45. The Planet Without a Visa¶
Core Argument¶
In The Planet Without a Visa, Trotsky transforms his personal odyssey of exile into a searing indictment of bourgeois democracy’s collapse before the counter-revolutionary united front. Arriving in Constantinople after Stalin’s GPU reneged on promises to release his co-workers, Trotsky dissects the mechanics of official lying. The press, he argues, lies as a rule; Zola’s distinction between a venal press and an “incorruptible” one that lies only when it matters is merely a difference of degree. The Times exemplified this by claiming Trotsky had come to Constantinople by arrangement with Stalin to prepare a military conquest of the Near East.
Trotsky’s attempt to enter Germany after Reichstag President Löbe publicly offered him asylum became a case study in the degradation of democratic rights. The GPU claimed Germany had already refused; Trotsky wired Löbe directly and applied. The democratic right of asylum was progressively reduced: first to restricted residence, then to entry only for medical treatment, then only if he were near death. Germany finally refused. Trotsky concluded that the Social Democratic government had acted as the link in a united front of Stalin, the German right, and the bourgeoisie against revolutionary Marxism.
Refusals by Norway, France, and Britain followed the same pattern. British Home Secretary Clynes defined the right of asylum as the state’s right to refuse it; Trotsky countered that historically, asylum meant the persecuted person’s right to refuge. He reminded British ministers—Snowden, Lansbury, and Webb, who had visited the USSR as guests—of Soviet hospitality, to no effect. Sidney Webb suggested a Labour government might be too weak to grant a visa; Trotsky replied that a party unable to answer for its actions had no right to power. He characterises these Labour figures as timid petty bourgeois, more concerned with proving their respectability to the old ruling classes than with faith in the masses.
Europe and America are without a visa; the planet is without one. Trotsky defends the October Revolution as an experiment in a new social regime, comparable to the German Reformation and French Revolution, requiring decades or centuries to judge. He rejects personal tragedy, citing Rosa Luxemburg and Proudhon on rising above circumstance. The chapter is a polemic against the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy and the cowardice of social democracy, both of which have become prison guards for revolutionary Marxism.