In Defense of Marxism (Excerpts)¶
Core Argument¶
In these polemical writings from 1939, Leon Trotsky defends dialectical materialism as the indispensable scientific method for revolutionary politics, while excoriating what he identifies as a petty-bourgeois revisionist tendency emerging within the American Socialist Workers Party. The crisis of proletarian leadership, Trotsky insists, does not stem from working-class incapacity but from the contradiction between the masses' revolutionary impulse and the conservative character of existing labour leaderships. Against those who would abandon Marxist theory for supposedly "concrete" political questions, Trotsky argues that method determines political conclusion.
Dialectical materialism, Trotsky contends, is not mysticism but the logic of evolution—a science of thinking that grasps phenomena in their continuous change and identifies the critical limits where quantitative transformations become qualitative. Formal logic's axiom that "A equals A" holds only within strict limits, whereas dialectical logic establishes a "tolerance" for concepts, analogous to technical tolerances in production. The dialectic is to vulgar logic as a motion picture is to a still photograph. To reject it as religion, Trotsky warns, is to imply that the syllogism itself is divine revelation.
Trotsky attacks Burnham's outright rejection and Shachtman's semi-rejection of dialectics, demonstrating that these theoretical positions directly parallel their errors on the nature of the Soviet state. Burnham's definition of the USSR as "neither a workers' nor a bourgeois state" is a negative, unsociological abstraction. A dialectical materialist would examine the USSR's historical origin, its changes, and whether those changes passed from quantitative to qualitative. The answer remains: the USSR is a degenerated workers' state, a damaged automobile that can be reconditioned. The bureaucracy is not a new class with a historical future but a parasitic caste whose contradiction with the social basis is a motor force for revolutionary struggle.
Trotsky cites instructive historical precedents: Bernstein and Kautsky rejected the dialectic and ended as opportunists; Mehring defended it and died a revolutionary communist. Struve, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Eastman, and Hook all abandoned the dialectic and ended in reaction. The opposition's call to abandon philosophy for "concrete politics" repeats Menshevik arguments against Lenin and Iskra. Burnham's demand for "critical and experimental" politics without Marxism reveals adaptation to bourgeois public opinion—the formula of all petty-bourgeois empiricists.
The party crisis, Trotsky insists, stems from inadequate theoretical education and the conservatism of petty-bourgeois elements, not workers. Shachtman's continued support for political revolution against the bureaucracy is inconsistent with his theoretical position: if the USSR were no longer a workers' state, social revolution would be required. The convention must repulse the revisionists, reaffirm Marxism, and condemn determining policy towards the USSR from incident to incident.