내년 4·15 국회의원 총선 공천에 대해 생각해 봅니다. 제가 26년 간 몸담아온 자유한국당에 대해서만 생각해 보겠습니다.
반드시 짚고 넘어가야 할 역사적 대사건이 박근혜 대통령 탄핵입니다. 자기들이 앞장서서 대통령 만들어 놓고, 아무런 죄가 밝혀진 것 없는데도 박근혜 대통령을 탄핵한 자유한국당 국회의원들은 모두 정계를 은퇴해야 마땅합니다.
이언주 국회의원처럼 당시 야당인 더불어민주당 소속이라면 그럴 수도 있는 일입니다. 그러나 당시 새누리당 국회의원으로서 자기 당 소속의 박근혜 대통령 탄핵에 찬성했던 62명은 스스로 정계은퇴함이 마땅하고 옳은 일이라고 생각합니다. (발췌)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
< 요약 >
1. 평양 미림 비행장 조선인 800명 학살 썰이 국내 역사 도서, 기사, 인터넷에 널리 퍼져감
2. 출처를 거슬러 거슬러 올라가도보니 조총련 대학 교사(前) 박경식의 책이 나옴. 그 책은 북괴 '로동신문'의 기사를 근거로 삼고 있음.
3. 결국 무근거 선동이었음이 밝혀짐.
4. 인터넷에 반일정신병자 새끼들, 좋다고 떡밥 물어서 여기저기 퍼뜨리고 다니던데 로동신문이 시키드나?
http://www.ilbe.com/view/11210711943
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국민의 목소리
출처 일베
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Gordon G. Chang
#China can reap short-term advantages by its extremely selfish use of water, but eventually #India, #Vietnam, and other downstream users will find a way to make Beijing pay.
중국이 상류의 강물을 독점해서 단기적으로 이익을 챙기겠지
만, 언젠가 하류의 인도, 베트남 등의 나라들이 보복할 날이 올
것이다.
China has promised to release more dam water for
drought-stricken countries. The offer highlights the
newfound reliance of downriver countries on Chinese
goodwill. By diverting river waters to giant dams,
China has emerged as the upstream water controller.
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Gordon G. Chang
#China is the Qing empire held together with racist "Sinification" policies and fortified with the worst elements of modern totalitarianism. See this review of the fine work of @HudsonInstitute scholar Charles Horner: http://bit.ly/2C6vJcj .
Probably the most valuable and startling one is that “China” is not really “China” at all, but the Qing Empire. When the Qing collapsed in 1912—largely under its own moribund weight—the struggle that had plagued its last days continued. Badly weakened by the Taiping Rebellion, a fifteen-year religious civil war during which some twenty million Chinese died, the Qing no sooner collapsed from exhaustion than warlords and foreigners squabbled over its remains. Eventually, fighting narrowed to a three-way contest among Japan, the Nationalists (under Chiang Kai-shek), and the Communists (under Mao Zedong). Mao and the Communists won in 1949—and made the fateful decision to resurrect the Qing Empire as a one-party dictatorship masquerading under the cover of nation-state ideology. (찰스 호너 책소개 일부)
중국은 인종차별적 한화(漢化) 경찰과 현대 최악의 전체주의
요소들로 유지되는 청(淸) 제국이다.
--->중국은 수천년간 한번도 민주적 정권이나 이념을 가져보
지 못한 국가이다. 따라서 이 나라가 전체주의와 관료주의에서
벗어나려면 상당한 시간과 시민 사회의 투쟁이 필요하다. 그래
서 개인적으로는 30년 정도의 시간이 필요하고 또 국민소득도
2만 달러를 넘어서야 그게 가능하다고 본다.
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Wilson Leung 梁允信
There is a tendency among some Hong Kong elites to
think that, as long as they act as obedient citizens
under the CCP regime, they will be protected from
the dictatorial excesses of that regime. Unfortunately,
many examples from Xinjiang disprove that thinking.
중국 정권 하에서 복종하면 무사할 거라고 믿는 홍콩
인의 생각은 착오이다.
------------------------------------------------------
Axios
Author Doug Wead claims in his new book that
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is "fascinated by
Donald Trump" and even views the U.S. president as
a father figure.
Author Doug Wead claims in his new book, "Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency," that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is "fascinated by Donald Trump" and even views the U.S. president as a father figure, according to Fox News.
김정은이 트럼프를 아버지 상으로 본다고? 만우절도 아닌데 이렇게 심한 농담을?
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Most Americans don’t realize just how much influence China (CCP) really has in the US—and not just with the NBA. The truth is, China has been working for decades to undermine our rights and freedoms. Learn more in my new book STEALTH WAR.
중국은 미국에 상당한 영향력을 지니고 있다.
ABOUT STEALTH WAR
China expert Robert Spalding reveals the shocking success China has had infiltrating American institutions and compromising our national security.
The media often suggest that Russia poses the greatest threat to America’s national security, but the real danger lies farther east. While those in power have been distracted and disorderly, China has waged a six-front war on America’s economy, military, diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure–and they’re winning. It’s almost too late to undo the shocking, though nearly invisible, victories of the Chinese.
In Stealth War, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding reveals China’s motives and secret attacks on the West. Chronicling how our leaders have failed to protect us over recent decades, he provides shocking evidence of some of China’s most brilliant ploys, including:
• Placing Confucius Institutes in universities across the United States that serve to monitor and control Chinese students on campus and spread communist narratives to unsuspecting American students.
• Offering enormous sums to American experts who create investment funds that funnel technology to China.
• Signing a thirty-year agreement with the US that allows China to share peaceful nuclear technology, ensuring that they have access to American nuclear know-how.
Spalding’s concern isn’t merely that America could lose its position on the world stage. More urgently, the Chinese Communist Party has a fundamental loathing of the legal protections America grants its people and seeks to create a world without those rights.
Despite all the damage done so far, Spalding shows how it’s still possible for the U.S. and the rest of the free world to combat–and win–China’s stealth war.
펭귄 책소개
예아운지북따닥2019.11.04 12:59:37
일개 교사가 외제차 두 대를 굴린다??
태양광 관련해서 서울시와 커넥션.
학교옥상에 태양광패널 설치로 태양광발전소 라는 사업도 하고 있음.
이 태양광사업에 지역유지, 힘깨나 쓰는 학부모들 모조리 관련돼 있음.
존나 어마어마한 카륻텔을 구성하고 있는거지.
저런 사태가 벌어졌는데도 학부모들이 너무 잠잠하고 무반응었던 게
그저 홍어유입이 아무리 많다한들 이해가 되지 않았는데 이제야 이해가 됐음.
전교조의 아지트, 태양광을 빨갱이들이 어떻게 굴려 먹고 있는지가 저 인헌교도소에 다 있다는 게 ㄹㅇ개씹소오금
태양광 관련해서 서울시와 커넥션.
학교옥상에 태양광패널 설치로 태양광발전소 라는 사업도 하고 있음.
이 태양광사업에 지역유지, 힘깨나 쓰는 학부모들 모조리 관련돼 있음.
존나 어마어마한 카륻텔을 구성하고 있는거지.
저런 사태가 벌어졌는데도 학부모들이 너무 잠잠하고 무반응었던 게
그저 홍어유입이 아무리 많다한들 이해가 되지 않았는데 이제야 이해가 됐음.
전교조의 아지트, 태양광을 빨갱이들이 어떻게 굴려 먹고 있는지가 저 인헌교도소에 다 있다는 게 ㄹㅇ개씹소오금
일베
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►"4일 국정원 업무보고에서 국정원장이
대륙간탄도미사일(ICBM) 이동식으로 보는 것이 맞다"
►"이동식 불가능" 청와대 안보실장 주장과 달라
"한국의 미사일 방어시스템은 무력화 됐다"
김태우 전 통일연구원장은
"북한이 한반도를 공격할 수 있는 미사일은 이미 준비가 된 상태"라며
"ICBM과 SLBM에 목매며 고체연료주입에 매진하는 것은 미국을 겨냥한 것인데
이것은 미국 본토를 타격할 수 있기 때문에 미국 내에서 '위험을 감수하며
한미동맹을 유지할 필요가 없다'는 여론을 생성하기 위한 미사일 개발"이라고 했다.
대륙간탄도미사일(ICBM) 이동식으로 보는 것이 맞다"
►"이동식 불가능" 청와대 안보실장 주장과 달라
"한국의 미사일 방어시스템은 무력화 됐다"
김태우 전 통일연구원장은
"북한이 한반도를 공격할 수 있는 미사일은 이미 준비가 된 상태"라며
"ICBM과 SLBM에 목매며 고체연료주입에 매진하는 것은 미국을 겨냥한 것인데
이것은 미국 본토를 타격할 수 있기 때문에 미국 내에서 '위험을 감수하며
한미동맹을 유지할 필요가 없다'는 여론을 생성하기 위한 미사일 개발"이라고 했다.
그는 "이미 한국의 미사일 방어시스템은 무력화 됐다"며
"이제 북한이 미국을 향해 한반도에서 나가라는 마지막 시그널을 보내고
적화통일을 위한 기반을 다 마무리 해가는 중"이라고 분석했다.
"이제 북한이 미국을 향해 한반도에서 나가라는 마지막 시그널을 보내고
적화통일을 위한 기반을 다 마무리 해가는 중"이라고 분석했다.
출처 뉴데일리, 일베
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제1회 MBC 대학가곡제 최우수상 '눈' 조미경 (1981년)
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Those who tell us today that China is reviving totalitarianism, not to mention the planned economy, with the help of big data, facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence, misunderstand the seven key lessons of 1989:
China’s rulers have forged an economic powerhouse built
on repression. Yet the events of 1989 show the one-party
state is doomed to fail, writes Niall Ferguson
빅데이터와 안면 인식 기술, 인공 지능 등으로 중국이 전체주
의를 부활시키고 있다는 주장은 1989년의 7가지 교훈을 오해
하고 있다.
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이코노미스트지의 엉터리 경제학
In short, they assume that alcohol revenues would decline by 38 per cent (£13 billion) if everyone drank within the government's evidence-free guidelines. They then assume that the industry would have to raise £13 billion from somewhere to keep its head above water. The figures in the graphic above show what they reckon drinks would cost if the industry were to pass that £13 billion on to customers.
The whole premise of the study is ridiculous.
The whole premise of the study is ridiculous.
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The Soviet communists intentionally starved millions
of #Ukrainians to death in 1933
They confiscated their wheat, took all seeds &made it
illegal to hide food from the state
As the starving peasants tried to leave for cities, the
Secret Police blocked them by force
다.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Naive universalism attracts IYIs and self-righteous psychopaths
칸트의 순박한 보편주의는 문맥을 제거하고 풍부하고, 프랙탈
이며 역동적이고 상호작용하는 구조를 해체해서, 정적이고,소
박하며 저차원적인 사물을 만드는 데 있었다.
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"For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation" - @nntaleb
자신을 실망시키지 않는 것이다.
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"In a classic bait-and-switch scam, democratic socialist politicians and their allies in the media are hoping that Americans confuse them for Nordic social democrats."
그들을 북유럽의 사회민주주의로 착각하기를 희망하고 있다.
The ideology and policies of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which include an end to profits and “democratizing” the means of production, are much more like those of Havana and Caracas than Helsinki and Copenhagen.
Venezuela and Cuba are perfectly valid illustrations of democratic socialist policies, but if this sounds like trite red-baiting, consider the outcomes elsewhere in the region
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트로츠키에 대한 무지와 악
19세기에 바쿠닌은 일찍이 막스주의를 철저히 분석해서, 그 정부가 오만하고
방자한 과학자와 학자들로 이루어진 새로운 계급을 형성할 거라고 예측했다.
또 폴란드의 혁명가 Waclaw Machajski는 사회주의가 노동자들을 대변하는
게 아니라, 불만에 싸인 중류층 지식인의 이데올로기이고, 사회주의 국가의 간
부와 매니저들의 착취를 위한 이념이라고 갈파했다.
러시아 혁명의 결과 그곳에는 이전보다 더 억압적이고 반동적인 관료적 집합주
의bureaucratic collectivism"가 들어앉게 되었다.
전시 공산주의는 막스의 이상을 현실로 옮기기 위한 시도였다. 상품 생산과 가
격 체계 그리고 시장의 철폐 등은 바로 막시즘의 모든 것이었다.
모든 볼셰비크 지도자 중에서 가장 강력하고 적극적으로 강제 노동을 주장한 사
람은 트로프키이다.
트로츠키가 20세기의 거인이었다고? 트로츠키는 사상 통제, 교도소, 반대자들
의 처형, 일반 노동자들의 강제 노동, 심지어 동산(動産) 노예제를 주장한 사람
이다.
Trotsky: The Ignorance and the Evil
Ralph Raico
[Leon Trotsky • By Irving Howe • Viking Press, 1978 &bull 214 pages. This review originally appeared in Libertarian Review, March 1979.]
Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. The reasons for this are clear enough. He was a writer, an occasional literary critic — according to Irving Howe, a very good one — and an historian (of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917). He had an interest in psychoanalysis and modern developments in physics, and, even when in power, suggested that the new Communist thought-controllers shouldn't be too harsh on writers with such ideas — not exactly a Nat Hentoff position on freedom of expression, but about as good as one can expect among Communists.
Above all, Trotsky was himself an intellectual, and one who played a great part in what many of that breed have considered to be the real world — the world of revolutionary bloodshed and terror. He was second only to Lenin in 1917; in the Civil War he was the leader of the Red Army and the Organizer of Victory. As Howe says, "For intellectuals throughout the world there was something fascinating about the spectacle of a man of words transforming himself through sheer will into a man of deeds."
Trotsky lost out to Stalin in the power struggle of the 1920s, and in exile became a severe and knowledgeable critic of his great antagonist; thus, for intellectuals with no access to other critics of Stalinism — classical liberal, anarchist, or conservative — Trotsky's writings in the 1930s opened their eyes to some aspects at least of the charnel-house that was Stalin's Russia. During the period of the Great Purge and the Moscow show trials, Trotsky was placed at the center of the myth of treason and collaboration with Germany and Japan that Stalin spun as a pretext for eliminating his old comrades. In 1940, an agent of the Soviet secret police, Ramon Mercador, sought Trotsky out at his home in Mexico City and killed him with an ice ax to the head.
Irving Howe, the distinguished literary critic and editor of Dissent, tells the story of this interesting life with great lucidity, economy, and grace. The emphasis is on Trotsky's thought, with which Howe has concerned himself for almost the past 40 years. As a young man, he states, "I came for a brief time under Trotsky's influence, and since then, even though or perhaps because I have remained a socialist, I have found myself moving farther and farther away from his ideas."
Howe is in fact considerably more critical of Trotsky than I had expected. He identifies many of Trotsky's crucial errors, and uses them to cast light on the flaws in Marxism, Leninism, and the Soviet regime that Trotsky contributed so much to creating. And yet there is a curious ambivalence in the book. Somehow the ignorance and evil in Trotsky's life are never allowed their full weight in the balance, and, in the end, he turns out to be, in Howe's view, a hero and "titan" of the 20th century. It's as if Howe had chosen not to think out fully the moral implications of what it means to have said and done the things that Trotsky said and did.
We can take as our first example Howe's discussion of the final outcome of Trotsky's political labors: the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime. Throughout this book Howe makes cogent points regarding the real class character of this regime and other Communist governments — which, he notes, manifested itself very early on:
A new social stratum — it had sprung up the very morning of the revolution — began to consolidate itself: the party-state bureaucracy which found its support in the technical intelligentsia, the factory managers, the military officials, and, above all, the party functionaries…. To speak of a party-state bureaucracy in a country where industry has been nationalized means to speak of a new ruling elite, perhaps a new ruling class, which parasitically fastened itself upon every institution of Russian life. [emphasis in original]
Howe goes on to say that it was not to be expected that the Bolsheviks themselves would realize what they had done and what class they had actually raised to power: "It was a historical novelty for which little provision had been made in the Marxist scheme of things, except perhaps in some occasional passages to be found in Marx's writings about the distinctive social character of Oriental despotism."
This is not entirely correct. Howe himself shows how Trotsky, in his book 1905 (a history of the Russian revolution of that year), had a glimpse of this form of society, one in which the state bureaucracy was itself the ruling class. In analyzing the Tsarist regime, Trotsky had picked up on the strand of Marxist thought that saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production. This was a view that Marx expressed, for instance, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
More importantly, the class character of Marxism itself — as well as the probable consequences of the coming to power of a Marxist Party — had been identified well before Trotsky's time. The great 19th-century anarchist Michael Bakunin — whose name does not even appear in Howe's book, just as not a single other anarchist is even mentioned anywhere in it — had already subjected Marxism to critical scrutiny in the 1870s. In the course of this, Bakunin had uncovered the dirty little secret of the future Marxist state:
The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class…. But in the People's State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all … but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many "heads overflowing with brains" in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars. [Emphasis added.]
This perspective was taken up somewhat later by the Polish-Russian revolutionist, Waclaw Machajski, who held, in the words of Max Nomad, that — "nineteenth century socialism was not the expression of the interests of the manual workers but the ideology of the impecunious, malcontent, lower middle-class intellectual workers … behind the socialist 'ideal' was a new form of exploitation for the benefit of the officeholders and managers of the socialized state."
Thus, that Marxism in power would mean the rule of state functionaries was not merely intrinsically probable — given the massive increment of state power envisaged by Marxists, what else could it be? — but it had also been predicted by writers well known to a revolutionary like Trotsky. Trotsky, however, had not permitted himself to take this analysis seriously before committing himself to the Marxist revolutionary enterprise. More than that: "To the end of his days," as Howe writes, he "held that Stalinist Russia should still be designated as a 'degenerated workers' state' because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a 'conquest' of the Russian Revolution" — as if nationalized property and the planned economy were not the very instruments of rule of the new class in Soviet Russia!
"It may well be, that is, that the Bolsheviks had never had the slightest idea of what their aims would mean concretely for the economic life of Russia, how those aims would of necessity have to be implemented, or what the consequences would be."
It remained for some of Trotsky's more critical disciples, especially Max Shachtman in the United States, to point out to their master what had actually happened in Russia: that the Revolution had not produced a "workers' State," nor was there any danger that "capitalism" would be restored, as Trotsky continued to fret it would. Instead, there had come into an existence in Russia a "bureaucratic collectivism" even more reactionary and oppressive than what had gone before.
Trotsky rejected this interpretation. In fact he had no choice. For, as Howe states, the dissidents "called into question the entire revolutionary perspective upon which [Trotsky] continued to base his politics…. There was the further possibility, if Trotsky's critics were right, that the whole perspective of socialism might have to be revised." Indeed.
To his credit, Howe recognizes that a key period for understanding Bolshevism, including the thought of Trotsky, is the period of war communism, from 1918 to 1921. As he describes it, "Industry was almost completely nationalized. Private trade was banned. Party squads were sent into the countryside to requisition food from the peasants." The results were tragic on a vast scale. The economic system simply broke down, with all the immense suffering and all the countless deaths from starvation that such a small statement implies. As Trotsky himself later put it, "The collapse of the productive forces surpassed anything of the kind that history had ever seen. The country, and the government with it, were at the very edge of the abyss."
How had this come about? Here Howe follows the orthodox interpretation: War communism was merely the product of emergency conditions, created by the Revolution and the Civil War. It was a system of "extreme measures [which the Bolsheviks] had never dreamt of in their earlier programs."
Now, this last may be, strictly speaking, correct. It may well be, that is, that the Bolsheviks had never had the slightest idea of what their aims would mean concretely for the economic life of Russia, how those aims would of necessity have to be implemented, or what the consequences would be.
But war communism was no mere "improvisation," whose horrors are to be chalked up to the chaos in Russia at the time. The system was willed and itself helped produce that chaos. As Paul Craig Roberts has argued in his brilliant book Alienation and the Soviet Economy, war communism was an attempt to translate into "Reality" the Marxist ideal: the abolition of "commodity production," of the price system and the market.
This, as Roberts demonstrates, was what Marxism was all about. This is what the end of "alienation" and the final liberation of mankind consisted in. Why should it be surprising that when self-confident and determined Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky seized power in a great nation, they tried to put into effect the very policy that was their whole reason for being?
As evidence for this interpretation, Roberts quotes Trotsky himself (ironically, from a book of Trotsky's writings edited by Irving Howe):
[T]he period of so-called "war communism" [was a period when] economic life was wholly subjected to the needs of the front … it is necessary to acknowledge, however, that in its original conception it pursued broader aims. The Soviet government hoped and strove to develop these methods of regimentation directly into a system of planned economy in distribution as well as production. In other words, from "war communism" it hoped gradually, but without destroying the system, to arrive at genuine communism … reality, however, came into increasing conflict with the program of "war communism." Production continually declined, and not only because of the destructive action of the war.
Roberts goes on to quote Victor Serge: "The social system of those years was later called 'War Communism.' At the time it was called simply 'Communism' … Trotsky had just written that this system would last over decades if the transition to a genuine, unfettered Socialism was to be assured. Bukharin … considered the present mode of production to be final."
One slight obstacle was encountered, however, on the road to the abolition of the price system and the market: "Reality," as Trotsky noted, "came into increasing conflict" with the economic "system" that the Bolshevik rulers had fastened on Russia. After a few years of misery and famine for the Russian masses — there is no record of any Bolshevik leader having died of starvation in this period — the rulers thought again, and a New Economic Policy (NEP) — including elements of private ownership and allowing for market transactions — was decreed.
The significance of all this cannot be exaggerated. What we have with Trotsky and his comrades in the Great October Revolution is the spectacle of a few literary-philosophical intellectuals seizing power in a great country with the aim of overturning the whole economic system — but without the slightest idea of how an economic system works. In State and Revolution, written just before he took power, Lenin wrote,
The accounting and control necessary [for the operation of a national economy] have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.
With this piece of cretinism Trotsky doubtless agreed. And why wouldn't he? Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest had all their lives been professional revolutionaries, with no connection at all to the process of production and, except for Bukharin, little interest in the real workings of an economic system. Their concerns had been the strategy and tactics of revolution and the perpetual, monkish exegesis of the holy books of Marxism.
The nitty-gritty of how an economic system functions — how, in our world, men and women work, produce, exchange, and survive — was something from which they prudishly averted their eyes, as pertaining to the nether-regions. These "materialists" and "scientific socialists" lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel, Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring's philosophical errors was infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a price.
Of the actual operations of social production and exchange they had about the same appreciation as John Henry Newman or, indeed, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. This is a common enough circumstance among intellectuals; the tragedy here is that the Bolsheviks came to rule over millions of real workers, real peasants, and real businessmen.
Howe puts the matter rather too sweetly: once in power, he says, "Trotsky was trying to think his way through difficulties no Russian Marxist had quite foreseen." And what did the brilliant intellectual propose as a solution to the problems Russia now faced? "In December 1919 Trotsky put forward a series of 'theses' [sic] before the party's Central Committee in which he argued for compulsory work and labor armies ruled through military discipline…."
So, forced labor, and not just for political opponents, but for the Russian working class. Let Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, the left-anarchists from the May days of 1968 in Paris, take up the argument:
"Was it so true," Trotsky asked, "that compulsory labor was always unproductive?" He denounced this view as "wretched and miserable liberal prejudice," learnedly pointing out that "chattel slavery, too, was productive" and that compulsory serf labor was in its times "a progressive phenomenon." He told the unions [at the Third Congress of Trade Unions] that "coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor were no mere emergency measures and that the workers' State normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at any place of its choosing."
And why not? Hadn't Marx and Engels, in their ten-point program for revolutionary government in The Communist Manifesto, demanded as point eight, "Equal liability for all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture"? Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of "the workers' state" had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise. Now, having annihilated the hated market, the Bolsheviks found that the need for enslavement had, indeed, arisen. And of all the Bolshevik leaders, the most ardent and aggressive advocate of forced labor was Leon Trotsky.
There are other areas in which Howe's critique of Trotsky is not penetrating enough, in which it turns out to be altogether too soft-focused and oblique. For instance, he taxes Trotsky with certain philosophical contradictions stemming from his belief in "historical materialism." All through his life, Howe asserts, Trotsky employed "moral criteria by no means simply derived from or reducible to class interest. He would speak of honor, courage, and truth as if these were known constants, for somewhere in the orthodox Marxist there survived a streak of nineteenth century Russian ethicism, earnest and romantic."
Let us leave aside the silly implication that there is something "romantic" about belief in ethical values, as against the "scientific" character of orthodox Marxism. In this passage, Howe seems to be saying that adherence to certain commonly accepted values is, among Marxists, a rare kind of atavism on Trotsky's part. Not at all.
Of course historical materialism dismisses ethical rules as nothing more than the "expression," or "reflection," or whatever, of "underlying class relationships" and, ultimately, of "the material productive forces." But no Marxist has ever taken this seriously, except as pretext for breaking ethical rules (as when Lenin and Trotsky argued in justification of their terror). Even Marx and Engels, in their "Inaugural Address of the First International," wrote that the International's foreign policy would be to "vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice [sic] which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations."
That Trotsky admired honor, courage, and truth is not something that cries out for explanation by reference to Russian tradition of "ethicism" (whatever that might be). The admiration of those values is a part of the common heritage of us all. To think that there is a problem here that needs explaining is to take "historical materialism" much too seriously to begin with.
Similarly with other contradictions Howe thinks he has discovered between Trotsky's Marxist philosophy and certain statements Trotsky made in commenting on real political events. Of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, Trotsky says that it would have taken place even if he had not been in Petrograd, "on condition that Lenin was present and in command." Howe asks, "What happens to historical materialism?" The point Howe is making, of course, is that in the Marxist view individuals are not allowed to play any critical role in shaping really important historical events, let alone in determining whether or not they occur.
But the answer to Howe's question is that, when Trotsky commits a blunder like this, nothing happens. Nothing happens, because "historical materialism" was pretentious nonsense from the beginning, a political strategy rather than a philosophical position. Occasionally, in daubing in some of the light patches of sky that are intended to make up for the dark ones in Trotsky's life, Howe comes perilously close to slipping into a fantasy world.
He says that in the struggle with Stalin, Trotsky was at a disadvantage, because he "fought on the terrain of the enemy, accepting the damaging assumption of a Bolshevik monopoly of power." But why is this assumption located on the enemy's terrain? Trotsky shared that view with Stalin. He no more believed that a supporter of capitalism had a right to propagate his ideas than a medieval inquisitor believed in a witch's right to her own personal style. And as for the rights even of other socialists — Trotsky in 1921 had led the attack on the Kronstadt rebels, who merely demanded freedom for socialists other than the Bolsheviks. At the time, Trotsky boasted that the rebels would be shot "like partridges" — as, pursuant to his orders, they were.
Howe even stoops to trying a touch of pathos. In sketching the tactics Stalin used in the struggle with Trotsky, he speaks of "the organized harassment to which Trotskyist leaders, distinguished Old Bolsheviks, were subjected by hooligans in the employ of the party apparatus, the severe threats made against all within the party…." Really now — is it political violence used against Leon Trotsky and his "distinguished" followers that is supposed to make our blood run cold? No: if there was ever a satisfying case of poetic justice, the "harassment" and "persecution" of Trotsky — down to and including the ice ax incident — is surely it.
The best example of Howe's strange gentleness toward Trotsky I have for the last. What, when all is said and done, was Trotsky's picture of the Communist society of the future? Howe does quote from Trotsky's Literature and Revolution the famous, and ridiculous, last lines: "The average human type [Trotsky wrote] will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise." He doesn't, however, tell us what precedes these lines — Trotsky's sketch of the future society, his passionate dream. Under Communism, Trotsky states, Man will
reconstruct society and himself in accordance with his own plan…. The imperceptible, ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to the titanic construction of city-villages, with map and compass in hand…. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built up consciously, will be erected and corrected…. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training…. [It will be] possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life…. The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the laws of heredity and sexual selection! … Man will make it his purpose … to create a higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman.
"Man … his own plan … his purpose… his own hands."
When Trotsky promoted the formation of worker-slave armies in industry, he believed that his own will was the will of the Proletarian Man. It is easy to guess whose will would stand in for that of Communist Man when the time came to direct the collective experiments on the physiological life, the complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physiological training, the reconstruction of the traditional family, the substitution of "something else" for blind sexual selection in the reproduction of human beings, and the creation of the superhuman.
This, then, is Trotsky's final goal: a world where mankind is "free" in the sense that Marxism understands the term — where all of human life, starting from the economics, but going on to embrace everything, even the most private and intimate parts of human existence — is consciously planned by "society," which is assumed to have a single will. And it is this — this disgusting positivist nightmare — that, for him, made all the enslavement and killings acceptable!
Surely, this was another dirty little secret that Howe had an obligation to let us in on.
Howe ends by saying of Trotsky that "the example of his energy and heroism is likely to grip the imagination of generations to come," adding that, "even those of us who cannot heed his word may recognize that Leon Trotsky, in his power and his fall, is one of the titans of our century."
This is the kind of writing that covers the great issues of right and wrong in human affairs with a blanket of historicist snow. The fact is that Trotsky used his talents to take power in order to impose his willful dream — the abolition of the market, private property, and the bourgeoisie. His actions brought untold misery and death to his country.
Yet, to the end of his life, he tried in every way he could to bring the Marxist revolution to other peoples — to the French, the Germans, the Italians — with what probable consequences, he, better than anyone else, had reason to know. He was a champion of thought-control, prison camps, and the firing squad for his opponents, and of forced labor for ordinary, nonbrilliant working people. He openly defended chattel slavery — which, even in our century, must surely put him into a quite select company.
He was an intellectual who never asked himself such a simple question as: "What reason do I have to believe that the economic condition of workers under socialism will be better than under capitalism?" To the last, he never permitted himself to glimpse the possibility that the bloody, bureaucratic tyranny over which Stalin presided might never have come into existence but for his own efforts.
A hero? Well, no thank you — I'll find my own heroes somewhere else. A titan of the 20th century? In a sense, yes. At least Leon Trotsky shares with the other "titans" of our century this characteristic: it would have been better if he had never been born.
This review originally appeared in Libertarian Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 (March 1979), pp. 38–42.
Image source: The Viking Press
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