REVISIONISM AND THE 'ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY'

Joseph Losey's film The Assassination of Trotsky' is a distortion of the life and work of Leon Trotsky. The distortion arises because Losey himsell, like so many artists and intellectuals a supporter of Stalinism in the 1930s and long after, refused and still refuses to make any real evaluation of the political meaning of Stalinism and Trotsky's struggle against it. Whether Losey likes it or not, the product is politically a film which directly assists Stalinism, by obscuring its real role and by reducing. Trotsky to the level of a played-out eccentric who met his death through a chance crossing of the ways with an assassin.

A film which so thoroughly distorts the historical reality, which ignores the real forces driving the characters, cannot but be a failure, even as 'entertainment'. It has no chance of qualifying as art, the first criterion of which is truth.

However Losey's work has produced a reaction among certain revisionists which is Leading mem in Paris, which sets itself up as an alternative Trotskyist movement to the International Committee of the Fourth International, have leapt to Losey's defence . . . in the name of the freedom of the artist! Pierre Frank, for many years the leading spokesman of the Pabloite revisionists in France, writes (in the Ligue Communiste's weekly 'Rouge'): 'Losey did not intend to make made an anti-Trotsky flm. Pot This apparently excuses everything, and indeed Frank ends by insisting that filmmakers like ourselves have every right to make mistakes! Frank's collaborator, Michel Lequenne, 'Rouge's' 'expert' on questions art and culture, explains their position even more openly. (He is replying to a correspondent of Rouge' who attacked the film.)

Lequenne's piece is entitled, The work of a great filmmaker' and runs:

'The criticism Sabathe and Nicello is terrorist. It is a criticism made by disillusioned militants. But an explanation is not enough. The Marxist criticism of this film which honours Losey remains to be done at every • level in the work of this great filmmaker, in the epoch of the renaissance Trotskyism which we are experiencing, in its relation to a general public which, in its vast majority, ignores the historical facts in question.

'Neither Marx nor Lenin has until now met a poet of their stature. That is not just mere chance, but the result ot the historic relation of the proletariat culture. The Losey film, like the recent work by Peter Weiss, is an event which shows that the basis of the world is changing. Such works have a place in the problematic of uniting the revolutionary proletariat with the intellegentsia. It is useless to point out that a criticism like that of our comrades is no contribution to this.' ('Rouge' 156.)

First of all, why the epithet "terrorist'? It, is fashionable among certain middle-class intellectuals in France to brand as 'terrorist' anyone who demands that their opinions and work are criticized from the standpoint of principle and particularly the standpoint of insisted that his work be judged by literary or artistic standards.

But what are these standards? A. creative work must illuminate the truth about the objective world. The writer or film-maker may select and work on only one 'aspect' of this world, but his greatness consists of the way in which he creates compelling images of its relation to the whole historical movement of which it is part.

What Losey does in this film is the opposite. He presumably claims to be portraying the meaning of death, of the tension involved in final decisions, nature of personal violence. But he abstracts these things from the real historical forces which produce them, shape them and determine their results.

He therefore cannot see individuals as representative of historic forces, internally torn in some cases by the conflict of these forces. On the contrary, his "psychological' presentation obscures the specific historic forces which form the real drive and tension to the events he portrays.

If this needs saying in reply to those who celebrate supposed artistic or dramatic merit of Losey's film, it needs a million times more emphasis because Losey did after all choose definite historical subject, the Stalinist bureaucracy's murder of Trotsky! ideology.

Film is a medium which can reach many millions of people all over the world. It does not bear the same relationship to the masses as the traditional art forms (poetry, drama, music, the novel). Even withex-Stalinist petty-bourgeois to really overcome their past and subordinate themselves to the proletarian revolution results in frustration and speculation, and among these results is Losey's film. he was 'surprised' to find Trotsky was for defence of the Soviet Union, and that the theory of permanent revolution consisted only of 'a few lines'!), and he rightly says that Losey's version of the assassination corresponded to the 1930s The OCI leaders, in their haste to ingratiate themselves with the politics of Mr Hansen, conveniently leave out the most Philistine section of Hansen's far from 'systematic' criticism: 'The producers, naturally [sic] were not interested in image projected by the Stalinist-turned-Liberal Losey and the criteria of those who finance the film. The violence and sense of menace only subserve the real purpose of the film which is to discredit Trotsky's politics and distort If the OCI today find themselves lavishing praise on Hansen and the SWP, it is precisely because they share the same political scepticism towards the working class which is expressed in Hansen's review. In practice this means could only result in later splits and differences, as we have seen, particularly in Sri Lanka.

Instead of prosecuting the struggle to deepen Marxist theory by taking all these developments to their roots,