review of emanuele saccarelli, gramsci and trotsky in the shadow of stalinism

8/13/2019 Review of Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism

1/23

Capital & Class34(3) 509530

The Author(s) 2010Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0309816810378725c&c.sagepub.com

Our awkwardancestors: Trotsky,Gramsci andthe challenge ofreconnaissance

Ian G. McKay Queens University, Ontario, Canada

Emanuele SaccarelliGramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory andPractice of Opposition, Routledge: London, 2008; 312 pp.: 9780415873383,26.99 (pbk)

Socialists of the 21st century live in a world undergoing two connected and epochalcapitalist revolutions: neoliberal globalization and environmental transformation.Spatially limited and temporally restricted approaches, i.e. the familiar liberal panoplyof practical and partial responses to these interlocked revolutions, are transparentlyinadequate when measured against crises that challenge the sustainability of humancivilisation. A new socialism that takes the survival of humanity itself as its categoricalimperative must necessarily actualise Marxs theoretical vision of a rational and justregulation of humankinds metabolism with the natural world. Yet as soon as this social-ist imperative is voiced, it is as quickly muffled by the bloodied weight of socialist his-

tory, with its failed states and post-Bolshevik disillusionment. InGramsci and Trotsky inthe Shadow of Stalinism, Emanuele Saccarelli captures something of this predicament when he writes that the proverbial elephant in the room confronting leftists is the leg-acy of Stalinism: Any reconsideration of Marxism seeking to do more than provide yetanother interpretive riff on various texts must account for this reality (p. 11). Oneimportant term bearing on this mission, bequeathed to posterity by Antonio Gramsci,

was reconnaissance (Gramsci, 1971: 238, Q716)1: an accurate, rigorous and histori-cally informed analysis of each country we hope to revolutionise and (by extension) theinternational socialist movement we hope to inherit, critique, and transform. It is a

Gramscian metaphor that nicely unifies urgency, realism, and collectivism: there is a real world, understandable through shared categories of analysis and empirical explorations,

Feature review


2/23

510 Capital & Class 34(3)

that we socialists are collectively called upon first to understand and then to change; andthis combined project of understanding and transformation, this praxis of revolution,means that we must articulate our investigations together, in a campaign that unites usall in a massive, ultimately planetary co-ordination of information, insight and activism.

According to Saccarelli, today Leon Trotsky is the indispensable guide to the theoryand practice of Stalinism, whereas Gramsci, helpful on some topics, is unreliable andpolitically suspect on many others. Saccarelli first addresses Gramscis contemporarylegacy, arguing that the Gramsci we know today was made to measure by the StalinistItalian Communist Party. He also eviscerates academics who subsequently dallied witha domesticated, post-revolutionary Gramscianism. Next, he analyses Gramscis oftenimplicit critique of Stalinism in thePrison Notebooks . In the books second part, Saccarellitakes up the cause of Trotsky. Rather than engaging fully with Trotsky, a world-histori-cal figurefor our times (p. 191), rightly associated with a revolution that actually

succeeded, academics have preferred to focus on a Gramsci deeply infected by a compro-mising defeatism and even guilty of complicity with Stalinism. Professor Saccarelli is anengaging, often savagely sarcastic polemicist, rising to the defence of his hero Trotskyagainst philistine academics, Stalinists real and imagined, weak-kneed liberals, socialdemocrats, and effete Gramscists. Here is a vintage Leninist annihilating polemicbarely disguised as a heavily footnoted academic bookwhich is the main reason whyGramsci and Trotsky is really a model ofWhat Is Not To Be Done for those trying torethink and reshape the next left.

As is the case in so many polemics, we are confronted here with a starkly dichot-

omised choice between two men. One, Antonio Gramsci, is rather like the J. AlfredPrufrock of the socialist tradition: vague, disconnected, introspective, even ratherpathetic, a sickly silhouette (p. 38) much loved by academics who, in their grandioseefforts to inflate this sad Sardinian into something more than his properly provincialstatus, are even neglecting the methodologically correct history of ideas (p. 199, n9),one that would essentially confine him to the Italian peninsula. Hell-bent on producinga Gramsci abstracted from his Italian context, Gramscian academia has convenientlyoverlooked its heros unimpressive recordone suggestive of a very recalcitrant andtroublesome supporter of Stalinism before his imprisonment, and the author of crypticand indirect critiques of it afterwards (pp. 545). Any comparison of this frail specimen

with the brilliant, prophetic, decisive, strong and principled Leon Trotsky, unqualifiedlyone of the great men of the type saluted by Hegel in hisPhilosophy of History (pp. 24950 n80), works to the Sardinians disadvantage.

***

This comparative exercise is necessary, Saccarelli urges, because it is in Trotsky, notGramsci, that we can find the indispensable tools with which to analyse Stalinism.Much obviously depends on how we understand this term. Saccarelli adheres closely tothe position of the Fourth International, with which he has been closely identified, ininsisting upon a near-absolute distinction between Bolshevism and Stalinismand on


3/23

McKay 511

1929 to 1933 and consolidated from 1934 to 1953an approach that defines Stalinismin terms of a particular dictatorial regime and its excessive, cruel and irrational practices,as well as the veritable mass religion that came to be based upon it (Cohen 2008 [1977]:258). Rather, Saccarellis Stalinism is largely a reiteration of Trotskys mature, final

word in The Revolution Betrayed (1937) as interpreted by the Fourth International, which saw the Soviet regime as one that was transitional between capitalism and social-ism, as the particular outcome of Russias backwardness, the failure of the revolutionarymovement in Europe, and the processes of exhaustion and bureaucratisation that typi-cally set in after any revolution (p. 167). Counter-intuitively, then, Saccarellis Stalinismexisted long before the advent of Stalins regime and well after his demise in 1953; it alsopervaded all the Comintern-affiliated partieswhich became lifeless bureaucratic appa-ratuses easily steered from Moscow (p. 211 n86).2 A vast array of left-wing parties andintellectuals, indeed almost any leftist outside the Fourth International, can also be

linked to Stalinism.3

Even before it was fully formed, this Stalinism entailed anextended, profound process of political, theoretical, and moral decay (p. 214 n7).In essence, after Trotsky producedThe Revolution Betrayed in the mid-1930s, there

was not a great deal left to be said on the subject (and so Saccarelli neglects virtually allthe new archivally-based histories and collections of documents generated over the lastfour decades). For Saccarelli, it goes without saying that the rise of this Stalinism shouldhave been the central preoccupation of any aware Marxist theoretician after 1924yetonly Trotsky, standing virtually alone among prominent Marxists, was able to grasp thetruth and act upon it. More myopic, distant and confused communists, e.g. Gramsci, are

basically just distractions from the main Trotsky vs. Stalin event.This orthodox interpretation suggests an emphatically essentialist method, one thattakes up and refinesone of Trotskys positions on Stalin and makes itthe Trotskyist position.In Saccarellis reconstruction, any Trotsky writing that does not fit the Fourth Internationalmodel can be set aside as a mere anticipation of the masters mature position or, if it was

written later than The Revolution Betrayed , can be seen as a mere non-essential or rhetoricalsupplement to it. Yet, from a less Manichean perspective, it would seem that Trotsky hadat least five implicit and explicit theories about Stalin and his regime.

First, and most problematically, there was Trotskys Orientalising, biological andracial explanationone that predominates in the early chapters of hisStalin, a work

written well after Saccarelli tells us Trotsky had reached his mature, final stance on thesubject (and, remarkably, not even cited in this text). It must be remembered that Trotsky,deeply influenced by Darwin as well as Marx, worked within a framework that postu-lated a clear-cut pattern of human social development. Influenced by pervasive notionsof Orientalism, Trotsky thus interpreted Stalin as the product of the deficient South, afact demonstrated by his enemys bad manners, deficient grasp of theory, mis-shapedforehead, and even (by implication) the yellowish tinge of parts of his body (Trotsky,1967 [1941]: 3, 244; Trotsky, 2007 [1930]: 449). Trotsky, who regarded eugenics as animportant component of the new socialist world wherein a superman would emerge(Trotsky, 2005 [1925]: 2067), thought that Stalin exemplified the savagery and bar-barism that, in a biological as well as cultural sense, would become extinct after the


4/23


[1941]: 4), so poorly educated at a dismal seminary that his Russian language skills wereas defective as various parts of his bodyin all these respects Stalin was Trotskys racialisedand essentialised inferior. When this primitive product of the backward Caucasus showssome signs of intellectual capacity, they are said to be mere acts of mimicry, shaped (inone famous instance) by the unremitting supervision and line by line editing of Lenin(Trotsky 1967 [1941]: 1567). Sluggishness and inordinate cautiousness, utter lack ofliterary resourcefulness, and, finally, extreme Oriental laziness combined to make Stalinspen rather unproductive Trotsky remarks (Trotsky, 1967 [1941]: 140). So how couldthis yellow-eyed atavism, this Oriental other, have come to occupy the leadership of theBolsheviks? In this mode, Trotsky explains the rise of Stalin in the highly charged andimmensely popular fin-de-sicle language ofdegeneration theory . Stalin, this man seized

with an ambition of an untutored Asiatic cast (Trotsky, 1967 [1941]: 393) is for Trotskya Nero-like individual degenerate.Degeneration writ largein essence, evolution work-

ing in reverse gearbecame aleitmotif of Trotskys analysis of Stalinism overall.Stalins bio-ethical unfitness can be closely related to a second element in Trotskysneo-Darwinian theorisation of Stalinism, which focused on the conditioning environ-ment resulting from Russias patterns of uneven and combined development. As Saccarelliusefully shows, Trotsky grasped that the expansion of the capitalist world-systemimpressed an accelerated but lopsided development onto the socioeconomic structure atthe periphery of the world economy. Rather than produce a world after its own image,

Western capitalism would instead systematically spawn odd mutations (p. 98). Insteadof an ever-advancing modernity, capitalism on the periphery might well strengthen

existing archaic and grotesque forms of political rule. In such a setting, even a relativelynew, relatively small, but potentially powerful working class could take the politicalinitiative, achieve democratic and national tasks elsewhere associated with the bourgeoi-sie, and ultimately be compelled by the logic of the political situation to rapidlyengage in a struggle for socialism as well (pp. 989). Trotsky did not himself invent, nordid he consistently defend, this theory of permanent revolution (Day and Gaido, 2009).Nonetheless (and, as an innovative account shows, to a large extent misleadingly [Day,1973]), it came to be polemically attached to him, as the antithesis of Stalins socialismin one country. In this interpretation, Stalins rise could be explained by revolutionaryRussias isolated position, encircled as it was by hostile capitalist powers and unaided bya socialist revolution in a major western country, and by the abject cultural unevennessand spiritual poverty (Deutscher, 2003 [1959]: 137) of a population just emerging froma long Middle Ages.

A third strand in Trotskys interpretation of Stalin and Stalinism connected hisadversary to the history of revolutionary movements in Western Europe, specifically theFrench Revolution, which provided Trotsky with two of his key categories: those ofThermidor and Bonapartism. One could, on this analogical line of reasoning, predictthe future of the 20th-century Russian Revolution in part on the basis of its 18th-centuryFrench predecessor, because revolutions, affected as they are by natural (implicitlyevolutionary) laws of human physiology and psychology, follow predictable patterns.Thermidorthe end of the most radical phase of the French Revolution, exemplified


5/23

McKay 513

endpoint of this Thermidorian process. In one of his interpretations, the SovietThermidor coincided precisely with his own individual reversals within the CommunistParty; in another, Thermidor and Bonapartism were interpreted not as consecutive stepsbut as parallel processes happening at the same time. As Saccarelli usefully observes, these

were not for Trotsky just interesting historical analogies, but actual living forces thatdemanded a definite political orientation toward them (p. 158).

Fourth, the most renowned schema advanced by Trotsky was that of the totalitarian-ism of a ruling bureaucracy. Repeatedly and insistently, especially inThe RevolutionBetrayed , he draws out the parallels between Nazism and Stalinism (see especially Trotsky,1965 [1937]; 1972 [1937]), a theme subsequently taken up by many Cold War liberals(a good number of whom were Trotskyists in the 1930s). In this interpretation,Stalinism, like Nazism a product of capitalisms interwar crisis, was the outcrop of atotalising vision of humanity. Well before George Orwell did the same, Trotsky thus

made totalitarianism a powerful presence in interpretations of the Soviet Union, withenduringly controversial results.4

It is not so much the vanguard party and its leader that bear the brunt of Trotskyscritique of totalitarianism inThe Revolution Betrayed , but the bureaucracy and its allies,

which together made up a ruling stratum, a vast caste-like assemblage of post-revolu-tionary careerist mediocrities. They were, paceLenin, not so much passive hold-oversfrom the ancien rgime , but the active makers of the new one. Adding the bureaucratsproper to the labor and collectivised peasant aristocracy, the Stakhanovists, the non-party active, trusted personages, their relatives and relatives-in law, Trotsky suggests

that these two interpenetrating strata might constitute a ruling stratum as many as25m people, or about 15 per cent of the population (Trotsky, 1965 [1937]: 139). Asmany scholars have since observed, this vast, powerful Thermidorian bureaucracy didnot look much like the bureaucrats known in other societies, and neither did many ofthe activities associated with itmass murder, breakneck collectivisation and industri-alisation, and other processes that swept into oblivion thousands of the bureaucratsthemselvesseem cautiously bureaucratic (see especially McNeal 2008 [1977]). If, asSaccarelli says of the mid-to-late-1920s, this was an increasingly privileged bureaucracy

whose watchwords were stability, order, routine, and mistrust of adventures at home orabroad (p. 139), it seems hard to explain (for many contemporary students of StalinsRussia) why such risk-averse types would launch the cataclysmic adventures of theSoviet 1930s. Moreover, Trotskys characterisation of Stalins base of supportthe tiredradicals,... the bureaucrats,... thenepmen, the kulaks , the upstarts, the sneaks,... all the

worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution (Trotsky1967 [1941]: 393)underestimated a phenomenon far more fully explored in thearchivally-based literature Professor Saccarelli so scrupulously avoids: that is, thework-ers considerable support for Stalin, encompassing even their enthusiastic participationin aspects of the Great Terror, which some of them used to address their own class griev-ances (Goldman, 2007). They were caught up, that is, in a revolution from above(Tucker 2008 [1999]: 119), one that over time looks less and less like the manifestationof a routine bureaucratism orchestrated by a dim-witted man who was never, in any-


6/23


Trotskys explicit or implied emphasis on Stalins character, as a free-standing factor in itsown right. Trotsky often wrote and spoke about the Russian Revolution as a play(Beilharz, 1985, 1987) or as a book, with predetermined acts or chapters (see especiallyDeutscher, 2003 [1959]: 208). He placed great stress on how the lead protagonistslooked, with their dress, deportment, dispositions and body-types providing clear indi-cations of their underlying charactersindeed, of their moral worth (for example,Trotsky, 2007 [1930]: 151). Just like in a romantic novel, inThe History of the RussianRevolution, vast developments can depend upon a particular individuals delivering onestirring speech or making a split-second decision, or come about through sheer serendip-ity; and hidden conspiracies and even accidents can influence patterns of history (Trotsky,2007 [1932]: passim). Trotsky often suggests that moral and political excellence equates

with attractiveness. Conversely, through My Life , Stalin, and The Stalin School ofFalsification, the pockmarked Stalin is less the exemplification of underlying social pat-

terns, and more like the villain of a novel. He is compellingly drawn, but in the end weare left with an enigmatic force of evilthe ultimate stage villain. With obviously necessary emendations, each of these threads might contribute some-

thing to our knowledge of Stalin and his regime. Saccarelli insists that most of themcome together in an organically unified interpretation, one that it is the imperative dutyof every present-day Marxist to accept (for a more critical evaluation, see Anderson,1984). From a different viewpoint, however, and one that aligns better with much con-temporary writing on the Soviet 1930s, while Trotskys various perceptions and interpre-tations of his adversary are valuable as eyewitness testimony and initial stabs at an

explanation, they do not really cohere into a unified theory. In fact, taken together, theyboth contradict one another and depend for much of their force on a pervasive counter-factualism at odds with Marxist methodologyone that infers, unprovably, an entirelydifferent path for a Russia without Stalin and with Trotsky. Lacking a coherent methodfor separating the organic from the conjunctural, Trotskys work imaginatively juxta-poses, but cannot reconcile, fatalistic determinism and voluntarist accidentalism. Is thistheoretical unevenness so surprising from one who was immersed in the events about

which he wrote? As judgements that were often made on-the-fly, and made by someoneimmersed in the very events he was trying to analyse, Trotskys journalistic evaluationsneed to be critically assessed in the context of more contemporary historical work, espe-cially that based on far greater access to the archival records.

Trotskys appraisals of Stalin and his regime were politically significant. They left (andstill leave) his many followers, among them some of the sharpest minds Marxism hasknown, with a legacy of unresolved debates over which they have split and split again (seeespecially Matgamna, 1998). For instance, if Stalin arose as a direct result of a revolutionin a country characterised by uneven and combined development, would not revolutionsin similar circumstances invariably fall victim to the same patterns? If the Book ofRevolutions has always already been written, in one way or the other, and if Thermidorinexorably follows upon Revolution, almost as a natural physical process, what is thepoint of resisting it? If the key to the story lay in the poisoned personality of Stalin, whatthen became of the Marxist science that had underwritten the Soviet experiment, and of


7/23

McKay 515

vast interpenetrating strata, which could seemingly command a surplus squeezed out ofa working population in the interests of sustaining a bourgeois lifestyle? And here wasthe question that most profoundly divided his followers in 19391940: did not Trotskysemphasis on a Nazi-like totalitarianism even more murderous after 1936, with theMoscow Trials and the HitlerStalin Pact, suggest that honest leftists should repudiatethe Soviet regime entirely? In what real (and not merely formal or rhetorical) sense wasthis militaristic behemoth still a workers state?

And was there not, in truth, another elephant in the room besides Stalin andStalinismthat is, the Leninist party itself? As Trotsky confided privately in his mid-1930s Notebooks , Lenin created the apparatus. The apparatus created Stalin (Trotsky,1986: 86). Could the Bolsheviks be entirely removed from any honest account of thetransformation of their own party? And, we might now ask, given that we now know thatthe Russian Revolution decisively failed as a revolution, in the rigorous Marxist sense that

it proved incapable of permanently transforming prior social relations of production, what today remains of all of Trotskys own argumentsfor the militarisation of labour,for the gpu s first red terror (see especially Rabonowitch, 2008 [1979]), for the first largeparty purges and for Kronstadtall defended by Trotsky on consequentialist groundsin the name of an ultimate triumph of socialism that did not, in fact, take place?

If Saccarellis efforts to isolate, identify and sanctify one element of Trotskys analysisare unpersuasive, so too are his attempts to enshrine an authoritative interpretation ofTrotsky as a revolutionary politician. An unintended consequence of the professorsStalinisation of everyone outside the orbit of the Fourth International is that Trotsky

himself emerges as no real Trotskyist.En passant , and with considerable understate-ment, Saccarelli concedes for example that the militarisation of trade unionsin effect,in the name of the workers state, the return of coerced labourshowed that Trotskyhimself was not completely removed from the powerful negative currents affecting theparty (p. 153). If totalitarianism in this form is linked to the one-party state, and

within that one party the abolition of the right to form factions, Trotsky in the 1920s was obviously one important architect of the very totalitarian forces that were later todestroy himalthough, to his credit, as Ernest Mandel and others have shown (Mandel,1995: 846; Mandel in Le Blanc 1993: xxiv; see also Trotsky, 1965 [1936]: 263), hesubsequently championed a multi-party workers democracy and advanced sophisti-cated arguments for a form of market socialism (Day, 1973).

And the clear lines of demarcation that Saccarelli would like to draw between hisTrotsky and a Stalinising Soviet regime are even more difficult to draw from 1928 to1933. Trotsky, at least on Isaac Deutschers reading, gave serious consideration to a blocbetween his left faction and that of Stalins center (Deutscher, 2003 [1959]: ch. 6).5 Trotsky maintained almost to the day of his expulsion from the Soviet Union that hisprimary enemy was Bukharins right. If this much is common knowledge, J. ArchGettys work on hitherto secret parts of the Trotsky Archives more innovatively suggeststhat from 1929 to 1933, Trotsky worked tirelessly for a return to the Moscow leader-ship, a quest made all the more urgent by the Nazi crushing of the German Communists.Trotsky pursued two lines: one using secret contacts within the Soviet Union to further


8/23


9/23

McKay 517

Gramsci, there is little in Trotsky resembling a philosophy of history, a political economy,a social theory, or even a statement of method (p. 97). Au contraire : for Trotsky, the lawsof the materialist dialectic governed everything from the behaviour of foxes to theachievements of modern science to the correct resolution of debates among communists(Trotsky, 1995 [1942]: 166). There could be no doubt, in Trotskys mind, that a Marxist

who did not subscribe to dialectical materialism was in reality no Marxist at all: Bewareof the infiltration of bourgeois skepticism into your ranks, he urged the younger mem-bers of his movement. Remember that socialism to this day has not found higher scien-tific expression than Marxism. Bear in mind that the method of scientific socialism isdialectic materialism (Trotsky, 1995 [1942]: 156).

One reason for Saccarellis strange neglect of Trotskys fascination with Darwin and hisfervent loyalty to Diamat is that such links might qualify his insistence that, when it cameto revolutionary Marxism, Trotsky had no peer. This is, unapologetically, Great Man

history, often more Carlylean than Marxist in its argumentation (see Carlyle, 1993[1841]). Rather than probing Trotskys writings for their internal consistency and empir-ical accuracytasks perhaps better left to the critical and clueless academics (p. 114)

we are urged, via Alasdair MacIntyre, to remember our humble stations in the face ofgreatness of a certain dimension: A Lilliputian who sets out to write Gullivers biographyhad best take care (p. 102). Trotsky was no mere human being, but a Prophet, displayingremarkable gifts of clairvoyance (p. 93). As an individual hero, he towers far above all hiscontemporaries and descendants. Saccarelli strikes an unmistakably Carlylean pose: Iregard Leon Trotsky as the highest model of political conduct, a figure whose historical

and political stature dwarfs the more usual cast of characters typically invited in a work ofpolitical theory (p. 16). The Stalin regimes grotesque parodies of Orthodox Christianity, with its icons and saints, is here answered with a no less reverential account of an heroicand apostolic succession: from Marx to Lenin to Trotsky.

***

Alas for those accustomed to lighting their candles before images of Saint Antonio,Saccarelli is almost as scathing towards the Sardinian as he is reverential towards Trotsky.

As the very title of his book announces, this is a compare-and-contrast exercise: inessence, between (on the one hand) a giant, one of Hegels word-historic titans, and (onthe other) a deservedly obscure provincial, preserved for posterity by Stalins accomplices,and the source of much confusion and pomposity today. There can be only one GreatMan in Saccarellis book. That position has already been taken.

Yet in most respects, this Trotsky/Gramsci showdown is a shallow polemical exercise,presented without subtlety and context, and one strictly derived from the authors insis-tence upon the Fourth Internationals version of Trotsky. Again and again, Gramsci thevague talker and long-term loser is contrasted with Trotsky, the decisive doer and revolu-tionary winner. Could the young Gramsci, for instance, provide us with fresh insightsinto radical working-class democracy, based upon the workplace? Mais non, scoffs theauthor: we only find in the editor ofLOrdine Nuovo an enthusiast of a pseudo-syndicalist


10/23


Saccarelli thrives on such apples-and-oranges comparisons. As Deutscher demon-strated, it is possible to write a long history of the Stalin/Trotsky conflict in the 1920s

without once mentioning Gramsci. Although Gramsci had lived for a time in the SovietUnion, knew the politics of the Comintern from within, and as leader of the PartitoComunista dItalia (pc di), kept abreast of the Russian developments of the mid-1920s,he could hardly match Trotskys first-hand experience of events.6 After Gramscis arrest inNovember 1926 and up until his death in April 1937, his access to detailed informationabout Russia was even more restricted. Saccarelli treats both Gramsci and Trotsky aspeople equally implicated in, and knowledgeable about, the rise of Stalina whollyinappropriate decontextualising and ahistorical strategy. The trial of Antonio GramsciSaccarelli mounts in this book, on the charge of his having been defective in his abilityto diagnose Stalinism in its specificity, causes and implications (p. 48) is triply miscon-ceived: first, because Stalinism by any definition hadnot cohered by 1926; second,

because unlike Trotsky, an imprisoned Gramsci was in no position to investigate theSoviet regime from 1926 to 1935; and third, because even Trotskys theory and practiceof opposition were far from coherent, consistent or successful. Saccarellis elaborate testcase, predesigned to show an adamantine, consistent and heroic Trotsky against a tenta-tive, inconsistent and weak Gramsci, has been rigged in advance.

Gramsci was a deeply concerned observer of Russian developments, and his initialresponse to the bitter factional warfare of the 1920sreflected especially in his famousOctober, 1926 letter to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union7was to side with themajority aligned with Bukharin and Stalin. His position was based on the fairly solid

Leninist grounds that, since the party had earlier banned factions and the JointOpposition had been acting like one, the Oppositionists had therefore broken the rules.That said, Gramsci went on to express shock and disappointment over the way bothsides had fought each other. He hated the heavy-handed way the majority had dealt withthe minority. As Saccarelli himself concedes, his was a letter flamboyantly beyond thepale of the historico-political standards enforced by Stalinism (p. 60)one, interest-ingly, more flamboyant than many roughly contemporaneous and cautious statementsfrom Trotsky himself. Gramscis critique called into question the ability of the majorityto lead the international movement, queried the privileged position of the Russian party,and warned of factionalisms catastrophic consequences (see Agosti, 2008). Yet somehow,in the face of this evidence, the hubristic author merely sees in this moment an alwaysevasive Gramsci who, failing to grasp the full international dimensions of the crisis, wasseemingly trying to wish it away (p. 61).

The Prison Notebooks are subjected to an even odder treatment. Saccarelli follows thecontroversial interpretation of Francesco Benvenuti and Silvio Pons, who work hard toshow that Gramscis apparent criticisms of Trotskyprincipally as a reckless proponentof the war of manoeuvreare in fact aimed at Stalin. The first served as a lightning rodfor the second. As Marcus Green suggests, the case is speculative, seems to rely on aninconsistent reading of the textual evidence, and is hence not wholly convincing: ifGramsci referred elsewhere in theNotebooks to Stalin by easily decoded names, why

would he have adopted this roundabout stratagem to target him in comments seemingly


11/23

McKay 519

others, specifically the ways in which the international and national-popular elementsof revolutionary struggle should be connected (Rosengarten, 2002 [19845]: 344; seealso Leonetti, 1972), Saccarelli seemingly cannot entertain the proposition that there

were valid grounds upon which the Great Man Trotsky could be critiqued along withStalinand by such a lowly, confused, non-heroic provincial as Gramsci.

Gramscis 1930s critique of Trotsky, like his well-known attacks on Bukharin, is actu-ally a multifaceted and intricate one. In an important note in the Prison Notebooks ,Gramsci broaches War of Position and War of Manoeuvre by way of a commentary onRosa Luxemburg, P. N. Krasnov, and Luigi Cadorno. He concludes,

One attempt to begin a revision of the current tactical methods was perhaps that outlined byL. Dav. Br. [Trotsky] at the fourth meeting [the Fourth Congress of the CommunistInternational in 1922], when he made a comparison between the Eastern and Western fronts.

The former had fallen at once, but unprecedented struggles had then ensued; in the case ofthe latter, the struggles would take place beforehand. The question, therefore, was whethercivil society resists before or after the attempt to seize power; where the latter takes place, etc.However, the question was outlined only in a brilliant, literary form, without directives of apractical character. (Gramsci, 1971: 236, Q1324)

In another note, with respect to Trotskys theory of permanent revolution, Gramsci wonders whether the theory of permanent revolution was not the political reflectionof the theory of war of manoeuvre, and compares the superficially national and super-

ficially Western or European Trotsky with the profoundly national and profoundlyEuropean Lenin. He then adds, in a passage whose extreme folkloric roughness, invivid contrast to Trotskys polished epigrams, seems as if designed to shock the reader:

Bronstein [Trotsky] in his memoirs recalls being told that his theory had been proved true fteen years later, and replying to the epigram with another epigram. In reality his theory, assuch, was good neither fteen years earlier nor fteen years later. As happens to the obstinate, he guessed more or less correctly; that is to say, he was right in his more general practicalprediction. It is as if one were to prophesy that a little four-year-old girl would become amother, and when at twenty she did so one said: I guessed that she wouldoverlooking thefact, however, that when she was four years old one had tried to rape the girl, in the belief thatshe would become a mother even then. It seems to me that Ilyich understood that a change

was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war ofposition which was the only form possible in the Westwhere, as Krasnov observes, armiescould rapidly accumulate endless quantities of munitions, and where the social structures wereof themselves still capable of becoming heavily armed fortications. This is what the formula ofthe united front seems to me to mean, and it corresponds to the conception of a single frontfor the Entente under the sole command of Foch. (Gramsci, 1971: 2378, Q716)

The polemical unfairness of Gramscis specific critique, especially with reference tothe United Front, lay in the fact that it was Trotsky who had, through his intervention


12/23


permanent revolution and war of manoeuvre, did slight justice to a concept that, devel-oped by Kautsky, Parvus, Lenin and Trotsky, stood close to the heart of the Bolshevikframework, and was one Gramsci himself had earlier used in Trotskys sense (Rosengarten,2002 [19845]: 345). Yet the critique was notwholly unjust. Gramsci was acutely sensi-tive to the problem of reductionist and simplistic applications of the theory that failed torespect the particularities of each countryhence his insistence on reconnaissance. Inrecent communist history, such actions had unfolded in Germany, Estonia, and Bulgaria,in each case suggesting a cosmopolitan line that little respected local realities. It wasnot wholly far-fetched to interpret Trotsky as a proponent of such a line in the Germancase (for discussion, see Brou, 2006: 822). Such forced moments were, without adetailed reconnaissance of the country they aimed to transform, bound to fail.

Gramscis critique of Trotsky as the theorist of frontal assault, war of manoeuvre,adventurist ultraleftism was simply preposterous, writes Saccarelliso, following

closely on Benvenuti and Pons, he concludes that its real object must have been thirdperiod Stalinism (pp. 845). Actually, Gramscis critique was not based on thin air (seeRosengarten 2002 [19845]: 340). Trotskys My Life , which Gramsci had recently read,echoes and re-echoes with exalted descriptions of its heros death-defying exploits in theCivil War. In Gramscis recent memory, Trotsky had run the risk of setting off the lit-erature debate by releasingLessons of October , with its defiant finger-pointing at Zinovievand Kamenev, the strikebreakers of the revolutiona debate that was useful to hisenemies in the factional war that promptly erupted all around him, and which he deci-sively lost. Trotskys record in the 1920s is the release of one bombshell publication and

one spell-binding speech after another, many governed by his proudly announced prin-ciple, when the struggle is one for great principles, the revolutionary can only followone rule: Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra (Trotsky, 2007 [1930]: 531). We couldcharacterise the gist of Gramscis rejoinder in thePrison Notebooks with an old Frenchexpression, Cest magnifique, mais ce nest pas la guerre . Unless youre deeply familiar

with the lay of the land and the socialand cultural forces at play, and unless you havecalculated as carefully as possible the likely outcome of your move, then among theconsequences of doing what you think must be done will not just be whatever mighthappen, but the destruction of all youand not just you, we hope to achieve. Gramsci

was abrasively critical of a Jacobin temperament without an adequate political content(Gramsci, 1971: 85n*, Q1924). As Rosengarten remarks, Gramsci had a high regardfor individuality, but he loathed individualism, egotism, self-centredness (Rosengarten,2002 [19845]: 331). Readers of Trotskys My Life , such as the imprisoned Gramsci,

would encounter manifestations again and again of some of these traits. Gramsci inparticular underlines Trotskys epigrammatic authorial conceits. He seemingly per-ceived in the Trotsky of My Life a man who had emerged from the Civil War with areputation for illustrious manoeuvres, but who (in one way or another) proved far lesscapable of addressing the partys day-by-day reciprocal siege warfare, and so yielded upa lasting victory to Stalinand in politics the war of position, once won, is decisivedefinitively (Gramsci, 1971: 239, Q6138). Gramsci may well have considered that thefrontal attacks Trotsky repeatedly praises in My Life were bound to backfire in other


13/23

McKay 521

Moreover, Gramscis dismissive commentary on My Lifelikely also implies a morefundamental critique of aspects of Trotskys Marxism. Gramsci was a severe critic ofLorianismthe importation into a loosely-defined socialism of pseudo-scientific evo-lutionary notions that threatened to undermine the movements analytical capacities andrevolutionary potential (see especially Buttigieg, 1992: 425 and passim). As someone

who had helped Trotsky on Italian Futurism as the latter was preparingLiterature andRevolution, Gramsci surely would have recoiled from many of that particular bookseugenic and science-fiction-like, indeed Lorianesque, depictions of the socialist future. My Life , with its numerous beautifully crafted epigrams, might also have struck Gramscias somewhat Lorianistic in its curious treatment of the dialectic, problems of culture,and characterisations of Trotskys enemies.

Saccarelli usefully notes that when Gramsci tore into Bukharins Marxism, he was inpart ripping up a text issued in 1921, when Lenin was alive and at the helm of the party

(pp. 745). This he reads as evidence questioning the firm and reliable presence of adoctrinal critique of Stalinism in theNotebooks , and raising the possibility that Gramsciscritique of the primitiveness of official Soviet Marxism made no particular distinctionbetween works coming before or after the Stalin regime (pp. 745). Yet Professor Saccarellimust surely know that Trotsky, who saw dialectical materialism as the fundamental philo-sophical presupposition of Marxist theory and activism, was as vulnerable to Gramsciscritiques as Bukharin, whether before or after the rise of Stalin. Trapped in his own rigidperiodisation, he cannot see that the comments Gramsci aims against Trotsky in thePrison Notebooks target the credulous and adventurist application of mechanical models

in little-studied temporal and geographic contexts. And Gramscis critique of the primi-tiveness of Soviet Marxism would have been ten times rougher, had he had the opportu-nity to read TrotskysNotebooks , with their crude equations of Darwinism and dialectics,and especially hisIn Defense of Marxism, with its musings about the dialectical capacitiesof foxes and other animals and its unremitting insistence that dialectical materialismunlocked many of the scientific secrets of the universe. Gramsci saw in dialectical materi-alism a kind of amateurish and naive metaphysics similar to those of Lorianism, and hecould not have been oblivious to the extent to which it had profoundly structured thethought of so many Russian Marxists, including Bukharin, Trotsky and Stalin.

Thus, Professor Saccarellis leading question about Gramscithat of whether Gramscihimself contributed to or opposed the rise and consolidation of Stalinism (p. 48)isineptly posed, and better suited to the university seminar than to a realistic reconnais-sance of socialist history. If we accept his exceptionally loose definition of Stalinism,then virtually all communists and social democrats prior to 1933, Trotsky included,must be found guilty as charged. If we accept a narrower, more usable definitionStalinism as the state-orchestrated, excessive and extraordinary combination of national-ism, bureaucratisation, dictatorship, censorship, police repression, and the cult of theleader, each raised to an entirely new level, thus entailing a kind of 25-year holocaust byterror from 1929 to 1953 (Cohen, 2008: 12)then Gramsci made no contribution, andTrotsky at most a minimal one, to the phenomenon. The first definition, essentially thesame as that proffered by Cold War liberals, is unworkable; the second more meaning-


14/23


15/23


16/23


might well respond to this image of openness: Well, so much the worse for Gramsci. Again and again, and in accordance with his iron law of Great Man Theory of SocialistHistory, he attacks Gramsci on the grounds that he was not entirely original, but ratherextremely dependent on the international communist movement for the scaffolding,the material, and the techniques used for theNotebooks (p. 25) (overlooking, revealingly,all that recent scholarship has shown about Gramscis indebtedness to linguistics and tophilosophy [see, especially, Ives 2004]. The unrestrained violence of the polemic evenincludes a satire on the mummified body of the dead Gramsci, in the clichd Death ofMarx tradition. Trotsky was not like the imprisoned Gramsci, Saccarelli tells us, forcedby necessity to be evasive and indirect; struggling, but inexorably slouching toward therelative peace and comfort of a defeat fr ewig (p. 97)a particularly nasty polemicalswipe, which makes Gramsci sound like he spent the years from 1926 to 1937 luxuriat-ing in an old folks home, and not slowly dying in Mussolinis prison.

A man firing a gun in so many directions is bound occasionally to hit something.Sometimes this scattershot polemic against the Modern Gramsci connects with the oddtarget. Joseph Buttigieg, pondering the 15,000-odd titles in theBibliografia Gramsciana ,

wittily thinks of Paris Hilton, who is important or famous for being famous; she is acelebrity simply because she is a celebrity (Buttigieg, 2009: 20). In the late-20th century,Gramsci was repeatedly misinterpreted, by some very prominent North American intel-lectuals, as a simple-minded social control theorist (Scott, 1987) and hegemony wasoften treated as a strictly ideological phenomenon floating above the material world.

Although some of his critical points are still worth making, against a left academy

too often addicted to abstraction and allergic to actual politics, Professor Saccarellisalternativea return to the Great Man polemics of the 1920s and 1930sis worse thanthe ailment it purports to cure. The entire tradition of left polemic he typifies, with itsfeints and its thrusts, its charges and counter-charges, its tone of outraged certaintypremised on never-examined assumptions and terminology, has come to seem tired andcounterproductive. Professor Saccarellis book suggests why. Again and again, he mountsslashing attacks from his podium. His imaginary enemiespuffed-up social democrats,pompous professors, incomprehensible Gramscists, effete ditherersscatter beforehim. Behind him stand his stalwart heroes. Yet there is one little problem. Outside thevirtual reality staged by this book, the actual auditorium is empty. And an ivory tower,bedecked with red flags on symbolic occasions, is still an ivory tower. None of the pro-fessors mock skirmishes has much to do with any real world revolution in a moreprosaic sensethat is, an actual rising of the ruled against their rulers, to create a newand lasting egalitarian order.

It is time to fix a cold, Marxist eye on the Russian traditions of the annihilatingpolemicthat style of argumentation, exemplified by this book, in which the discussionof the lefts options is really a form of verbal warfare, in which the objective is the destruc-tion of ones opponent. Such polemics are very exciting and dramatic, especially foryoung male radicals in search of absolutes, clarity and adventure, and they are doubtlessdeeply rooted in the soil of theological and philosophical disputation specific to each ofthe national cultures in which Marxism has taken hold. Especially within academia, a


17/23

McKay 525

upon the unbaptised and the unrighteous. Often, around such menthey seem invari-ably to be mengather small cults of believers, hoping the guru will connect them withthe Great Men of History. Such sectarianism thus affords a strange kind of escapism.It suggests comparisons with retail therapy. Just what sort of revolutionary would youlike to be today? Anarchist? Anarcho-syndicalist? Anarcho-communist? FourthInternationalist? Fifth Internationalist? Sixth Internationalist? Whatever your selection,you will find a group, internet site, and a well-defined if vast set of enemies. If all goes

well, you will attain an ineffable and deeply individualised sense that you have achieveddistinction, not least over the petty bourgeois philistines who bought last years model.

With luck you may come to think you have channelled the spirit of some long-deadGreat Man, whose identity you shall inscribe upon your politics. This strange form ofpolitics, for all the critique of the academy it likes to affect, is in truth profoundly athome in it. There are not many instances in the developed worldFrance is a partial

exception, perhaps (Carpier, 2002)of such sectarianism managing to inform seriousrevolutionary movements, let alone create the actual revolutions that they have beenpromising for seven decades. What has generally remained is not the substance but theverbal violence, the certitude, the fervour to ascribe hostile class identities to onespolemical opponents. The first time this was a tragedy...

And it is past time to leave behind the entire tradition of wrapping ourselves aroundimagined figures from the socialist past. Make no mistake: a scrupulous, critical andcompassionate engagement with Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and the many other bignames in the socialist past can teach important lessons. Trotsky, Stalins most prominent

enemy and victim, was an intrepid analyst and critic of the Terror at a time when somany good liberals acclaimed it. He was an often inspired journalist gifted with unusualinsights into his time, and an accomplished theorist on many questions ranging frommilitary tactics to cultural life. There are many good reasons why his extraordinary lifehas inspired so many books, ranging from those of liberals lamenting his Marxism tomore discerning leftists seeking to evaluate him in his context (with Deutschers inspiringtrilogy and Brous thorough, workmanlike study standing out in the crowd).8 Few otherMarxists have stirred the socialist imagination or bothered the complacency of liberals socreatively as he. With Marx and Gramsci, he is one of the most remarkable of our awk-

ward, demanding ancestors. The subtle and unsubtle barriers that have made him a no-go zone for many leftists should be dismantled: he has much to teach us.

But our awkward ancestors effective reconstruction today, as our co-investigators inthe reconnaissance of capitalism and the world that must lie beyond it, will occur pre-cisely to the extent that the Great Man approach exemplified by Saccarellis book isabandoned. Awe-struck reverence for the legacy and grandeur (p. 19) of a figure likeTrotsky, and sometimes no less fetishistic treatments of Gramsci, not to speak of Lenin,are invitations to infantilisation. As the historian E. P. Thompsonpredictably broughtforward in this book as just one more denizen of a Stalinist party (p. 261 n176)onceremarked, The point is that Marx is on our side; we are not on the side of Marx (Thompson,1978: 384). This point bears repeating with respect to all our other awkward ancestors

whose records today can inform, but should never predetermine or name the debates


18/23


with our awkward ancestors, so that their voices might echo in our present. These old,dead men have many lessons, both painful and inspiring, about what it means to struggleto live otherwise, to create powerful movements of resistance against liberalism and thecapitalist order. But in order to learn from them, we have to unlearn the ancient, destruc-tive, violent and objectively reactionary habits of polemical warfare the left has inheritedfrom its distant past. One can imagine, that is, a form of left historiography and leftpractice entirely without apostolic successions, without heroes or apostates: yet one thatis also engag , that does not pretend that its underlying motivation for the sober andaccurate reconstruction of socialist history is merely for the edification or amusement ofthe reader, but rather aims at an informed and more intelligent relaunching of a leftmovement capable of intervening in the 21st-century fight for human survival. To use aterm earlier cited from GramscisPrison Notebooks , we might call this new stance towardthe history of the left reconnaissance, i.e. an accurate assessment of the historic modes

of the left in each country and period, using as a criterion of interpretation the capacity ofa given left formation to analyse, withstand and ultimately transform the capitalist order.Such an approach, more cold-hearted and more merciless than the enticing brew ofsentimentality and sectarianism we find in Professor Saccarellis book, would refuse toeternalise (i.e. sentimentalise) the conventional strategies of Marxist-Leninist historiog-raphy. To put it another way: reconnaissance would prefer to speak not in the conditionaland counterfactual mode so often favoured in left polemicif only things had workedout differentlybut in the indicative tenses and in a factual mode: here is how thingsplayed out, how this given ideal of a party worked in reality; here is the measurable dif-

ference over time that we can attribute to a given practice. Reconnaissance, that is, turnsaway from the fatal attractions of a certain kind of left history, in which by replaying andreplaying the tape of a past revolution, we might find the real revolutionary alternativethat actual history obscured, and focuses instead on the realist reconstruction of what

was necessarily in place in order for a given development to take placethat is, Marxsmethod of determinate abstraction, applicable not only to the past but also to a presentfast turning into the future.

In one of the few passages that really connected with something beyond his polemic,Professor Saccarelli writes,

It is true that the body of Gramscis work, which is for us so readily and transparently available,in a fundamental sense could not exist without the efforts of the communist movement.But in a different and no less signicant sense, we should say that this body of work alsoemerged in spite of these efforts. This contradiction is as puzzling and as real as those at theheart of the movements degeneration: between preserving a form and subverting its content;between the greatest attempt to snap the cycle of human history as the mere recongurationof oppression and one of its most appalling manifestations. (pp. 3435)

To snap this particular cycle, to live otherwise than merely configuring and reconfiguringexploitation and oppression, will also require the snapping of the cycle of mechanicalthinking and stale left polemic. But can we not also hear in these words a muffled call to


19/23

McKay 527

Endnotes1 Following convention, references to thePrison Notebooks give the number of the Notebook

(Q), along with the specic note (), to allow readers to refer to their own editions.2 This position places Saccarelli at the extreme traditionalist pole in current communist histo-

riography. Those wanting a more nuanced perspective should study Lawrence and Wishartssuperb new journal,Twentieth Century Communism.3 Those encompassed in one way or another in Saccarellis Stalinism, Stalinist parties or soft-

on-Stalin positions include Perry Anderson, Robert Brenner, Alex Callinicos, Anton Ciliga,Tony Cliff, Isaac Deutscher, Milovan Djilas, Max Eastman, Geoff Elay [sic], Christopher Hill,E. J. Hobsbawm (this living example of the demoralization and social democratization of theold Stalinist milieu, 196 n21), Sidney Hook, C. L. R. James, Ernest Mandel, Chantal Mouffe(suspect in part because supervised by Hobsbawm), and Paolo Spriano. This grab-bag of neer-do-wells includes a host of people normally associated with Trotskyism or social democracy. Inthis framework, a repentant Stalinist is always and forever still a Stalinist.

4 For the concept in general, see Arendt (2001 [1966]), Baehr and Richter (2004), Boffa (1992),Geyer and Fitzpatrick (2009), Zizek (2001). For Gramscis contrasting interpretation, see Adamson (2002 [1980]), Fontana (2004). For discussions with respect to the Soviet Union,see Cohen (2008 [1977]), Fitzpatrick, (2009 [1992]), Flewers (2008), Getty (1985), Gettyand Naumov (1999), Ilic (2006), Litvin and Keep (2005), McLoughlin and McDermott(2003), Shlapentokh (2001), Siegelbaum and Sokolov (2000) and Volkogonov (1991).

5 For a different emphasis but, to my mind, not an outright counter-argument, see Brou(1988), Chapters 31 and 32.

6 And, as we have seen, even as an insider Trotsky himself found such developments hard tounderstand and, on Saccarellis own evidence, fundamentally changed his mind about them.

7 This is available in Gramsci (1978): 42632.8 See, for example, Brotherstone and Dukes (1992), Brou (1988), Callinicos (1990), Conquest

(2009), Deutscher (1945, 1959, 1963, all reprinted 2003), Patenaude (2009), Swain (2006),and Thatcher (2000, 2003).

References

Adamson W (2002 [1980]) Gramscis interpretation of fascism. In Martin J (ed.) Antonio Gramsci:Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers in Intellectual and Political Context , Vol. 1.London: Routledge.

Agosti A (2008)Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography . New York: I. B. Tauris. Anderson P (1976) The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.New Left Review I(100) : 578. Anderson P (1984) Trotskys interpretation of Stalinism. In Ali T (ed.)The Stalinist Legacy: Its

Impact on 20 th-Century World Politics . Harmondsworth: Penguin. Arendt H (2001 [1966]) The Origins of Totalitarianism. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Baehr P, Richter M (eds.) (2004) Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, an

Totalitarianism.Cambridge: Cambridge University.Beilharz P (1985) Trotsky as historian.History Workshop 20 : 3655.Beilharz P (1987)Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism. London: Routledge.Beilharz P, McDermott K, Bayerlein B (2009) Writing the history of twentieth century commu-

nism. Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History 1 : 15363.Boffa G (1992) The Stalin Phenomenon, trans. Fersen N. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.


20/23


Buttigieg JA (1992) Introduction. In Gramsci A,Prison Notebooks , Vol. 1. ed. Buttigieg JA, Callari A. New York: Columbia University.

Buttigieg JA (2009) Reading Gramsci now. In Francese J (ed.)Perspectives on Gramsci: Politics,Culture and Social Theory . London: Routledge.

Callinicos A (1990)Trotskyism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.Carlyle T (1993 [1841]) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History . Berkeley: University

of California.Carpier F (2002) Histoire de lextrme gauche trotskiste de 1929 nos jours (Edition o1).Cohen S (2008 [1977]) Bolshevism and Stalinism. In Tucker R (ed.)Stalinism: Essays in Historical

Interpretation. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.Conquest R (2009) Trotsky: A Biography . London: Macmillan.Day R (1973) Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation.Cambridge: Cambridge University.Day R, Gaido D (eds.) (2009)Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record . Leiden:

Brill.Deutscher I (2003 [1954]) The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 18791921. London: Verso.Deutscher I (2003 [1959]) The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 19211929 . London: Verso.Deutscher I (2003) [1963] The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 19291940 . London: Verso.Fitzpatrick S (1992) The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia . Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University.Fitzpatrick S (2009) Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in

1930s . Oxford: Oxford University.Flewers P (2008)The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalins Soviet Union. London: Francis Boutle.

Fontana B (2004) The concept of Caesarism in Gramsci. In Baehr P, Richter M (eds.)Dictatorshipin History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity.

Getty J (1986) Trotsky in exile: The founding of the Fourth International. Soviet Studies 38(1) :2435.

Getty J (1985) Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 193319.Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Getty J, Naumov O (1999) The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolshevik19321939 . New Haven, CT: Yale University.

Geyer M, Fitzpatrick S (eds.) (2009) Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared .Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Goldman W (2007) Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin. Cambridge: Cambridge University.Gramsci A (1971)Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. and trans. Hoare Q, Nowell-Smith G.

London: Lawrence and Wishart.Green M (2009) Review ofGramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism by Emanuele Saccarelli.

New Political Science 31(1) : 11718.Hobsbawm EJ (2010). Poker Face.London Review of Books 32(7) : 234.Ilic M (ed.) (2006) Stalins Terror Revisited . London: Palgrave Macmillan.Ives P (2004)Gramscis Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and The Frankfurt Sch.

Toronto: University of Toronto.Knei-Paz B (1978)The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky . Oxford: Oxford University.


21/23

McKay 529

Litvin A, Keep J (2005) Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millennium.London: Routledge.

Mandel E (1995) Trotsky as Alternative , trans. Fagan G. London: Verso.Matgamna S (ed.) (1998)The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism. London:

Phoenix.McLoughlin B, McDermott K (2003) Stalins Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Sov

Union. London: Palgrave.McNeal R (2008 [1977]) Trotskyist interpretations of Stalinism. In Tucker R (ed.)Stalinism: Essays

in Historical Interpretation. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.Patenaude B (2009) Stalins Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky . London: Faber & Faber.Rabinowitch A (1979 [1976])The Bolsheviks Come to Power . London: New Left Books.Rabinowitch A (2008) The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrog.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.

Rosengarten F (2002 [19845]) The Gramsci-Trotsky question (19221932). In Martin J (ed.) Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philsophers , Vol. 1. London: Routledge.

Saccarelli E (2008)Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Praof Opposition London: Routledge.

Scott J (1987) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity.

Shlapentokh V (2001) A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and HowCollapsed . Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Siegelbaum L, Sokolov A (2000)Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents . New Haven,

CT: Yale University.Spriano P (1979) Antonio Gramsci and the Party: The Prison Years , trans. Fraser J. London: Lawrenceand Wishart.

Swain G (2006) Trotsky . London: Longman.Thatcher I (2003) Trotsky . London: Routledge.Thatcher I (2000) Leon Trotsky and World War One: August 1914 to February 1917 . London: Palgrave.Thomas P (2009) The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden: Brill.Thompson EP (1978) The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays . London: Merlin.Trotsky L (1999 [1904]) Our Political Tasks , available online at the Marxists Internet Archive

; accessed 20 April 2010.Trotsky L (2005 [1925]) Literature and Revolution. Chicago, IL: Haymarket.Trotsky L (2007 [1930]) My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography . New York: Dover.Trotsky L (2007 [1932])History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Eastman M. Atlanta, GA: Pathfinder.Trotsky L (1965 [1937]) The Revolution Betrayed , trans. Eastman M. New York: Merit.Trotsky L (1967 [1941]) Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence , trans. Malamuth C.

New York: Stein and Day.Trotsky L (1995 [1942]) In Defense of Marxism: Against the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in

Socialist Workers Party . Atlanta, GA: Pathfinder.Trotsky L (1996 [1945])The First Five Years of the Communist International . Atlanta, GA: Pathfinder.Trotsky L (1959) Lenin. Garden City.Trotsky L (1972 [1937]) The Stalin School of Falsification. Atlanta, GA: Pathfinder.


22/23


Tucker R (2008 [1999]) Stalinism as revolution from above. In Tucker R (ed.)Stalinism: Essays inHistorical Interpretation. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Volkogonov D (1991) Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy , trans. Shukman H. London: Weidenfeldand Nicolson.

Zizek S (2001) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Noti.London: Verso.

Author Biography See p21.


23/23