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his conscious existence, an active participant in events. The regime
of the Kremlin, whose ultimate corruption is sealed by this murder,
had practical reasons for disembarrassing itself of Trotsky in this
period of world-wide convulsion. Trotsky was the one man still
living whose name and prestige could have become a rallying·point
for a mass revolution in almost any part of the world, and espe·
cially in Russia. And even more important, as long as he lived,
there was a center of revolutionary Marxist consciousness in the
world, a voice which could not be frightened or corrupted into
silence.
Trotsky was born on October 26, the day on which, thirty·
eight years later, the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace. His death
came at an equally symbolic moment, in the dead center of that
storm which is razing the whole structure of European society. He
died after the fall of Paris and before the bombing of London, and
it would be hard to say which event is the more terrible confirma·
tion of the basic validity of the Marxist viewpoint Trotsky repre·
sented: the capitulation without a shot of the citadel of Western
culture, or the slow destruction of the great city which was the
capital of both the British Empire and of international capitalism.
"For the first time," wrote Rosa Luxemburg during the last
war, "the destructive beasts that have been loosed by capitalist
Europe over all other parts of the world have sprung, with one
awful leap, into the midst of the European nations.... This civil·
ized world has just begun to know that the fangs of the imperialist
beast are deadly, that its breath is frightfulness, that its tearing
claws have sunk deep into the breasts of its own mother, European
culture."
If
this could be said of the last war, what can be said of
this one, in which the victorious Nazis are reducing the other
nations of Europe to the political and economic position of subject
colonial nations, when such cities as Warsaw, Rotterdam, and now
London are laid waste in a few days or weeks or even minutes?
Today more than ever is it necessary to learn the hard lesson that
Trotsky devoted his life to teaching: that the fabric of our capi·
talist society is so rotten it cannot be patched up, that in world
revolution, "permanent revolution" by the oppressed masses lies
the only hope for mankind.
