Trotsky's Problems of Everyday Life

[citizen of industry]

Has anyone read this book and did you take anything out of it? I like most of Trotsky's works, but I just started this one and it seems like a bunch of weird crap about the "New Soviet Man" and how to alter media to change people's psychology. It doesn't seem particularly "Marxist" to me in that a change to a socialist mode of production will change people's consciousness, i.e; society determines consciousness, hence no need for huge amounts of propaganda in every aspect of personal life.

I know the Soviet Union was under tremendous economic difficulties during this period and so a classless society was probably impossible, but I still don't see why this work was even published or how it is useful.

[Prometeo liberado]

Has anyone read this book and did you take anything out of it? I like most of Trotsky's works, but I just started this one and it seems like a bunch of weird crap about the "New Soviet Man" and how to alter media to change people's psychology. It doesn't seem particularly "Marxist" to me in that a change to a socialist mode of production will change people's consciousness, i.e; society determines consciousness, hence no need for huge amounts of propaganda in every aspect of personal life.

I know the Soviet Union was under tremendous economic difficulties during this period and so a classless society was probably impossible, but I still don't see why this work was even published or how it is useful.

I know that he wrote and read voraciously so that leads me to believe that he may not have been able to give some of his works enough attention. Case in point here. Problems of everyday Life is not a bad book. Many issues in it are imperative and had not Trotsky brought them to light I doubt that anyone else would have. Having said that there are passages where he refers to a "few words on how to raise a human being" and also this passage, "We take people as they have been made by nature,” he writes in a typical passage, concerned with cultural development and the cinema in particular, “and as they have been in part educated and in part distorted by the old order. We seek a point of support in this vital human material.... The longing for amusement, distraction, sight-seeing, and laughter is the most legitimate desire of human nature.”The Trotsky way to raise humans? Amusement and distraction the legitimate desire of human nature? Expand please!

No Marx didn't write much about this stuff but you can find others such as Gramsci who did and made sense of it.

Overall the book lacks Trotskys usual depth but what I feel that it does posses much of is his lover for humanity the way he sees it.

I don't know why it would be published any way myself.

[A Marxist Historian]

Has anyone read this book and did you take anything out of it? I like most of Trotsky's works, but I just started this one and it seems like a bunch of weird crap about the "New Soviet Man" and how to alter media to change people's psychology. It doesn't seem particularly "Marxist" to me in that a change to a socialist mode of production will change people's consciousness, i.e; society determines consciousness, hence no need for huge amounts of propaganda in every aspect of personal life.

I know the Soviet Union was under tremendous economic difficulties during this period and so a classless society was probably impossible, but I still don't see why this work was even published or how it is useful.

Why he wrote it was as a sort of disguised polemic vs. the Stalinization and bureaucratization of Soviet society going on in the early 1920s.

He was trying to put forward a revolutionary perspective on the everyday life-problems that were occupying the mind of the average Soviet citizen given that the revolutionary mood of 1917 was withering away.

Soviet society was *not* being transformed into a socialist society in the early '20s, the USSR was much too isolated and backward for that. Instead, the great NEP retreat, with a partial restoration of capitalism, was what was going on.

In this context, Trotsky was trying to fight against all the bad features of Soviet society arising as a result of the inevitable retreat, on the basis of which the Soviet bureaucracy was starting to consolidate its power and take it away from the most revolutionary workers.

-M.H.-

[blake 3:17]

It's a very interesting book. Most the pieces in were written as occasional articles, declarations, and suggestions weren't they? Who actually put it together as a book?

If you're interested in these issues, I'd suggest Louise Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia. There's a bunch of really interesting stuff about day to day issues in the early revolutionary Russia. A part stands out memory wise is the description of the revolutionary process in the schools. The teachers stood up to whoever was over them, older students stood up to the teachers, and younger students stood up to them all.

This was happening all over the place and in many different settings.

I've heard a few people abuse portions of the book -- there was a stupid fight in a movement organization over the word "fuck" and the person objecting to it and other cuss words was using Trotsky's article on correct speech (? I may have the term wrong) as a weird vendetta device in a factional dispute. I was challenged in the middle of a demo about that very issue, and the person challenging me was right. It was needlessly upsetting and made some people with children uncomfortable for no good reason.

It's worth noting that Trotsky himself was quite conservative on a personal level and in private life. Nothing wrong with that, it was his life,and he got a lot more done than others who got busy partying. I'm not sure where he relates it, probably in History of the Russian Revolution where he describes a bunch of insurgents taking over a distillery and immediately helping themselves to the vodka. His advice was to wait until they'd secured the seizure of property and state power before having a drink or twelve.

The book of his which is most often related to the Problems is Literature and Revolution which I've never been able to make much sense of. That's mostly due to not knowing the majority of the literature he is referring to. I've heard a few comrades praise it, but I don't think they knew any of the literature either, but were happy to agree with him.

A related text is Fanon's Wretched of the Earth which deals with problems of culture and consciousness AFTER the revolution.

I'm not sure that either Trotsky or Fanon have that many applicable answers to post-revolutionary societies in the 21st century, bu they do ask many very necessary questions.

[citizen of industry]

It's a very interesting book. Most the pieces in were written as occasional articles, declarations, and suggestions weren't they? Who actually put it together as a book?

If you're interested in these issues, I'd suggest Louise Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia. There's a bunch of really interesting stuff about day to day issues in the early revolutionary Russia. A part stands out memory wise is the description of the revolutionary process in the schools. The teachers stood up to whoever was over them, older students stood up to the teachers, and younger students stood up to them all.

This was happening all over the place and in many different settings.

I've heard a few people abuse portions of the book -- there was a stupid fight in a movement organization over the word "fuck" and the person objecting to it and other cuss words was using Trotsky's article on correct speech (? I may have the term wrong) as a weird vendetta device in a factional dispute. I was challenged in the middle of a demo about that very issue, and the person challenging me was right. It was needlessly upsetting and made some people with children uncomfortable for no good reason.

It's worth noting that Trotsky himself was quite conservative on a personal level and in private life. Nothing wrong with that, it was his life,and he got a lot more done than others who got busy partying. I'm not sure where he relates it, probably in History of the Russian Revolution where he describes a bunch of insurgents taking over a distillery and immediately helping themselves to the vodka. His advice was to wait until they'd secured the seizure of property and state power before having a drink or twelve.

The book of his which is most often related to the Problems is Literature and Revolution which I've never been able to make much sense of. That's mostly due to not knowing the majority of the literature he is referring to. I've heard a few comrades praise it, but I don't think they knew any of the literature either, but were happy to agree with him.

A related text is Fanon's Wretched of the Earth which deals with problems of culture and consciousness AFTER the revolution.

I'm not sure that either Trotsky or Fanon have that many applicable answers to post-revolutionary societies in the 21st century, bu they do ask many very necessary questions.

It was an old book (70's?), put together by pathfinder press, which I believe was the publishing organ of the American SWP. It was a compilation of speeches, articles, statements, suggestions ,criticisms, etc, as you say.

There were some interesting articles and observations in it after all, but it's not a theoretical work, so I don't see it as particularly valuable unless someone is really interested in the pre-Stalin soviet-era or is really into Trotsky as a man.

Trotsky is highly critical of swearing and drinking in the book. I was amused when reading Grundrisse though to see Marx using "shit" and other expletives.

I think it has to be read critically, if at all. It was a different era, we have the benefit of retrospect, so some of it is wrong or over-the-top.

[A Marxist Historian]

It's a very interesting book. Most the pieces in were written as occasional articles, declarations, and suggestions weren't they? Who actually put it together as a book?

If you're interested in these issues, I'd suggest Louise Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia. There's a bunch of really interesting stuff about day to day issues in the early revolutionary Russia. A part stands out memory wise is the description of the revolutionary process in the schools. The teachers stood up to whoever was over them, older students stood up to the teachers, and younger students stood up to them all.

This was happening all over the place and in many different settings.

I've heard a few people abuse portions of the book -- there was a stupid fight in a movement organization over the word "fuck" and the person objecting to it and other cuss words was using Trotsky's article on correct speech (? I may have the term wrong) as a weird vendetta device in a factional dispute. I was challenged in the middle of a demo about that very issue, and the person challenging me was right. It was needlessly upsetting and made some people with children uncomfortable for no good reason.

It's worth noting that Trotsky himself was quite conservative on a personal level and in private life. Nothing wrong with that, it was his life,and he got a lot more done than others who got busy partying. I'm not sure where he relates it, probably in History of the Russian Revolution where he describes a bunch of insurgents taking over a distillery and immediately helping themselves to the vodka. His advice was to wait until they'd secured the seizure of property and state power before having a drink or twelve.

The book of his which is most often related to the Problems is Literature and Revolution which I've never been able to make much sense of. That's mostly due to not knowing the majority of the literature he is referring to. I've heard a few comrades praise it, but I don't think they knew any of the literature either, but were happy to agree with him.

A related text is Fanon's Wretched of the Earth which deals with problems of culture and consciousness AFTER the revolution.

I'm not sure that either Trotsky or Fanon have that many applicable answers to post-revolutionary societies in the 21st century, bu they do ask many very necessary questions.

Pathfinder Press translated both "Problems" and "Literature and Revolution" out of two volumes of Trotsky's Collected Works in Russian, published in the middle '20s before he was expelled from the party.

Put together by the same people who were doing the first edition of Lenin's Collected Works.

As for Trotsky's opposition to "four letter words," that has to do with Russian traditions of use of that kind of language by Tsarist officials on the peasants. A little different from other countries, where the upper classes usually pretend to be too "elevated" for that sort of thing, and use of obscene language is identified with the lower classes. Not in Russia!

-M.H.-