marx's and others' many criticisms of capitalism, many of which still hold up.
Communism, like Christianity 2000 years ago, offered people radical hope for a better world following an imminent apocalypse. The Communist Manifesto's famous finale, 'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.' is not so effective these days in the developed world: most people can point to many things they could lose other than metaphorical chains; we live lives of relative comfort, both in the global picture and certainly compared to the working classes of a century ago.
However, I can certainly understand communism's appeal when you're living in a slum, when you have long working hours in terrible conditions and a dead-end job with no hope of advancement or change. If you're already living under wage slavery, why not communist slavery? At least that's only temporary while you wait for Heaven on Earth.
I did not find this book 'an absolute banger'; I found it relentlessly tedious, unpleasant, and nonsensical. I can certainly understand wanting and hoping for a better system than what we have now, but the answer - if this book, supposedly 'one of Trotsky's best', is anything to go by - is not to be found in Trotskyism.
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