Bolsheviks Swim Against the Stream

(Quote of the Week)

In this passage from his 1938 work Their Morals and Ours, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky underlined that revolutionaries must maintain their program and purpose, including in periods of deep political reaction and defeats. In the face of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s usurpation of political power from the Soviet proletariat beginning in 1923-24 and the accompanying degeneration of the Communist International (Comintern), Trotsky and his supporters confronted relentless challenges in their struggle to uphold revolutionary proletarian internationalism, i.e., Bolshevism. Under dire conditions, they fought to defend the program of the 1917 October Revolution, embodied in the call to forge the world party of socialist revolution, the Fourth International, which was founded in late 1938.

The masses, of course, are not at all impeccable. Idealization of the masses is foreign to us. We have seen them under different conditions, at different stages and in addition in the biggest political shocks. We have observed their strong and weak sides. Their strong side—resoluteness, self-sacrifice, heroism—has always found its clearest expression in times of revolutionary upsurge. During this period the Bolsheviks headed the masses. Afterward a different historical chapter loomed when the weak side of the oppressed came to the forefront: heterogeneity, insufficiency of culture, narrowness of world outlook. The masses tired of the tension, became disillusioned, lost faith in themselves—and cleared the road for the new aristocracy. In this epoch the Bolsheviks (“Trotskyists”) found themselves isolated from the masses. Practically speaking, we went through two such big historic cycles: 1897-1905, years of flood tide; 1907-1913, years of the ebb; 1917-1923, a period of upsurge unprecedented in history; finally, a new period of reaction, which has not ended even today. In these immense events the “Trotskyists” learned the rhythm of history, that is, the dialectics of the class struggle. They also learned, it seems, and to a certain degree successfully, how to subordinate their subjective plans and programs to this objective rhythm. They learned not to fall into despair over the fact that the laws of history do not depend upon their individual tastes and are not subordinated to their own moral criteria. They learned to subordinate their individual tastes to the laws of history. They learned not to become frightened by the most powerful enemies if their power is in contradiction to the needs of historical development. They know how to swim against the stream in the deep conviction that the new historic flood will carry them to the other shore. Not all will reach that shore, many will drown. But to participate in this movement with open eyes and with an intense will—only this can give the highest moral satisfaction to a thinking being!

—Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (February 1938)