IV An Intellectual Partnership
…When Trotsky, barred from Iskra and at loggrheads with everybody,
left Geneva , he went to Munich , where Parvus was living; he stayed in
Parvus’s home, and there Sedova, his second wife, later joined him. In Parvus
he found a man viewing with detachment internal Russian alignments, capable of
taking in the whole international scene of socialism, a master at Marxist
analysis, unsurpassed in visualizing himself and others the broad vistas of class
struggle. Last but not least, Trotsky admired in Parvus his ‘virile, muscular
style’, which he was to remember hankeringly long after their break. In brief,
Parvus still towered above Trotsky in erudition, experience, and literally
taste. It is not easy, however, to define the extent on his influence in
Trotsky. To this day Trotsky’s detractors attribute the exclusive authorship of
the theory of ‘permanent revolution’, the hallmark of Trotskysm, to Parvus, and
suggest either that Trotsky copied or plagiarized it or that a theory coming
from so contaminated source must be worthless. Trotsky himself never denied his
dept to Parvus, although the warmth with which acknowledged it varied with
times and circumstances. What they both wrote in the hey-day of their
association reveals how many of the ideas and views first formulated from
Parvus left a deep mark on Trotsky, and how many of them was to repeat through
his life in a form not very different from that in which his older friend had
first put them.
But Trotsky was possessed of
certain qualities which enabled him to be from the outset more that Parvus’s
mere disciple. He Had his fresh experience of Russia and of the underground
struggle, which Parvus had not. He had in incandescent political imagination,
while Parvus’s analyses and prognostications sprang from a bold but cold mind.
He had the revolutionary fervour which gave wings to his ideas, while Parvus
was the cynical type of revolutionary. Trotsky, than, had his own contribution
to make to their common fund of ideas. As in most associations of this sort,
the respective shares of the partners cannot be unscrambled, not even by the
partners themselves. The thinking is done in common; and even if sometimes it
is possible to say who has first formulated in print this or that part of a
theory, the invisible, two-way traffic of of suggestions and stimuli that has
passed between the partners can never be traced. All that can be said of Parvus
and Trotsky is that at first the older of the two was well ahead, leading with
ideas and formulas. At the next stage both seemed to advance pari passu. In the end the junior leapt
forward with a contribution which was distinctly his own, and which made and
rounded off a new political doctrine; and with this doctrine he came to the
fore on the vast and confused stage of revolution. It should be added that the
whole process developed and was concluded rapidly. It began of summer 1904. It
was consummated in 1906, when, awaiting trial on a Petersburg prison, Trotsky expounded in writing
the theory of the permanent revolution in its finished form. The time of his
apprenticeship with Parvus was briefer still: it hardly lasted longer than till
the beginning of 1905, the opening of first revolution. This was a time of
condensed and rapid thinking; and the young Trotsky, who had already projected
the image of Jacobinism in Russian revolution, was a quick learner.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
After the outbreak of the
Russo-Japanese war, Parvus published a series of essays in Iskra on ‘War and Revolution’. Even before that his contributions,
which he used to sign as Molotov, had strongly impressed Trotsky. But it was
mainly the views which he put forward in ‘War and Revolution’ that made the
lasting impression.
Parvus’s central idea was that
nation-state, as it had developed in capitalism, had outlived its day. This
view had belonged to the common stock of Marx’s theory – it had been stated by
Marx in the Communist Manifesto. But
to most socialist writers at the turn of century this was one of the master’s
sayings, fit to be prepared on festive occasions, but bearing little relation
to the realities of a late Victorian, nation-conscious, and empire proud Europe . Only a very remote future, it was thought, might
bring eclipse of the nation-state. Parvus, on the contrary, saw the eclipse
coming, pointed in its symptoms, forecast its cataclysmic intensification, and
urged the Socialists to adjust their attitudes and policies accordingly. He
placed an unusually emphasis on the interdependence of nations and states, and
this emphasis gave to a reasoning a broad, worldwide sweep, rare in other
Socialists. He saw the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904 as the start of a lonf
sequence of wars, in which the nation-states, impelled by capitalist
competition, would fight for their survival. The fate of continents had become
intertwined. The opening of the American west had sharpened the competition for
world markets between the agriculture producers. European, especially German,
farming and industrial interests joined hands in order to do away with free
trade and to impose a protectionist system in western Europe. ‘The customs wall
have become an economic barrier to the historical process of the cultural
unification of nations; they have increased the political conflicts between
states … and enhanced the power of states and governments … - the stronger the
power of governments, the easier do the states clash in arms’. These ideas were
to become for Trotsky axioms from which he would argue all his life.
Parvus concluded his analysis as
follows: ‘The worldwide process of capitalist development leads to a political upheaval in Russia . This in its turn must have
its impact on the political development of all capitalist countries. The
Russian revolution will shake the bourgeois world… And the Russian proletariat
may well play the role of the vanguard of social revolution’.
Thus already in 1904 Parvus
viewed the approaching revolution not as purely Russian affair but as a
reflection in Russia
of worldwide social tensions; and ha saw in the coming Russian upheaval a
prelude to world revolution. Here were the main elements for the theory of
permanent revolution. Yet, Parvus had so far spoken only about a ‘political
upheaval’ in Russia ,
not about a ‘social’ or Socialist revolution. He apparently still shared the
view, than accepted by all Marxists, that the Russian revolution by itself
would, because of the country’s semi-feudal and backward outlook, be merely
bourgeois in character. Trotsky would be the first to say that the revolution
would of its own momentum pass from the bourgeois to the Socialist stage, and
establish a proletarian dictatorship in Russia , even before the advent of
revolution in the West.
Not only were Parvus’s
international ideas and revolutionary perspectives becoming part and parcel of
Trotsky’s thinking, but, also, some of Trotsky’s views on Russian history,
especially his conception of the Russian state, can be traced back to Parvus.
The view that the Russian state, a cross between Asian despotism and European
absolutism, had formed itself not as the organ of any class in Russian society,
but as a military bureaucratic machine designed primarily to resist pressure
from the more highly civilized West. It was for this purpose that Tsardom had
introduced elements of European civilization into Russia , especially into the army.
It was enough, he remarked, to cast a glance at the line of Russian frontier
fortresses to see that the Tsars had intended to separate Russsia from the West
by a sort of Chinese wall. Some of these theories, as they were developed and
refined by Trotsky, became a objects of heated historical and political disputes
twenty years later.
Parvus influence on Trotsky is
felt also in the style and manner of exposition, especially in the
characteristic sweep of historical prognostication. This is not to say that
Trotsky played the literary ape to Parvus. He absorbed the influence naturally
and organically because of his intellectual and literally affinity with Parvus,
an anffiity which has not lessened by contrasts in character and temperament.
. . . . . . .
. . . . .
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