(no subject)

[pantryslut]

Oh yeah, this is what I meant to talk about.

This post is all about radical political philosophy, and may be somewhat esoteric to some, possibly irritating to others. I’m not going to put it behind a cut, but nonetheless, you’ve been warned.

Not too long ago, gordonzola posted a list of formative books that influenced his politics. I promised I’d post my list, too, but never got around to it.

This morning, I read a review in the Nation of Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky, recently re-issued. (I garner, from the review, that you’re best off continuing to haunt used bookstores for an older copy instead.) And I realized that The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast may be the three most politically formative books that I never read.

I did read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. For the record, I also read The Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism. All of them were formative in their own ways, too, although I give much more credit to Marx For Beginners, Lenin for Beginners, Trotsky for Beginners, and Socialism for Beginners. Really, they’re fantastic books, and I recommend them.

I don’t think it’s a secret that I used to consider myself a Marxist. Never a particularly orthodox one, which drove *everybody* crazy, but I did things like write high school papers on why Lenin could be considered a hero and debated my history teachers on the merits of the “political scale makes a circle” spiel. I have no particular shame about this period in my life. I’ve also always had a (totally unrelated, believe it or not) fascination with the entirety of Russian history and culture, so I also boned up on alla them radical groups, not just because another book I fell in love with at about this time was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, with the famous nihilist Bazarov. Nihilists and anarchists, Mensheviks and Narodniks, they were all friends of mine, and paid close attention to their arguments and philosophies, and tried to sort them all out for myself.

But back to the subject.

A lot of my early politics were absorbed from my father, and my father would undoubtedly list Deutscher’s trilogy as monumentally important in shaping his worldview. I remember him repeatedly encouraging me to read it, but alas, he owned only the first and third volumes, so I put it off, more or less indefinitely.

The review reminded me, though, of my promise to gordonzola. And it also reminded me that The History of the Russian Revolution may be exactly what turned me away from Marxism. The Nation reviewer, Ronald Aronson, writes near the end of his piece, “It has always been tempting, in the 1930s, in the 1960s and again today, to look for the original sin of the Bolshevik Revolution. But what if it was the revolution itself? Not its radicalism and not its use of violence but rather the vanguard party's determination to assume power over a backward society in the first place, and in the single-party state that followed?” As it turns out, that’s the conclusion I drew many many years ago on my own.

After Aronson’s review, I am considering going back to Deutscher, and reading him not as history, but more like fiction. For the story. The adventure, the conflict, the tragedy. It’s a story that won over my father, clearly – he proudly called himself a Trotskyite*, still does sometimes, even though he never belonged to any party or was on any mailing list. (He later confessed to me that he tended not to get along with orthodox Trotskyists because they never had a sense of humor). He, too, was infatuated with history, and the narrative of history, which is one thing that attracts lots of people to various flavors of Marxism in the first place – Marxism provides history with a readymade narrative. A plot, and a climax to look forward to and participate in.

I prefer to tell different stories these days about history and politics and stuff like that. But I’m always a sucker for a good read.



* You all know that there’s a fierce squabble about “Trotskyite” vs. “Trotskyist,” a la the now-famous “Trekkie” vs. “Trekker” kerfuffle**, right? My father always called himself a Trotskyite. That is not a typo or a faulty memory moment. Just sayin’.


** Except that people who call other people "Trekkies" haven't ever historically persecuted, imprisoned, and executed people who consider themselves "Trekkers." I thought that might be worth noting.

Comments

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

In the original Russian, it's "Trotskovnik".

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

You know you've now got me thinking if there's a way to distinguish the two in Russian. There must be. What would it be? Damn my foggy foreign grammar.

[manomano.livejournal.com]

There's probably not. It's probably one of those only-meaningful-in-English debates