TROTSKY IS DEAD
351
on this basis can the development of the USSR in the last ten years
be
understood.
So, too, with the development of fascism in Germany. When
one reads Trotsky's analysis of the class forces and anti-fascist
strategy
in
the last years before Hitler took power-1 am thinking
of his three long studies of
1932:
"Germany, the Key to the Inter–
national Situation," "The Only Road for Germany," and "Ger–
many-What Next?"--<me marvels at his realism and penetration.
His
proposal for a united front of the CommunistS and the Social
Democracy against the Nazis, his demolition of the Stalinist idea
of "social fascism,"
hi~
realization that Hitler was more than a
tool of finance capital and that his victory would mean a long
period of deep reaction
("Mter
Hitler, our turn!" said the Stalin–
ists)-all of this makes impressive reading today. And yet, once
Hitler had won power and the Nazi state began its evolution,
Trotsky's ·understanding of it seemed to cease.* After the
1934
"blood purge," when the petty bourgeois radicals were crushed by
Hitler, Trotsky expected the beginning of the end. And in the terms
of
"classic" Marxism, it was a reasonable assumption. The Nazis
had been forced by their big business backers to liquidate their
mass base; this would mean the regime would assume an increas–
ingly Bonapartist character, the class struggle would become ever
.harper, and the
~nd
of the dictatorship ever nearer. But, just as
Stalin
liquidated the kulaks and the NEP without thereby advanc–
ing one step towards socialism, so Hitler curbed the petty bourgeois
radicals without thereby turning in a big business direction. Since
1936, indeed, a "blood purge" without either blood or dramatics
has
been going on at the expense of the businessmen and bankers
who financed Hitler's rise to power.
In both these cases, it seems to nie, Trotsky understood fully
the
immediate political issues. But he was unable to reshape the
instrument of "classic" Marxism so as to fit the new forms of
10eiety that are arising in Russia and Germany. The very penetra–
tion of his analysis of the secondary political factors blinded him
to
its basic defects. The outbreak of the second world war revealed
in
a sudden, dramatic way the inadequacies of Trotsky's basic
•His
interest, too. It is significant that, although he wrote so copiously on the
..Utieal problema of the last year before Hitler took power, he seems to have paid
kie
attention to the internal development of the Nazi state since 1933; at
lea~t
I
bow
of no studies by Trotsky of any length on the 1ubject.
