Introduction
Their Morals and Ours was written during the Moscow Show Trials when thousands of old Bolsheviks and others faced trumped up charges and many were condemned to death accused of being Trotskyists and fascist agents. This was part of Stalin’s consolidation of his rule. Trotsky showed in this text that all those “moralists”, both of the bourgeois type and those within the Labour movement, who claimed that Stalinism was simply a continuation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks could not explain what happened during the Moscow Trials.
Stalin’s execution of thousands upon thousands of genuine revolutionary communists who had given everything for the revolution created a river of blood between himself and all the old Bolsheviks. This shows that Stalin was not the continuation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks but represented a sharp break with that tradition. Trotsky and the Left Opposition, who defended the ideas of Lenin in the USSR, were hunted down, exiled from the country and killed by Stalinist agents. Trotsky ends Their Morals and Ours with a dedication to his son Leon Sedov who was killed by a Stalinist agent while Trotsky was writing the text.
All moralists use some abstract principle that varies according to who is making the appraisal. For a religious person, Darwinists, Marxists and anarchists are all the same because they all accept that life evolved and was not created. For Hitler, Liberalism and Marxism are the same since they don’t believe in the doctrines of “race” and “blood and honour”. For bourgeois democrats, Fascism and Bolshevism are twins because they do not bow down before bourgeois democracy. What all these moralists have in common is that they do not see the underlying material conditions of each situation.
Moralists counterpose the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR, which is a concrete historical reality, to bourgeois democracy as a supra-historic abstraction. They conveniently ignore the fact that bourgeois democracy, precisely because it is merely a means of running the capitalist system, offers nothing but crisis and unemployment. And they also tip-toe round the fact in the same period of the rise of Stalin in the USSR the bourgeoisie in many countries abandoned “democracy” and promoted the rise of Fascism and world war because the working class failed to overthrow capitalism.
Trotsky explains this moral approach to politics, an approach that is also found in the Labour movement and amongst the Left in general, has its class basis amongst the petty bourgeois intellectuals. The political foundation is their impotence and confusion in the face of both reaction and revolution. These ideologues from the middle layers are those who have fallen, or are in danger of falling, between the lines of fire of the two main classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. What they desire is capitalism with a human face. Unfortunately for them, this is now a Utopia.
Marie Frederiksen
From ‘Marxists and Morality’, Marxist.com
27 March 2013