MODERN DOCUMENTS
MEANS AND ENDS
Their Interdependence, and Leon Trotsky's Essay on
"Their Morals and Ours"
The relation of means and ends has long been an outstanding
issue in morals. It has also been a burning issue in political theory and
practice. Of late the discussion has centered about the later develop–
ments of Marxism in the U.S.S.R. The course of the Stalinists has been
defended by many of his adherents in other countries on the ground that
the purges and prosecutions, perhaps even with a certain amount of
falsification, were necessary to maintain the alleged socialistic regime of
that country. Others have used the measures of the Stalinist bureaucracy
to condemn the Marxist policy on the ground that the latter leads to
such excesses as have occurred in the U .S.S.R. precisely because Marxism
holds that the end justifies the means. Some of these critics have held
that since Trotsky is also a Marxian he is committed to the same policy
and consequently if he had been in power would also have felt bound
to use any means whatever that seemed necessary to achieve the end
involved in dictatorship by the proletariat.
The discussion has had at least one useful theoretical result. It
has brought out into the open for the first time, as far as I am aware,
an explicit discussion by a consistent Marxian of the relation of the
means and ends in social action.* At the courteous invitation of one of
the editors of this review, I propose to discuss this issue in the light
of Mr. ' Trotsky's discussion of the interdependence of means and ends.
Much of the earlier part of his essay does not, accordingly, enter into my
discussion, though I may say that on the ground of
tu quoque
argument
(suggested by the title) Trotsky has had no great difficulty in showing
that some of his critics have acted in much the same way they attribute
to him. Since Mr. Trotsky also indicates that the only alternative position
*
EDITORS' NOTE:
Mr. Dewey refers to Leon Trotsky's article in
The New Inter–
national,
June 1938. Mr. Dewey's answer appeared in the August 1938 issue of
The New International·
