Requiescat, dialectically: An Ironic Elegy on the Anniversary of a Death by Ice Axe: A Small Elegy for Lev Davidovich

 

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21 August

There is something almost too fitting in the instrument. Not a bullet, not a tribunal, not even the bureaucratic apparatus he himself had once helped assemble and then spent the remainder of his life theorizing against — but an ice axe, a mountaineer's tool, wielded in a study in Coyoacán by a man carrying an alias, an overcoat in August, and a magazine article he pretended to want edited. One does not require Freud to notice the allegory sitting patiently in the historical record: the revolution that could not climb down from the heights it had claimed to be scaling was, in the end, undone by a piece of equipment meant for the descent — a small, almost embarrassingly literal instance of the recursivity that structured the man's entire intellectual life, in which every attempt to ascend past a limit produced, sooner or later, the tool of one's own return to earth.

I write of this not as hagiography — Trotsky requires no more of that than he has already received from partisans on every continent who found in him a convenient vessel for their own unrealized purities — but as a case study, the kind that those of us who spend our careers cataloguing the migration of doctrine across legal and political systems learn to treasure. Trotsky is instructive precisely because he lost, and because the manner of his losing tells us more about the structure of Marxist-Leninist legality than his winning ever could have.

Consider: here was a man who helped construct the theoretical scaffolding of a state built on the proposition that law is superstructure, that legality is merely the codified interest of a ruling class, that the dictatorship of the proletariat need answer to no court but History itself. He built this scaffolding with evident sincerity and no small brilliance. And then he spent his exile — Alma-Ata, Prinkipo, Norway, Coyoacán — insisting, with equal sincerity, that the very apparatus he had helped theorize had betrayed its own logic, had ossified into a bureaucratic caste, had substituted the permanent revolution for the permanent committee — had, that is, arrested the recursive motion he believed was the very engine of history, freezing it into a single administrative present tense. It is one of the great ironies of twentieth-century political thought that the man most committed to keeping the revolution unfinished was murdered by the man most committed to declaring it, officially and eternally, complete. Stalinism did not merely defeat Trotskyism; it closed the file. That is what state legality does, in every system, communist or otherwise — it converts contested political claims into settled administrative fact, and it treats the losing claimant not as a rival but as a clerical error to be corrected.

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There is a lesson here that travels well beyond the Fourth International, and I confess it is the lesson that interests me more than the man. Every ideological state — whether organized around Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, corporate social responsibility, or the sovereigntist nationalisms now again fashionable — eventually produces its own heretics from within its own premises, and eventually must decide what to do with them. Some are permitted to become institutions (chairs, journals, minor cults of personality, footnotes). Others are exiled. A very few are handed an ice axe across a desk. The variable is not the correctness of the heresy but its proximity to power at the moment the orthodoxy consolidates. Trotsky was not wrong about bureaucratic degeneration; he was merely early, and unarmed, and geographically reachable.

To return to that recursivity, then, and press it further: Trotsky was, in his own way, the phenomenological expression of the very motion he sought to overcome — trapped within another cognitive cage, one built from the strategic exploitation of outside irritants, pushing recursively forward toward a promised land whose essence eluded him as thoroughly as it eluded the almost accidentally successful vanguard that had simply found itself, for a moment, at the right place in Russia. And Stalin, in the end, saw to it that Trotsky became precisely that: the irritant. The very instrument he himself had once found so infinitely useful in the bodies of others, now turned on him — alive to death.

So: an elegy, ironic because the man believed in nothing so bourgeois as elegies, and because the tragedy is not that he died for his convictions but that his convictions and his killer's convictions shared a grandmother; scholarly, because the case remains one of the cleanest illustrations we have of how revolutionary legality disposes of its own dissidents once the revolution has a state to protect; and neutral, insofar as neutrality is possible when writing about a man who would have found neutrality itself an ideological position requiring unmasking — which, of course, it is.

Eighty-six years on, the ice axe is in a vault in Mexico City. The apparatus he criticized outlived him by half a century and collapsed anyway, for reasons that had rather little to do with him. The permanent revolution did not arrive. The bureaucracy, in one form or another, generally does.

Requiescat, dialectically.

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