384
IRVING HOWE
the post-war years, when as it seemed to many observers, all political
systems, including both Marxism and classical liberalism, proved
insufficient. Trotsky's mind was a mixture of the rigid and the
flexible: he held unquestioningly to the basic tenets of Marxism, but
within those limits was capable of innovation and risk. The prob–
lems he was forced to grapple with were qualitatively different from
those which the greatest minds in his tradition had had to confront;
for Trotsky was living in the time of the debacle of socialism and
the triumph of totalitarianism, events that none of his intellectual
ancestors had foreseen.
In one of his last articles, "The USSR in War," he showed a
readiness at least to consider the possibility that the proletariat might
not fulfill the revolution that he and other Marxists had so long
expected. He knew quite well that in such an event he would have
to initiate a fundamental shift in political thought:
If
this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletarian revolu–
tion, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureau–
cracy in the USSR and regeneration of Soviet democracy on a
far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918. . ..
If,
however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not
revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains
another alternative : the further decay of monopoly capital–
ism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of
democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime.
The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the
leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions
to the growth of a new exploiting class.
There were other problems-already present during the last
years of Trotsky's life but visible in their full significance only during
the decades since his death-which call into question at least parts
of his political outlook. Can, for instance, the modern phenomenon
of totalitarianism, with its profound irrationality, its systematized ter–
rorism, and its tendency to suppress traditional class dynamics, be
understood adequately in terms of Trotsky's Marxism? Trotsky, it
is true, had kept writing that in the absence of socialism, there would
be a relapse into a kind of modern barbarism, and the Europe of
the thirties and forties certainly sustained this prediction. But to pre–
dict a phenomenon is not necessarily to describe it fully or under-
