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International Socialist Review Issue 42, July–August 2005
Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours
Meredith Kolodner reviews Trotsky's classic work on the Marxist approach to ends, means and morality
Page references correspond to: Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Pathfinder Press, 5th edition, 1973).The book can also be read online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1938/1938-mor.htm
IT IS not uncommon for governments and political parties to invoke morality as the driving force and justification for their policies and priorities. Often, these attempts to claim the moral high ground in order to sway public opinion rely on a conception of morality as a stable and timeless set of norms that rise above specific conditions. In reality, social definitions of what is moral and what is immoral are always hotly contested ideological battles.
Today, George W. Bush seeks the mantle of Goodness for his foreign and domestic policy, while at the same time trying to paint all opposition with the brush of Evil. American bombers destroy cities such as Fallujah in the name of justice and democracy, while people in the Middle East who actively resist U.S. dominance are portrayed as lacking a moral compass, driven by an Islamist ideology that runs counter to civilized social norms.
The struggle to claim the moral high ground was in full swing during the 1930s when Leon Trotsky wrote Their Morals and Ours. Society was intensely polarized and there were fierce battles between the competing and conflicting ideologies of Stalinism, Western liberal capitalism, and fascism. Hitler was coming to power, Franco’s fascism was threatening Spain, and Stalin was systematically exterminating what was left of the leadership of the Russian Revolution. Completed in early 1938 as the last of the Moscow show trials were being held, the pamphlet is dedicated to Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov, who, upon finishing the work, Trotsky discovered Stalin had murdered.
In the context of an increasingly global wave of reaction, there was also a global shift to the right among the many on the broad Left. Many of the intellectuals who during a rising upsurge of international struggle had enthusiastically supported the victory of the Russian Revolution, began to move rightwards under the pressure of what Leon Trotsky called “triumphant reaction” as the dream of socialism transformed into an authoritarian nightmare throughout the Soviet Union. One of the most common paths for former socialists in the process of rejecting revolutionary politics was a rejection of Marxism and the class struggle in favor of “morality” and the elixir of educating the masses in the “universal values” of humanity. The goal of Trotsky’s pamphlet is to argue for a materialist approach to questions of morality that cuts Marxism free both from the brutal rigidity of Stalinism and the liberal theorizing of erstwhile revolutionaries turned reformists.
In this short book, Trotsky takes on arguments by liberals and former supporters of the Russian Revolution that the Bolshevik Party’s politics led directly to the crimes of Stalinism. In denying the connection between Stalinism and Bolshevism, Trotsky focuses on the class content of his opponents’ arguments. Those abandoning revolutionary politics led arguments against what they termed the “amoralism” of the idea that “the ends justify the means.” They argued that this approach, advocated by the Bolsheviks, led to an atmosphere of indiscriminate brutality, murder, and deceit. Trotsky takes on the philosophical and practical aspects of this debate and exposes the reactionary operational conclusions of those who demand that revolutionaries adhere to an abstract vision of morality. One of Trotsky’s central contentions is that the maintenance of class inequality depends precisely on the acceptance of these norms. He argues that capitalism “could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality.” (20)
Historical materialist conception of morality
Trotsky’s primary argument is that there are no politics or ideas that are timeless or which exist outside of the social context out of which they have emerged. Instead, common sense notions of morality and immorality are completely defined by the state and structure of a particular society; and in particular, by the interests of its dominant class. To see morality as somehow fixed in time, as an eternal and unchanging concept, does not take into account the fact that different societies have defined morality in different ways. For example, religions often portray their rules of conduct as having existed from the beginning of time. In fact, even religions have adjusted to changing social conditions. Prior to the abolition of slavery, certain sects of Christianity found justification for enslavement in the Bible itself. Now, slavery is seen as un-Christian and immoral. Catholicism, which now holds abortion to be an immoral sin, passed decrees prior to the 1800s that not only allowed for inducing an abortion before “quickening” (the first movements of the fetus) within the first trimester of pregnancy, but encouraged it in some cases.
Trotsky lays out an argument for why it is useful for ruling-class institutions in particular to present morality as a universal, unchanging concept, in addition to making the case that a historical materialist method is needed when examining definitions of morality. Trotsky argues that the very attempt to present moral concepts as ahistoric is rooted in the need to obscure the social, or class relations, of society. He writes,
Bourgeois evolutionism halts impotently at the threshold of historical society because it does not wish to acknowledge the driving force in the evolution of social forms: the class struggle. Morality is one of the ideological functions in this struggle. The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality. (20–21)
Trotsky is arguing that the social definition of morality has a class character and that it plays a crucial ideological role for those in power.
In an example that could easily be applied to the current day, Trotsky explains,
In so far as the state is concerned, in peaceful times it limits itself to individual cases of legalized murder so that in time of war it may transform the “obligatory” commandment, “Thou shalt not kill!” into its opposite. The most “humane” governments, which in peaceful times “detest” war, proclaim during war that the highest duty of their armies is the extermination of the greatest possible number of people.” (21–22)
One cannot help but think of the all-out effort made by the Bush administration to “save” Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been brain dead for fifteen years, while during the same week ordering the bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Iraq.
Trotsky argues that the key link in what Noam Chomsky has more recently called “manufacturing consent” among people living in a capitalist society is hiding the fact that those in power are doing just that, manufacturing consent. Codes of morality must seem universal and utterly disconnected from the interests of the ruling class for morality to work properly and exert a social impact.
The ruling class not only needs to justify its own behavior (repression, war) as reflecting timeless norms that cannot be questioned; it must use those same norms to convince the oppressed not to rebel. So, while the U.S. extradites suspects to its ally Uzbekistan to be tortured—a state that massacred hundreds of protesters this spring—it exhorts the people of Uzbekistan to protest peacefully. “The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more democratic government, but that should come through peaceful means, not through violence,”1 White House spokesperson Scott McClellan can say with a straight face.
Arguing for the need to struggle against this deception, Trotsky writes,
It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions patronized by religion, philosophy, or that hybrid which is called “common sense.” The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception. The exposure of this deceit which retains the tradition of thousands of years is the first duty of a proletarian revolutionist. (22)
Leninism v. Stalinism
Given the connection in people’s minds between Russia and revolutionary politics, especially during the 1930s, one of Trotsky’s central tasks is to insert a political wedge between the revolutionary morality of Bolshevism and the reactionary politics of Stalinism.
To begin with, Trotsky lays out the stark differences between the Bolshevik-led revolution and Stalin’s Russia. He writes,
Stalinism in turn is not an abstraction of “dictatorship,” but an immense bureaucratic reaction against the proletarian dictatorship in a backward and isolated country. The October Revolution abolished privileges, waged war against social inequality, replaced the bureaucracy with self-government of the toilers, abolished secret diplomacy, strove to render all social relationship completely transparent. Stalinism reestablished the most offensive forms of privileges, imbued inequality with a provocative character, strangled mass self-activity under police absolutism, transformed administration into a monopoly of the Kremlin oligarchy and regenerated the fetishism of power in forms that absolute monarchy dared not dream of. (32–33)
Trotsky’s argument here is not only that Stalinism and Bolshevism are diametrically opposed—both in theory and in their concrete results—but also that Stalinism itself was rooted in the material conditions of Russia. Those conditions had been created by Russia’s historical economic backwardness and by the strangling of the Soviet Union and the destruction of a huge part of its working class after the revolution as fourteen imperial armies converged on the fledgling workers’ state.
In addition, Trotsky argues that the lies, treachery, and brutality of Stalinism are in proportion to the revolution that came before it. Because of the mass nature of the Russian Revolution, Stalinism must cloak its aims and methods in secrecy in order to deceive what is left of its working-class base of support. Whatever cannot be hidden must be imposed with the utmost brutality and ruthlessness in order to maintain its hold. Stalinism was the imposition of a counter-revolution in the name of the revolution it was destroying. Trotsky writes,
The sharper the transition from revolution to reaction; the more the reaction is dependent upon the traditions of revolution, that is, the greater its fear of the masses—the more is it forced to resort to mendacity and frame-up in the struggle against the representatives of the revolution. Stalinist frame-ups are not a fruit of Bolshevik “amoralism”; no, like all important events in history, they are a product of the concrete social struggle, and the most perfidious and severest of all at that: the struggle of a new aristocracy against the masses that raised it to power. (33)
By contextualizing the terror of Stalinism, Trotsky draws a sharp line between its tactics and aims and those of the Bolsheviks. Attempts to equate the two became one of the most powerful tools of opponents of revolution in their campaign to discredit socialism. Trotsky argues that the method that allows for the connection between Stalinism and Bolshevism, is one that looks only at the surface appearance of things and draws a superficial conclusion. Therefore Trotsky is particularly hard on those who condemn Bolshevism and Stalinism both as equally immoral while at the same time claiming to be Marxists. Trotsky argues that these people “‘recognize’ the proletarian revolution as the Kantians recognized the categorical imperative, that is, as a holy principle but not applicable to daily life. In the sphere of practical politics they unite with the worst enemies of the revolution (reformists and Stalinists) for the struggle against us.” (35)
In order to take apart the attempts to use the “moral gangrene of the Soviet bureaucracy” in the “rehabilitation of liberalism,”(32) Trotsky devotes some space to detailing the acts of individuals who supported Stalin while condemning Trotskyists worldwide, up until the Moscow show trials began to more fully expose the ferocity of Stalin’s murderous counterrevolution. Among this group were international leaders of left-wing movements and parties, as well as mainstream liberals and writers for the Nation and the New York Times. Some of those who had defended Stalin finally began to condemn Soviet practices in the late 1930s, but argued that the problem was rooted in the immoral tactics employed during the 1917 Russian Revolution, at a time when Lenin was one of the central leading figures. In their attempt to distance themselves from the growing authoritarianism of the USSR, they argued that Stalin’s reign of terror was simply an extension of Bolshevism, and therefore they condemned Trotskyism as well. They rejected Stalinism for liberalism, rather than looking to Trotskyism—even though it was the Trotskyists who were fighting Stalin when these former “communists” were still apologizing for him.
In order to ease their slide into liberalism, the former defenders of revolution and Stalinism used “morality” as a central reason for their new found political stance. Trotsky writes that this group of intellectuals “consider themselves called upon to regenerate the workers‚ movement with a new morality.” (35) This call for a “new morality,” however, is not new at all. Its content dovetails with mainstream “common sense” notions of morality: Against revolution and against mass workers’ democracy in favor of parliamentary democracy. As reaction set in, former apologists for Stalinism used its degeneration as an opportunity to find a place back in the bourgeois fold by using it as proof of the moral bankruptcy, and inevitable failure, of revolution.
Ends and means
One of the most frequent points of attack for critics of Marxism is the idea that Marxists believe that the ends justify the means, in other words, the ends can be achieved “by any means necessary,” as Malcolm X put it. Revolutionaries who adhere to this dictum are portrayed as immoral (or amoral), driven solely by the quest for power and willing to perform all manner of atrocities along the way. In fact, it is the ruling classes worldwide that live and die by the notion of the ends justifying the means. They will bomb villages “to save them,” detain thousands of men charged without a crime in the manufactured “hope” of catching one terrorist, and test dangerous drugs on their own unknowing soldiers and citizens to better “understand” and defeat the enemy. When asked whether or not the economic sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s was worth the price of one million dead Iraqi children, the U.S. secretary of state at the time, Madeleine Albright, answered on national television, “The price, I think, was worth it.” To her, the ends justify the means.
But there were those in the movement during Trotsky’s time, like today, who, in an attempt to separate the Left from the Right, claimed that the Left should not use any of the tactics employed by the Right—such as deceit and violence. The argument was that if the same tactics were used to change society, the struggle would end up reproducing the same injustice, inequality, and lack of democracy. But Trotsky argues that even the categories of “truth” and “lies” themselves have a context and a class character. Trotsky writes,
A worker who does not conceal the “truth” about the strikers’ plans from the capitalists is simply a betrayer deserving contempt and boycott. The soldier who discloses the “truth” to the enemy is punished as a spy.… It appears that even the “holy truth” is not an end in itself. More imperious criteria which, as analysis demonstrates, carry a class character, rule over it. The life and death struggle is unthinkable without military craftiness, in other words, without lying and deceit. May the German proletariat then not deceive Hitler’s police? Or perhaps Soviet Bolsheviks have an “immoral” attitude when they deceive the G.P.U. [Stalin’s secret police]? (43–44)
Using the example of the Spanish Civil War, Trotsky argues that engaging in the violence of this war was the only moral thing to do, given that the alternative was fascism. In the course of the Spanish Civil War, the republicans, socialists, and anarchists all used violence, murder, and deceit in the attempt to stop Franco’s fascism. He gives an example:
Without lies war would be as unimaginable as a machine without oil. In order to safeguard even the session of the Cortes (February 1, 1938) from Fascist bombs the Barcelona government several times deliberately deceived journalists and their own population. Could it have acted in any other way? Whoever accepts the end: victory over Franco, must accept the means: civil war with its wake of horrors and crimes. (36)
Part of Trotsky’s argument rests on a broader generalization—that the violence of the oppressed is not the same at the violence of the oppressor. He argues,
The question lies not even in which of the warring camps caused or itself suffered the greatest number of victims. History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality! (38)
Trotsky’s argument is that actions must be judged in the overall concrete, material, and historical context in which they take place. In the case of the Spanish Civil War, he argues that to renounce violent tactics in the name of abstract morality would be immoral itself, because in this case the result would be fascism. But far from celebrating this reality, Trotsky again puts these decisions within their social context. In a powerful passage, he writes,
Nevertheless, do lying and violence “in themselves” warrant condemnation? Of course, even as does the class society which generates them. A society without social contradictions will naturally be a society without lies and violence. However there is no way of building a bridge to that society save by revolutionary, that is, violent means. The revolution itself is a product of class society and of necessity bears its traits. From the point of view of “eternal truths” revolution is of course “anti-moral.” But this merely means that idealist morality is counter-revolutionary, that is, in the service of the exploiters. (36–37)
In this passage Trotsky’s dialectics, and revolutionary honesty, are on full display. There is no attempt to hide or soft-peddle what is necessary to make a revolution, and there is also no attempt to revel in the brutality towards even the ruling class. Instead, Trotsky’s approach is rooted in the necessities of the struggle, understanding that a new world cannot be built completely free of the vestiges of the old. He makes the point that in fact the democracy that so many liberals cling to and hold up as the key aspect of a morally pure and just society “possesses a history in which there is no lack of pollution.” Referring to the great French Revolution, he reminds readers that “democracy came into the world not at all through the democratic road,” but rather through revolutionary violence, and even terror. (32) This statement could of course as easily be applied to the American Revolution.
In an attempt to definitively answer the question, “Do the ends justify the means?” Trotsky argues that the question in and of itself is abstract and also a diversion, since so many people from right to left also, whether in rhetoric or solely in practice, also answer in the affirmative. The more important question is really, “What justifies the ends?” It is not just the means the Bush administration uses to pursue its ends that are reprehensible—indiscriminate bombing, torture, detention without trial—but the ends they serve: conquest, exploitation, and oppression.
On this point Trotsky writes,
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man. (48)
Trotsky reverses the logic of common sense morality and interrupts the linear theorizing of “ends” to “means.” He tries to make clear that “ends” and “means” are not distinct categories that can be separated from their context, in the same way that “morality” cannot be considered as a category that rises above all “political” issues, pure and free from the confines of concrete reality.
However, contrary to popular myth, Trotsky does not then conclude that all means are justified in the pursuit of a particular end or goal.
Revolutionary morality
Because morality is connected to society and the struggle to change it, Trotsky also argues against an “anything goes” conception of ends, means, and morality. He argues for a revolutionary morality:
Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows that not all means are permissible. When we say that the end justifies the means, then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship for the “leaders.”(49)
In this way, it is not simply that the ends justifies the means, but that the two are inextricably linked, especially when judging the morality of a course of action. What makes certain actions impermissible is not so much their perceived moral bankruptcy, but that they do not help to further the goal of human liberation. There are of course contradictions between the means and this transformative end—the use of violence will no doubt be needed to rid the world of violence. Because the fight for human liberation occurs in the wholly degraded social context of a brutal and ruthless capitalist society, the fight for a new society must bear some of the traits of the old—a new world cannot be born wholly formed from some sort of socialist incubator. But for Marxists, there is an unbreakable thread that connects justifiable means and ends. The central core of Marxism is that only through workers’ struggle and mass democracy can true human liberation emerge from a capitalist society. In this way, any means that violates or undermines the unity and equality of workers cannot be justified in the struggle for human liberation. The reliance on the self-emancipation of the working class is the check that holds in place a truly revolutionary morality.
The task for revolutionaries is to figure out the guideposts for making these decisions. Revolutionaries must firmly reject “official morality” and fuse a dynamic understanding of ends and means with the concrete situation they confront. In other words, the central core of Marxism, working-class self-emancipation, is the starting point for Marxist morality. As Trotsky writes,
These criteria do not, of course, give a ready answer to the question as to what is permissible and what is not permissible in each separate case. There can be no such automatic answers. Problems of revolutionary morality are fused with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics. (49)
By way of example, Trotsky takes the most extreme case of individual terrorism. As a generality, Marxists believe that acts of individual terror do not help to bring a struggle forward since they bypass the building of a mass movement. Further, socialists would oppose the targeting of innocent people. But if a small band of guerrillas had assassinated Hitler, is there really anyone on the Left who would have spoken out against this terrorist attack? The point here is that there is no way to judge an act simply by its shell, it must be seen in its proper context. In trying to explain his dialectical approach, Trotsky notes repeatedly that the context of even something like murder is what determines its morality, not simply the act. For example, murdering an individual who is about to kill a roomful of innocent children renders quite a different moral judgment than the attempt by that individual to kill the children. As Trotsky writes, “Thus, even in the sharpest question—murder of man by man—moral absolutes prove futile. Moral evaluations, together with those political, flow from the inner needs of struggle.”(51)
Trotsky is making the case that the rejection of “common sense” morality is in fact a necessity in the pursuit of revolutionary change. The description of Bolshevism as “amoral” by its opponents, in fact, pushes Trotsky to argue that revolutionary morality is in fact a “higher human morality,” (45) since its guiding principle is the emancipation of the working class, the only route toward a society which can free humanity. Demanding abstract norms of morality, rules that cover every circumstance, only mirrors the ruling ideology (although the ruling class rarely follows its own rules) and benefit those in power who seek to preserve the status quo. Seeing actions in their full context and social dynamic is the only method by which a moral judgment can be rendered.
In today’s political context, the battle for who gets to define morality is at full tilt. Do we condemn a poor man for stealing food, or do we judge the society that denies him the opportunity to survive and prosper by other means? Do we condemn a young man in Iraq, living under an occupation that has created poverty, death, and devastation, for picking up a gun to challenge the invaders? If we equally condemn the young Iraqi man for turning to violence and the U.S. government for its violence, we create a falsely level moral playing field, equating self-defense with imperial conquest. And by condemning both, we make it impossible for the Iraqis to defeat their conquerors and instead sentence them to a life of occupation and misery. Who then does our evenhandedness serve?
The question of what ends justify which means is never an easy one. Nor is it something that can be judged by the use of “common sense” notions of morality as the yardstick. Revolutionaries must construct their own definitions of morality, independent of those of the ruling class.
Trotsky ends his pamphlet with a tribute to socialists who navigated these complicated waters and maintained a revolutionary course. He writes
They learned not to fall into despair over the fact that the laws of history do not depend upon their individual tastes and are not subordinated to their own moral criteria. They learned to subordinate their individual desires to the laws of history. They learned not to become frightened by the most powerful enemies if their power is in contradiction to the needs of historical development. They know how to swim against the stream in the deep conviction that the new historic flood will carry them to the other shore. Not all will reach that shore, many will drown. But to participate in this movement with open eyes and with an intense will—only this can give the highest moral satisfaction to a thinking being! (52)
Meredith Kolodner is a member of the International Socialist Organization in New York City.>
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