A Reply to Branko Milanovic on Trotsky
Branko Milanovic, whose writings I enjoy and whom I greatly respect, has written a scathing attack on Trotsky and Trotskyism . https://open.substack.com/pub/branko2f7/p/trotsky-after-kolakowski?r=oy52j&utm_medium=ios Here is a brief reply.
Dear Branko,
I studied with Leszek Kolakowski at Oxford and attended the seminar course at All Souls on which Main Currents of Marxism is based. He was a brilliant man whom I liked, but the book isn’t impressive - I found it full of inaccuracies. The story you tell of Trotsky is often told and it’s certainly true he was a bad politician who made a lot of mistakes. He and Lenin complemented each other.
But, his real intellectual achievements aside, Trotsky is immortalised by his moral and political stance in the 1920s and 1930s - standing almost alone during the Midnight of the Century against the corruption of socialism by the Stalin regime and for the classical Marxist tradition. It’s thanks to him that Marxists, whether or not they call themselves Trotskyists, can hold their heads up high. For this, he, his family, and his comrades paid a terrible price. There’s a moving passage in Trotsky’s Diary in Exile where he expresses his awareness of this personal cost. He also was an extremely prescient observer of the rise of National Socialism in Germany. His warnings and calls for a united front of Social Democrats and Communists against Hitler went unheard, but that doesn’t diminish their prophetic quality.
You have some fun with the Trotskyist movement, but some of what you say is just absurd - the idea for example that the PCF (the PCF!!!) and the PCI were influenced by Trotskyism in the 1960s and 1970s! You cannot be serious. And spare us the canard about neoconservativism being a product of Trotskyism. A few neocons had a brief brush with Trotskyism in their youth - that’s all. Leo Strauss was a much bigger influence on the neocons, as he is on the contemporary US far right.
Yes, the Trotskyists failed, but so too did the Maoists who were much more influential in continental Europe, for example. That broader failure of the post-1968 far left needs to be reckoned with. I’m still proud of what we have achieved - for example in the movements against racism, fascism, and war here in Britain. The future as far as I’m concerned remains open. But, please, spare us also the cracks about cappuccino. I prefer espresso myself. I hope to buy you one sometime.
Best wishes,
Alex
My own (quite old) assessment of Trotskyism here https://www.marxists.de/trotism/callinicos/index.htm
Dear Alex,
I wrote about Kolakowski's negative assessment of Trotsky & I tried to explain it. So the parts that you find most objectionable are an attempt from my side to rationalize or to understand Kolakowski's contemptuous attitude. As I wrote, I can in parts understand Kolakowski's position but it does not mean that I fully agree with it. For example, my review f the "Betrayed Revolution" is excellent as is my review of Victor Serge's memoirs. But I will write on it. Best, Branko
Of I may ask, what reading(s) would you recommend on the main currents of Marxism instead of Kolakowsi, since his book is full of innaccuracies? Thank you in advance.