324
PETER
WEISS
Fer this reasen I have placed the demand fer finding the truth
above party political considerations informed by present conditions.
Moreever, the argument that claims that the bourgeeis world
could use Trotsky and the thoughts he proclaimed as a weapon against
socialism is untenable. N0' goals can be feund in his werk that would
argue an advantage for the beurgeeisie. Whenever he attacked com–
munist parties, he did se in erder te accuse them ef net fighting
capitalism and fascism effectively and strongly enough. His criticism
ef the socialist state was directed against its bureaucratic deformations;
he demanded the return to revolutienary traditions. And t0' his very
end - often in centradistinctien te his followers - he combined his
polemic, his suggestions, with the appeal for the necessity of selidarity
with the First Workers' State.
That his writings as well as biographies of him can enly be found
in Western countries has nothing te do with him, but with those who
attempted to push him off by force inte the camp of the enemy and
who struck his name from the annals of the revelution.
Thirty years after his death what
is
it that represents Trotsky?
Which dangers can be associated with him that could account for a
taboo, unique in history, that is attached to his name in socialist
countries, and for his activities being surrounded by an obscuring
process incompatible with dialectical materialism?
Quite obviously and above all it is his perspective of the per–
manent revolution, his advocacy of a never-ending war of liberation
on all continents, from which the slander and brandishing of his person
can be derived. And beneath that, working on centinuously, is his break
with Stalin, when he declared his internationalist anathema in opposi–
tion to the principle of socialist construction in one c0'untry.
Even if we are ef the opinien that in view of the capitalist en–
circlement at the time Stalin's solution was inescapable, we cannot
help but recognize the disproportionate discrepancy between the
in–
famous image of Trotsky created by Stalin and Trotsky's actual ideas,
guidelines and prognoses.
In 1970, when life in socialist countries takes place under the
sign of Lenin's one hundredth birthday the fight against Trotsky also
reaches a new height. The caricature of him that in the meantime
may even have become threadbare for quite a number of socialists
is being revived and actualized with great efforts. It is not an accident
that the honoring of Lenin that is now reaching cuItic dimensions co–
incides with a compact condemnation ef Trotsky. In the fight about the
accurate interpretation of Marxism-Leninism Trotsky offers sufficient
(
"
r
t
f
~
I
l
