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IRVING HOWE
the contrary, the secretarial hierarchy of the party to an
ever greater degree selects the membership of conferences and
congresses which to an ever greater degree are becoming ex–
ecutive consultations of the hierarchy.
Trotsky did not propose the restoration of freedom for the out–
lawed socialist parties, but confined himself to urging democracy
within the Bolshevik party so that its intellectual life could be re–
freshed. And finally, he urged a reassertion of the principles of
"socialist internationalism" in the work of the Communist parties
abroad, charging that under Stalin's domination the Communist
movement was being reduced to an appendage of Russian national–
ism.
As
Trotsky saw it, the struggle between Stalin and himself was
not primarily a personal dispute or a competition for power; it in–
volved profound differences of principle between a bureaucracy that
had become encrusted on the workers' state and the oppositionist
forces that spoke for the socialist tradition.
Some years later, when the triumph of Stalinism had become
complete in Russia and a good number of Western liberals had
succumbed to an uncritical acceptance of its pretensions, it became
fashionable to say that Stalin, having embarked upon a frenzied
program of industrialization through his successive Five Year Plans,
had "stolen Trotsky'S thunder." Such remarks ignored the fact that
what mattered for Trotsky was not industrialization as an end in
itself but industrialization in behalf of what he took to be socialist
ends. Industrialization might be effected in any backward country
prepared to employ centralized power with sufficient ruthlessness in
order to sweat capital accumulation out of the people, but that was
not what Trotsky believed to be the issue. For him, as he kept
insisting, industrialization mattered as a means for "raising the
specific gravity of the proletariat in society," and thereby moving
toward the harmonious world of socialism. The industrialization of
Stalin, by contrast, was achieved through the social exploitation of
the working class, the imposition of totalitarian controls upon the
entire country, and the destruction of political life and consciousness.
It
brought with it grave economic imbalances, profound social dis–
ruption, and extreme political barbarism, the effects of which
will
be felt for decades to come. No, this was not the "thunder" that
Trotsky or any other Bolshevik leader of the twenties had proposed
