Why Christopher Hitchens Called Himself a Trotskyist

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/07/28/Uncommon_Knowledge_Christopher_Hitchens__Robert_Ser...

Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens defends calling himself a Trotskyist. Hitchens says Trotsky "combined in himself the role of man of action and man of ideas," and admires his opposition to Stalin and Hitler as "a person of immense emotional and physical courage."

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Leon Trotsky, one of the leading figures of the Russian October Revolution, remains a controversial figure. For many, Trotsky's assassination in Mexico marked a tragedy in Soviet history, cutting off the possibility of a humane version of communism taking hold in Russia, with Trotsky himself arguing that he would have held back the tides of arbitrary rule and terror. But is that so? In answering this question and others about Trotsky's ideas, political defeat, and exile, Hitchens and Service speak to the very nature of communist ideology. - Hoover Institution

Christopher Hitchens is an author, journalist and literary critic. Now living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Nation and Slate; additionally, he is an occasional contributor to many other publications.

Peter M. Robinson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics, edits Hoover's quarterly journal, the Hoover Digest, and hosts Hoover's television program, Uncommon Knowledge.

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• socialists
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• marxism
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• george
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[freddiemercerful]

@JayGatsbyOdysseus I couldn't agree with you more, we've seen the wages system from its most savage free market form to its most brutal totalitarian form - a dog is a dog and the dog does not work, its time to get rid of capitalism, and put in its place a moneyless stateless classless world based around common ownership and democratic control of the means of production!

[Antipopularization]

@UnOxonien Neologisms are pretty common when trying to make a point.

Although, one must point out, criticizing someone's grammar is a cowardly way of sidestepping the issue at hand.

[Riiye]

@freddiemercerful Ah yes, Hitch would have slotted perfectly into this stateless, classless society. It's not like a little englander who got big from the free market, who got the right accent by being born into a family that could afford to send him to the right school, would at all find himself in contrast with such a society.

[highlyselassie1]

Freddiemercerful

[UnOxonien]

@RamrockMansJukebox Yes: why, don't you?

[RamrockMansJukebox]

@UnOxonien Do you?

[KrugmanTheKing]

@freddiemercerful

The only thing that changed in all the revolutions of history are the methods in which the masses are controlled and the category of people who hold power over them.

The problem is simple and was very well expressed by many classical liberal thinkers: too much power shall never be laid within the hands of too few people.

[KrugmanTheKing]

@freddiemercerful

As if a structure relying on the subordination of interests and the inequality of influences over a centralized power would be effective in bringing down an other centralized system of power which was precisely criticized for that reason... it obviously wasn't going to happen and apparently it unsurprisingly failed to happen, but successfully managed to keep power in the hands of a few "more rational individuals" and that in the "best interest of the majority."

[UnOxonien]

@freddiemercerful "Orthodoxly"? Really? Do you speak English?

[freddiemercerful]

@Freethinker12341 Whats orthodoxly marxist about believing (as Trotsky and Lenin did) that workers could only achieve what they disparagingly called "trade union consciousness" and therefore needed a centralised party of professional revolutionaries to lead them into socialism, rather than believing as Marx and Engels did that: "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class themselves"? I eat pork am I an orthodox jew?

[freddiemercerful]

@freddiemercerful Sorry its called 'The Seeds of Evil' my mistake, its actually based on something Orwell once said if thats of any interest. And yes your quite right Trotkyists did stand against Stalinist's, in this sense they were merely defending themselves against their own stick, a stick (or ice pick) that Trotsky was eventually beaten to death with, the icepick of totalitarian, one party centralism, the stick of undemocratic vanguardism in other words the stick of Lenninism.