'There is an irony deep laid in the very relations of life. It is the duty of the historian as of the artist to bring it to the surface.' (Trotsky, in Nicholas Mosley (1972), The Assassination of Trotsky, London: Abacus, p.11)

In 1938, Trotsky wrote of the inherent protest embedded in art, and of the necessity of art 'to remain true to itself'. He continued:
'Not a single progressive idea has begun with a "mass base". Otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in the last stage that the idea finds its "masses" - it, of course, it answers the needs of progress. The more daring the pioneers show in their ideas and actions - the more bitterly they oppose themselves to established authority which rests on a conservative "mass base" - the more conventional souls, sceptics and snobs are inclined to see in the pioneers impotent eccentrics of "anemic splinters". But in the last analysis it is the conventional souls, sceptics and snobs who are wrong - and life passes them by.' (Trotsky, in Mosley, 1972: 180)
The implication here is that an effective politician needed something of the commitment of the artist - and vice-versa. 

To Trotsky, dialectical materialism was scientific referring to the processes of change and of growth - of things seen in their context, not in absolute terms but in relative ones, in the play of opposites and contradictions of which an understanding is imperative to gain an insight into nature. Contradiction in this way is not cynical but paradoxical and perhaps ironic.

'Revolution is the inspired frenzy of history' (Trotsky, in Mosley, 1972: 64). 

The idea of permanent revolution - each revolution part of a larger and continuing series of revolutions... This also needs to work on an international stage (hence the Fourth International). 

The idea of permanent revolution relies on the impossibility of the perfect status quo, but a revolution of the mind - dialectics (Mosley, 1972: 106). The system becomes stale unless it is continuously challenged. In other words, this is the necessity of paradox, with the possibility of achieving synthesis (this is the split between Stalin and Trotsky even if both claimed to be working through a dialectical method). For Trotsky, effervescence would stop crystallisation from taking place - it is through recurring or permanent revolution that the burgeoning bureaucracy could be held in check - for otherwise, even in a socialist state, there would be ever widening differentiation in privileges (Mosley, 1972: 121).