"In an epoch of triumphant reaction the various democrats, social anarchists and other representatives of the 'left' exude twice as much morality, in the same way as people sweat twice as much when they are afraid". So begins the first of the two pungent essays that form 'Their Morals and Ours', a short book published over fifty years ago. ENZO TRAVERSO marks the recent. appearance of a new French edition. The translation is by Charles Mullett. WITH THE CLOUDS of war gathering over Europe and the show trials in the Soviet Union, many left-wing intellectuals in the 1930s were persuaded that the horrors of Stalinism were an inevitable product of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Trotsky's was a tightly-reasoned counter-argument refuting the facile equations of communism and fascism, Bolshevism and Stalinism, Trotskyism and Stalinism.
He presents Stalinism not as a logical consequence of Bolshevik "amoralism" or godless communism, but as the historical product of an isolated and suffocated revolution in a socially backward country.
In his view, there can be no question of "elementary rules of morality developed in line with the growth of humanity as a whole and necessary for the life of the whole collective".
He does not reject the Enlightenment notion of a universal human morality, but emphasises that it exists in the concrete reality of a society divided into classes. To put it another way, history obliges morality to take on class features and, in the epoch of imperialism, the universal ethical ideal is embodied by the revolution.
To the accusation that the Bolsheviks followed a Jesuitical or Machiavellian amoralism expressed in the phrase "the end justifies the means" he answers that historical materialism does not recognise such a simplistic divide.
For Marxism the end is communism - human freedom, the abolition of the domination of one person by another and the restoration of a human community in harmony with nature. This implies that not all means are acceptable, and that some must be ruled out because they can only act as obstacles to the achievement of the desired end:
One would have hoped that Trotsky would haved established the necessary distinctions, specifying which means are and are not permissible.
Unfortunately he insists on the historical legitimacy of means that have seemed very dubious, even harmful.
A serious problem arises when Trotsky defends all the political and military measures employed by the Soviet regime in the 19181921 civil war which followed the October Revolution.
In the name of the defence of the revolution he justifies the summary executions by the Soviet secret police, the establishment of censorship, the outlawing of counter-revolutionary parties and even the imposition of the de facto dictatorship of a single party and the taking of hostages and the execution of family members.
If we take seriously Trotsky's own stated principle, according to what is overall an excellent and Grisly remains of Stalinist repression. Mass grave of NKVD mass murder of 250, 000 near Minsk. When did defence of the Revolution become repression? Stalin (right) with Cheka boss Dzerzhinsky.
which the goal of socialism implies an ethically-based restriction on the methods of struggle, Victor Serge's objections seem justified: "the degeneration of Bolshevism began when the Cheka won the right to decided people's fate behind closed doors". Trotsky draws on the authority of Marx and the experience of the total freedom of expression to the counter-revolutionary camp and even promoted the social reintegration of Contra prisoners.
In fact some of the noblest pages in the history of the workers' movement, such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising of Spring 1943, were inspired by this simple moral principle: the primacy of the human dignity.
Whole generations of men and women have been inspired to struggle for socialism for moral reasons. Socialism cannot therefore escape the need to define a "code of ethical behaviour". Class morality cannot embody universal human morality if it does not recognise that certain means are unacceptable.
If injustice and oppression justify revolt and taking up arms, a revolutionary project for human emancipation leaves no room for massacres and torture. These means work against the desired end.
Even so, fifty years after it first appeared, Trotsky's work still retains a certain freshness.
If socialism needs to be thought through anew, the necessary "refoundation" will have to be both ethical and political. After all, our morals are not theirs.