PARTISAN REVIEW
591
olution emerged from these revolutionary situations does not prove
Trotsky's error, since this very fact is precisely due to the communists'
failure to accept Trotsky's strategy, a failure resulting from Stalin's
policy which reflected the specific interest of Soviet bureaucracy (not a
class - as Trotsky pointed out - but a privileged layer with con–
servative vested interests).
Mr. Krass6 replies, in his turn, that Trotsky never learned Lenin's
lesson and that he joined the Bolsheviks not because he changed his
mind about the theory of the party, but because of their insurrectional
orientation in
1917.
His attempts to imitate Lenin in the thirties were a
voluntarist caricature. Krass6 repeats that an alliance of the Right and
the Left in
1923
could have overthrown Stalin's power, but such an
alliance was impracticable because Trotsky had such a bad reputation
among the old leaders. And Trotsky - because of his sociologism–
was incapable of understanding that the Party was the only living pol–
itical force after the civil war. His inability to grasp the situation in
terms of relatively autonomous political structures led him to. believe
that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse unless saved by the revolu–
tion in the West. This is why he had no real industrial and agricultural
programs. Neither was he able - since he conceived of international con–
flicts only in terms of the class struggle - to understand national real–
ities and to admit the relative justice of one side in the wars between
capitalist countries; he saw the Second World War in patterns of the
First and he wrote in
1940
that "we support neither the camp of the
allies nor the camp of Germany." He wrongly dismissed the possibility
of revolution led by Comintern parties and he expected the awakening
of the revolutionary forces among the American working class.
Mr. Mandel replies again. KrassO, he says, "objectively slanders
Trotsky as well as Lenin," when he opposes Trotsky's fetishization
of Party program to Lenin's stress on the Party structure. There were
no. differences between them after March
1917.
Trotsky's industrial and
agricultural program in
1923-24
was correct and realistic. Krass6's mis–
takes result from his inability to understand the emergence of Soviet
bureaucracy as an autonomous social stratum. Both Lenin and Trotsky
understood perfectly the dangers of bureaucratism. Trotsky did not sug–
gest that coll apse of the Soviet Union was inevitable without world rev–
olution in advocating a policy which would have favored that revolution.
Again - revolutionary situations arose effectively in many countries
but Comintern's policy failed to exploit them. And in founding the
Fourth International, Trotsky was again expressing his well-justified
trust in the revolutionary future. The Fourth International "is living
Leninism today."
The next reply to Mandel's eu logy is by Mr. Johnstone. He quotes
