Trotsky’s work In Defence of October is the title of a speech delivered to a meeting of Social Democratic students in Copenhagen, Denmark in November 1932. At that time Trotsky was living in exile on the tiny island of Prinkipo in Turkey where he was like a caged tiger. He applied to various countries for a visa, but one after another the “democratic” countries of Europe refused to grant asylum to the revolutionary, who they still regarded as a threat.
Isolated from the mainstream of world politics, he continued to influence the course of the class struggle through the building of the International Left Opposition. Under these difficult conditions, Trotsky eagerly seized an invitation he had received to come to Denmark, and used every opportunity to speak to the press and activists in the Danish labour movement.
But Trotsky’s hope that his stay in Denmark might lead to the granting of asylum were soon dashed. The Stalinist leaders of the Danish Communist Party organised demonstrations against him in a kind of united front with the Danish Royal Family, who protested against the decision to permit the visit, accusing Trotsky of being responsible for the death of the Russian Tsar and his family, who were their relatives.
After the meeting, in Copenhagen just as before it, Trotsky found himself a prisoner of the Planet without a visa. Nevertheless, it has left us with one priceless asset – the text of his speech, which we reproduce here. It is possibly the best concise work one can read on the subject. For Marxists, the October Revolution of 1917 was the greatest single event in human history. If we exclude the brief but glorious episode of the Paris Commune, for the first time the working class succeeded in overthrowing its oppressors and at least began the task of the socialist transformation of society.
Trotsky later pointed out in The Revolution Betrayed that the October Revolution demonstrated the viability of socialism for the first time, not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, coal, electricity and cement. The nationalised planned economy established by the October Revolution succeeded in a remarkably short time in transforming an economy as backward as Pakistan today into the second most powerful nation on earth.
The Bolshevik Revolution has therefore been completely justified by history. However, the Revolution took place not in an advanced capitalist country as Marx had expected but in semi-feudal tsarist Russia, on the basis of the most frightful backwardness. To give an approximate idea of the conditions that confronted the Bolsheviks, it is sufficient to point out that in just one year, 1920, six million people starved to death in Soviet Russia.
The possibility of real socialism depends on the development of the means of production to a level far in excess of even the most developed capitalist societies, like the USA, Germany or Japan. This was explained by Marx even before he wrote the Communist Manifesto. In the German Ideology he wrote that “where want is generalised all the old crap revives.” And by “all the old crap” he meant class oppression, inequality and exploitation. The reason why the October Revolution degenerated into Stalinism was that it remained isolated in a backward country where the material conditions for building socialism were absent.
The low level of the productive forces and culture in Russia were the objective reasons for the bureaucratic degeneration of the Revolution, which finally ended with Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship – the very antithesis of the democratic workers’ state established by Lenin and Trotsky. The productive forces in the USSR had developed to a tremendous extent thanks to the nationalised planned economy, but came up against the obstacle of bureaucratic control, which inevitably led to colossal mismanagement, waste, corruption and inefficiency.
In the end the bureaucratic overlords preferred to return to capitalism rather than hand power back to the working class. Trotsky had already warned that the bureaucrats would not be satisfied with their enormous privileges, luxurious cars, dachas and servants. Because all this was based upon state property, they could not pass these things on to their children. Sooner or later, therefore, they would seek to transform state property into private property. And that was just what occurred.
Contrary to the predictions of the bourgeoisie and its hired agents in the universities and the media, the fall of Stalinism was neither the end of socialism nor the end of history. What failed in the USSR was not socialism in any sense that would be recognised by Marx or Lenin, but a bureaucratic and totalitarian caricature of socialism. That certainly failed and it was bound to fail for reasons that Trotsky explained decades in advance.
Now history has taken its revenge on the advocates of the “free market economy”, which has plunged the whole world into a bottomless abyss. Twenty five years ago the bourgeois economists predicted a world of peace and prosperity after the fall of “Communism”. But instead of peace there is war after war. Instead of prosperity there is economic collapse, mass unemployment, huge and unsustainable levels of debt, mass unemployment and growing misery alongside the most obscene wealth and luxury.
The collapse of Stalinism was undoubtedly a historical drama of the first magnitude. But it will be seen by future historians as merely the prelude to a far greater drama: the downfall of capitalism. The present socio-economic system is displaying all the symptoms of senile decay. The old order has outlived its usefulness and exhausted any progressive potential it may once have possessed. It is rotten-ripe for overthrow.
Let the pessimists and sceptics tremble for the future. Let them weep and wail about the present state of the world. What we are witnessing are the symptoms of the death agony of an outmoded, reactionary and barbarous system. Its overthrow is the prior condition for the preservation of civilization, culture and the human race itself. We Marxists look forward to that day, we welcome it with enthusiasm and we will do everything in our power to hasten it, to put an end to the nightmare into which it has plunged our world and to open a new and glorious page in the history of humanity.
London
23 September 2015