Lev Bronstein: A Revolutionary Life

**Lev Bronstein: A Revolutionary Life** is an autobiographical novel published by Russian expat and ex-Bolshevik Party member Leon Trotsky. Written in the spring of 1936, the book serves as a memoir for Bronstein's life, detailing his childhood, exile, and career as a revolutionary alongside Vladimir Illyich and Ioseb Jughashvili. He also laments in detail about contemporary post-Weltkrieg politics and offers both praise and criticism for revolutionary America. William Z. Foster, chairman of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, initially wanted to have the book censored for its critical view of the Commonwealth, but President Reed intervened on Bronstein's behalf due to the friendship the two shared as a result of Reed's time in Russia documenting the failed revolution.

The book was well-received in the USSA, where Bolshevik rebels came to be viewed as heroic martyrs. Syndicalist leadership, particularly under Secretary Reed, tried to cultivate an image of themselves as the successors of the "Great Russian Tragedy," continuing to carry the torch of the permanent revolution across the sea. Bronstein stated in a 1935 interview with the Daily Haymarket that he was "appalled" when statues of Illyich and Jughashvili were erected in San Francisco that year, stating that "if the Weltkrieg has repudiated anything, it is the Great Man theory of history. He stated that he would be open to memorials to heroes of the abolition movement such as Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, but that similar memorials to Debs and Reed would be "indulgent."

## Excerpts

### On the Historiography of the Syndicalist Revolutions

As much as crass old philosophers like myself tend to argue otherwise, history is defined by its accidents. Had humanity been perfectly logical from the start, the nations of the world would have been united under the red banner by 1491. The first volatile spark lit by good Prometheus was the equivalent of two particles colliding out of thin air, a polemic of sound and fury wherein the chapters are blurred and in such presumptuous handwriting or dialect to inspire fierce scholarly debate on how best to translate it. This realization is vital to any who calls himself "revolutionary." Spontaneity has always been our greatest weapon. As we wait through decades of what seems like nothing happening, suddenly the day comes when decades happen. Mind you, the chaotic nature of the world need not be reason to be chaotic in our attempts to make sense of it. Foucault did more harm than good to the academics when he made the preposterous claim that there were no grand narratives in history. He failed to realize that nothing is truly random, and on a long enough time scale patterns will begin to emerge in even the most chaotic datasets. That is humanity in a nutshell.

And so when Marx observed that class - class in the sense of real, empirical, materially defined conditions rather than Berkeleyan metaphysics - he was not simply glancing through the pages of history trying to observe patterns bourne of the randomness. As a man of science, he began with the observation all of our kind invariably make at some point in their lives that the society in which we lived did not spring out of the void without warning. Every brick lain, every log cut, every bonnet knit, every mosaic quill telling a story infinitely more interesting than *Hamlet* or *Robinson Crusoe* could ever hope to match. It is a tale of epic proportions, weaving into time's multicolored cloak depicting in the most vivid hues and most delicate strokes the story of the gentle laborer, who breaks his back and strains his neck believing that his life is the natural way of things when, like a half-finished chess board, one can observe with the most cursory glance that there is more at work here than the crude yelps of the nuclear chaos. Something much more sinister has injected itself into the fickle minds of men to change the very way in which their eyes and ears perceive the world. Their eyes have seen sheep where lions have stood and tasted honey when they were served a steaming course of cyanide. I speak, of course, of the international bourgeois element - or for our purposes, our queen in white who has been forced to look on in horror as she loses three knights in the most improbably rapid succession; so improbable, indeed, that one may even trick themselves into believing it happened out of sheer chance rather than a strategic error of historical proportions...