From Edmund Wilson (1940), To the Finland Station (New York: New York Review of Books: ). Wilson writes about the:
Posted by DeLong at July 24, 2003 01:23 PM | TrackBack...remarkable scene at the first congress of the Soviet dictatorship after the success of the October insurrection of 1917, when [Leon] Trotsky, with the contempt and indignation of a prophet, read [the socialist] Martov and his followers out of the meeting. "You are pitiful isolated individuals," he cried at this height of the Bolshevik triumph. "You are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on--in the garbage-pile of history!"
These words are worth pondering for the light they throw on the course of Marxist policy and thought. Observe that the merging of yourself with the onrush of the current of history is to save you from the ignoble fate of being a "pitiful isolated individual"; and that the failure to so merge yourself will relegate you to the garbage-pile of history, where you can presumably be of no more use.
Today [in the late 1930s], though we may agree with the Bolsheviks that Martov was no man of action, his croakings over the course that they had adopted seem to us full of far-sighted intelligence. He pointed out that proclaiming a socialist regime in conditions different from those [of advanced industrialization, high technology, and material abundance] contemplated by Marx would not realize the results that Marx expected; that Marx and Engels had usually described the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as having the form, for the new dominant class, of a democratic republic, with universal suffrage [for the working class] and the popular recall of officials; that the [Bolshevik] slogan "All power to the Soviets [workers' councils]" had never really meant what it said and that it had soon been exchanged by Lenin for "All power to the Bolshevik Party." There sometimes turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the garbagepile of history--things that have to be retrieved later on. From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where [Leon] Trotsky himself is today [in the late 1930s]. He might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual must needs be "pitiful" for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen's [play] An Enemy of the People that “the strongest man is he who stands most alone."
Agree with you on Martov. In an Irving Howe book, I read an essay he wrote in 1918 predicting the course that Lenin would follow. I remember how chillingly accurate he was.
Just clicked through to the Amazon reviews of the Wilson book, and am going to have to read this one. Was about to start writing a comment about how this post and the one above hint at how much damage the Bolsheviks did to the development of both Marxism and the left generally (thinking of the Spanish civil war here as well), but it looks like I should just read the book!