Trotsky and a pick in the head

On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in his home in Mexico with an ice-pick by undercover NKVD agent Ramón Mercader. Trotsky was taken to a hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day, dying at the age of 60 on 21 August 1940.

Trotsky developed the theory of the “degenerate workers' state”. He argued that the Soviet economy was basically socialist but that a party bureaucracy had smashed workers' control. Trotsky thought that the existence in Soviet Russia of nationalisation and planning meant that its economy had a socialist basis and that to establish socialism, only a political revolution displacing the bureaucracy was required, rather than a full social revolution as in the West. Trotsky’s mistake in equating state ownership with socialism prevented him realising the state capitalist nature of Russia. Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. However, the reality was that the apparatchik and nomenklatura in Russia constituted the capitalist class eating up surplus value.

Trotsky may have proclaimed that “socialism in one country” is impossible. But, it didn’t mean that he thought nothing could be done in one country if a vanguard was ruthless and determined enough it could, he argued, establish a “Workers State”, based on nationalisation and planning, i.e. that “state capitalism in one country” was possible.Trotsky can scarcely criticise Stalin for brutality, when he was as nearly as ruthless. In fact there is a good case that Stalin rose to power as part of a Stop-Trotsky faction, the fear that Trotsky as commander of the Red Army (with a predilection for being seen in public in military uniforms) could assume the role of a military dictator. Such fears would have been stoked by his support, in 1921, for the militarisation of labour.

Trotsky having been comprehensively out-manoeuvred by Stalin and driven out of Russia positioned himself as head of the loyal opposition to the Bolshevik regime, that he and his followers "maintained its fidelity to the official party to the very end” .

A contemporay article on the death of Trotsky can be read here

Trotsky - The Prophet De-bunked can be read here