Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks

3. An Ex-Maoist Looks at an Ex-Trotskyist: On Howe's Leon Trotsky

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [37], (1) Lines: 0 to 5 ——— 11.60301pt ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: PageB [37], (1) 3 Ian Williams An Ex-Maoist Looks at an Ex-Trotskyist: On Howe’s Leon Trotsky Ian Williams’s first book, The Alms Trade, was published in 1989, and his second,The un for Beginners, was published in 1995. He has also contributed to many other publications on politics and international affairs. Born in Liverpool, he graduated from Liverpool University despite several years’ suspension for protests against its investments in South Africa. His variegated career path includes a drinking competition with Chinese premier Chou En Lai and an argument on English literature with Chiang Ching, a.k.a. Mme. Mao. He eventually became a full-time labor-union official until the early 1980s, when he moved into full-time writing after winning a Nuffield Fellowship to study Indian unions. In 1987 he was a speechwriter for U.K. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the elections. He has been a regular contributor in Britain to the Guardian, the Scotsman, the Sunday Herald, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the European, the Observer, and the Independent, of which he was one of the founding contributors. Since 1980 he has lived in Manhattan, where he has written for on-line media such as Alternet, Salon, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting; he has also been a columnist for the New York Observer and a contributor to the Nation, Newsday, Dissent, theWall Street Journal, the Village Voice, la Weekly, and New York. Internationally he has contributed to media across the world, from the Jamaica Gleaner and the Jordan Times to the South China Morning Post and the Australian. In addition to writing, he frequently comments on politics and world affairs on tv and radio outlets: abc, cnn, bbc, itn, cnbc, msnbc, Fox, and so on. 38 Ian Williams 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [38], (2) Lines: 54 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [38], (2) A quarter of a century since he wrote it, Howe’s biography of Trotsky raises far more questions than it can directly answer. How could a devoted democratic socialist describe a founder of the Bolshevik Party and thus of the Soviet state as “one of titans of the century,” not least when the author also recognizes that Trotskyism is “without political or intellectual significance: a petrified ideology”?1 Outcast and unarmed, the prophet’s strong residual attraction for someone as intellectually and politically rigorous as Howe bears scrutiny. Throughout this biography he is in a state of quantum indeterminacy about his subject, shifting from a state of intellectual criticism to one of emotional attachment, often in the same paragraph. We read detailed condemnation of the totalitarian state that Trotsky helped bring to birth, and of the failure of his political movement, and of his failed predictions, yet Howe interlards this with general superlatives about his subject’s heroic virtues. Howe is not alone in this. There is, it seems, a special romantic Trotsky in the hearts of a certain generation of the American Left in particular: a proto-Che, a revolutionary and man of action who was yet an intellectual and man of sensibility. It is a mythic construct, as befits a mythical figure, or perhaps, in this more sordidly commercial age, a spectacularly successful example of rebranding. In either case somehow the American Left has absolved Trotsky of any moral responsibility for the events in the Soviet Union after his exile and indeed tends to overlook his direct responsibility for the formation and, more important, the subsequent development of the Soviet regime. Coming from Britain to the United States, one cannot help but be impressed, or rather somewhat depressed, by the influence of Trotskyism on the American Left. Admittedly the Left in much of the world is now hardly at the apogee of its influence, in contrast to the hopes many of us had at the fall of Berlin Wall, when we...