TROTSKY IS DEAD
347
him than of Jeremiah. A certain gaiety is indeed a feature of his
style, as in this characterization: "Bukharin,s nature is such that
he must always attach himself to something.... You must always
keep your eye on him, or else he will succumb quite imperceptibly
to
the influence of some one directly opposed to you, as other people
fall
under an automobile.,, Lenin would have denounced Buk–
harin as a "renegade/, and not once but many times. Trotsky,s
method is not only more effective, but it is also less open to abuse.
To some extent he moderated-often not enough-and humanized
the sharp, almost brutal tone of Marxist polemics, a tone that has
by
now become a real debit to the movement.
Trotsky,s claim to greatness as a political thinker rests on a
long series of books and pamphlets, stretching from his history of
the
1905
revolution through his writings on the Chinese revolu–
tion, the march to power of German fascism, and the course of the
French Popular Front, up to his culminating exposures of the
Stalinist degeneration in
The Revolution Betrayed
and his writings
on the Moscow Trials. For international scope, for brilliance,
solidity, and sheer volume, this body of work has no parallel in
the literature of Marxism. But perhaps the most spectacular dem–
onstration of his powers was his conception of "the permanent
revolution.,,
When the young Trotsky-twenty-seven years old-came out
in
1906
with his theory of "the permanent revolution/, he was
almost universally considered an ultra-left visionary. Yet his was
a remarkable intellectual achievement: a decade before the
1917
revolution, he predicted both its occurrence and the way in which
it might degenerate. Not only did he insist it would be a proletarian
socialist revolution, but also that, once it was made, it would prove
possible to create a socialist order in Russia only if similar revo–
lutions in more advanced nations came to the aid of the Russian
workers.
If
this did not happen, he predicted degeneration and
reaction
in
Russia-a prophecy which needs little underlining
ioday.
For his theory Trotsky received no support in either wing of
the Russian Social Democracy. While differing radically on the
form of state to be set up after the next revolution, the Bolsheviks
