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Trotskyism (, ) is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg. His relations with Lenin have been a source of intense historical debate. However, on balance, scholarly opinion among a range of prominent historians and political scientists such as E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Moshe Lewin, Ronald Suny, Richard B. Day and W. Bruce Lincoln was that Lenin’s desired “heir” would have been a collective responsibility in which Trotsky was placed in "an important role and within which Joseph Stalin would be dramatically demoted (if not removed)".
Trotsky advocated for a decentralization form of economic planning, worker's control of production, elected representation of Soviet socialist parties, mass soviet democratization, the tactic of a united front against far-right parties, cultural autonomy for artistic movements, voluntary collectivisation, a transitional program and socialist internationalism. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, and a dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", which Marxists argue is a major component of capitalism) based on working-class self-emancipation and council democracy. Trotsky also adhered to scientific socialism and viewed this as a conscious expression of historical processes. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favour of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists criticize the bureaucracy and anti-democratic current developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Despite their ideological disputes, Trotsky and Lenin were close personally prior to the London Congress of Social Democrats in 1903 and during the First World War. Lenin and Trotsky were close ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Trotskyists and some others call Trotsky its "co-leader".Lenin and Trotsky were "co-leaders" of the 1917 Russian Revolution. This was also alluded to by Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin himself never mentioned the concept of "Trotskyism" after Trotsky became a member of the Bolshevik party. Trotsky was the Red Army's paramount leader in the Revolutionary period's direct aftermath. Trotsky initially opposed some aspects of Leninism but eventually concluded that unity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was impossible and joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky played a leading role with Lenin in the October Revolution. Lenin and Trotsky were also both honorary presidents of the Third International. Trotskyists have traditionally drawn upon Lenin's testament and his alliance with Trotsky in 1922–23 against the Soviet bureaucracy as primary evidence that Lenin sought to remove Stalin from the position of General Secretary. Various historians have also cited Lenin's proposal to appoint Trotsky Vice- of the Soviet Union as further evidence that he intended Trotsky to be his successor as head of government.
In October 1927, by order of Stalin, Trotsky was removed from power. In November of the same year, he was expelled from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (VKP(b)). He was exiled to Almaty (now Almaty) in January 1928 and then expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose what he termed the degenerated workers' state in the USSR. On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent, and died the next day in a hospital. His murder is considered a political assassination. Almost all Trotskyists within the VKP(b) were executed in the of 1937–1938, effectively removing all of Trotsky's internal influence in the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev had come to power as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine, signing lists of other Trotskyists to be executed. Trotsky and the party of Trotskyists were still recognized as enemies of the USSR during Khrushchev's rule of the USSR after 1956. Trotsky's Fourth International was established in the French Third Republic in 1938 when Trotskyists argued that the Comintern or Third International had become irretrievably "lost to Stalinism" and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power.
On the political spectrum of Marxism, Trotskyists are usually considered to be on the left. In the 1920s, they called themselves the Left Opposition, although today's left communism is distinct and usually non-Bolshevik. The terminological disagreement can be confusing because different versions of a left-right political spectrum are used. Anti-Revisionism consider themselves the ultimate leftists on a spectrum from communism on the left to imperialist capitalism on the right. However, given that Stalinism is often labelled rightist within the communist spectrum and left communism leftist, anti-revisionists' idea of the left is very different from that of left communism. Despite being Bolshevik-Leninist comrades during the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War, Trotsky and Stalin became enemies in the 1920s and, after that, opposed the legitimacy of each other's forms of Leninism. Trotsky was highly Anti-Stalinism for suppressing democracy and the lack of adequate economic planning.
Overall, Trotsky and the Left-United Opposition factions advocated for rapid industrialization, voluntary collectivisation of agriculture, and the expansion of a soviet democracy.
The theory of permanent revolution addressed how such feudal regimes were to be overthrown and how socialism could establish itself, given the lack of economic prerequisites. Trotsky argued that only the working class could overthrow feudalism and win the 's support in Russia. Furthermore, he argued that the Russian working class would not stop there. They would win their revolution against the weak capitalist class, establish a workers' state in Russia and appeal to the working class in the advanced capitalist countries worldwide. As a result, the global working class would come to Russia's aid, and socialism could develop worldwide.
According to political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz, Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” was grossly misrepresented by Joseph Stalin as defeatism and adventurist during the succession struggle when in fact Trotsky encouraged revolutions in Europe but was not at any time proposing “reckless confrontations” with the capitalist world.
In Results and Prospects, written in 1906, Trotsky outlines his theory in detail, arguing: "History does not repeat itself. However much one may compare the Russian Revolution with the Great French Revolution, the former can never be transformed into a repetition of the latter." In the French Revolution of 1789, France experienced what Marxists called a "bourgeois-democratic revolution"—a regime was established wherein the bourgeoisie overthrew the existing French feudalistic system. The bourgeoisie then moved towards establishing a regime of democratic parliamentary institutions. However, while democratic rights were extended to the bourgeoisie, they were not generally extended to a universal franchise. The freedom for workers to organize unions or to strike was not achieved without considerable struggle.
The theory of permanent revolution considers that in many countries that are thought under Trotskyism to have not yet completed a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the capitalist class opposes the creation of any revolutionary situation. They fear stirring the working class into fighting for its revolutionary aspirations against their exploitation by capitalism. In Russia, the working class, although a small minority in a predominantly peasant-based society, was organised in vast factories owned by the capitalist class and into large working-class districts. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, the capitalist class found it necessary to ally with reactionary elements such as the essentially feudal landlords and, ultimately, the existing Czarist Russian state forces. This was to protect their ownership of their property—factories, banks, etc.—from expropriation by the revolutionary working class.
Therefore, according to the theory of permanent revolution, the capitalist classes of economically backward countries are weak and incapable of carrying through revolutionary change. As a result, they are linked to and rely on the feudal landowners in many ways. Thus, Trotsky argues that because a majority of the branches of industry in Russia originated under the direct influence of government measures—sometimes with the help of government subsidies—the capitalist class was again tied to the ruling elite. The capitalist class was subservient to European capital.
Trotsky himself argued that only the proletariat or working class were capable of achieving the tasks of that bourgeois revolution. In 1905, the working class in Russia, a generation brought together in vast factories from the relative isolation of peasant life, saw the result of its labour as a vast collective effort, also seeing the only means of struggling against its oppression in terms of a collective effort, forming workers councils (soviets) in the course of the revolution of that year. In 1906, Trotsky argued:
For instance, the Kirov Plant numbered 12,000 workers in 1900 and, according to Trotsky, 36,000 in July 1917.
Although only a tiny minority in Russian society, the proletariat would lead a revolution to emancipate the peasantry and thus "secure the support of the peasantry" as part of that revolution, on whose support it will rely.Trotsky adds that the revolution must raise the cultural and political consciousness of the peasantry. However, to improve their conditions, the working class must create a revolution of their own, which would accomplish the bourgeois revolution and establish a workers' state.
Trotsky agreed that a new socialist state and economy in a country like Russia would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world and the internal pressures of its backward economy. Trotsky argued that the revolution must quickly spread to capitalist countries, bringing about a socialist revolution that must spread worldwide. In this way, the revolution is "permanent", moving out of necessity first, from the bourgeois revolution to the workers' revolution and from there uninterruptedly to European and worldwide revolutions.
An internationalist outlook of permanent revolution is found in the works of Karl Marx. The term "permanent revolution" is taken from a remark of Marx in his March 1850 Address: "it is our task", Marx said:
His biographer, Isaac Deutscher, has explicitly contrasted his support for proletarian internationalism against his opposition to revolution by military conquest as seen with his documented opposition to the war with Poland in 1920, proposed armistice with the Entente and temperance with staging anti-British revolts in the Middle East. Historian Robert Vincent Daniels believed that the practical differences, in the domain of foreign policy, between the Left Opposition and other factions had been exaggerated and he contended that Trotsky was no more prepared than other Bolshevik figures to risk war or for the loss of trade opportunities despite his support for world revolution.
In 1917, he had proposed the election of a new Soviet presidium with other socialist parties on the basis of proportional representation. On the other hand, he had accepted the ban on rival parties in Moscow during the Russian Civil War due to their opposition to the October Revolution. Yet, he also opposed the extension of the ban to the Mensheviks in Soviet Georgia.
In 1922, Lenin allied with Leon Trotsky against the party's growing Nomenklatura and the influence of Joseph Stalin. In 1923, Trotsky and a number of Old Bolsheviks who signed The Declaration of 46 raised concerns to the Poliburo concerning intra-party democracy which shared similarities with Lenin's before his death. The signatories of the 46 letter expressed grievances related to the provincial conferences, party congresses and the election of committees. Separately, Trotsky would develop his views further with the publication of the New Course in 1924.
In 1927, Trotsky and the United Opposition had argued for the expansion of industrial democracy with their joint platform which demanded majority representation of workers in trade union congresses including the All-Union Congress and an increase of non-party workers to one-third of representation in these elected organs. They also supported legal protection for worker's right to criticise such as the right to make independent proposals. According to historian Vadim Rogovin, these proposals would have developed democracy in the sphere of production and facilitated the establishment of worker's control over economic management.
Following Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union and static centralization of political power, Trotsky condemned the Soviet government's policies for lacking widespread democratic participation on the part of the population and for suppressing workers' self-management and democratic participation in the management of the economy. Because these authoritarian political measures were inconsistent with the organizational precepts of socialism, Trotsky characterized the Soviet Union as a deformed workers' state that would not be able to effectively transition to socialism. Ostensibly socialist states where democracy is lacking, yet the economy is largely in the hands of the state, are termed by orthodox Trotskyist theories as degenerated or deformed workers' states and not socialist states.Trotsky, Leon (1935). "The Workers' State, Thermidor and Bonapartism". New International. 2 (4): 116–122. "Trotsky argues that the Soviet Union was, at that time, a "deformed workers' state" or degenerated workers' state, and not a socialist republic or state, because the "bureaucracy wrested the power from the hands of mass organizations," thereby necessitating only political revolution rather than a completely new social revolution, for workers' political control (i.e. state democracy) to be reclaimed. He argued that it remained, at base, a workers' state because the capitalists and landlords had been expropriated". Retrieved 27 December 2019.
In 1931, Trotsky wrote a pamphlet on the Spanish Revolution and called for the creation of worker’s juntas in emulation of elected soviets as an expression of working class organisation. Trotsky stipulated the need for shared participation of the communist factions, anarcho-syndicalists and socialists.
In 1936, Trotsky argued in his work, The Revolution Betrayed, for the restoration of the right of criticism in areas such as economic policy, the revitalization of trade unions and free elections of the Soviet parties. Trotsky also argued that the excessive authoritarianism under Stalin had undermined the implementation of the First five-year plan. He noted that several engineers and economists who had created the plan were themselves later put on trial as "Great Purge who had acted on the instructions of a foreign power".
Polish historian and biographer, Isaac Deutscher, viewed his inner-party reforms in 1923–24 as arguably the first act in the restoration of free Soviet institutions which the party had sought to establish in 1917 and the return of worker's democracy which would correspond with a gradual dismantlement of the one-party system. At the same time, Deutscher noted that Trotsky's attitude towards democracy could be characterised as inconsistent and hesitant by opponents but this stemmed from a range of reasons such as the ill timing after the failed revolutions in the West and controversies around party schisms.
In the Transitional Program, which was drafted in 1938 during the founding congress of the Fourth International, Trotsky reiterated the need for the legalization of the Soviet parties and workers control.
Political scientists Emanuele Saccarelli and Latha Varadarajan valued his theory as a "signal contribution" to the discipline of international relations. They argued his theory presented "a specific understanding of capitalist development as "uneven", insofar as it systematically featured geographically divergent "advanced" and "backward" regions" across the world economy.
In "Problems of Everyday Life", a contemporaneous book which further articulated his views on culture and science, Trotsky argued that cultural development would accentuate industrial and technical progress. He viewed both elements to be interrelated components as part of dialectical interaction in which he viewed the low level of Russian technology and expertise to be a function of cultural backwardness. According to Trotsky, Western industrial techniques and products such as the radio should not be rejected due to their status as a product of a capitalist system but rather absorbed into the Soviet socialist framework to facilitate new forms of techniques and cultural production. In this interpretation, the transference of techniques brought new cultural changes in terms of rationalism, efficiency, exactitude and service quality.
Trotsky would later co-author the 1938 Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art with the endorsement of prominent artists Andre Breton and Diego Rivera. Trotsky's writings on literature such as his 1923 survey which advocated tolerance, limited censorship and respect for literary tradition had strong appeal to the New York Intellectuals. (2017). 9781108210416, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108210416
Trotsky presented a critique of contemporary literary movements such as Futurism and emphasised a need of cultural autonomy for the development of a socialist culture. According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Trotsky recognised "like Lenin on the need for a socialist culture to absorb the finest products of bourgeois art". Trotsky himself viewed the proletarian culture as "temporary and transitional" which would provide the foundations for a culture above classes. He also argued that the pre-conditions for artistic creativity were economic well-being and emancipation from material constraints.
Political scientist, Baruch Knei-Paz, characterised his view on the role of the party as transmitters of culture to the masses and raising the standards of education, as well as entry into the cultural sphere, but that the process of artistic creation in terms of language and presentation should be the domain of the practitioner. Knei-Paz also noted key distinctions between Trotsky's approach on cultural matters and Stalin's policy in the 1930s.
Trotsky had urged economic decentralisation between the state, oblast regions and factories to counter structural inefficiency and the problem of bureaucracy. He had proposed the principles underlying the N.E.P. in 1920 to the Politburo to mitigate urgent economic matters arising from war communism. He would later reproach Lenin privately about the delayed government response in 1921-1922. However, his position also differed from the majority of Soviet leaders at the time who fully supported the New Economic policy.
Comparatively, Trotsky believed that planning and N.E.P should develop within a mixed framework until the socialist sector gradually superseded the private industry. He found allies among a circle of economic theorists and administrators which included Evgenii Preobazhensky along Georgy Pyatakov, deputy chairman of the Council of the National Economy and had more broadly the support of many party intellectuals.
Trotsky had specified the need for the "overall guidance in planning i.e. the systematic co-ordination of the fundamental sectors of the state economy in the process of adapting to the present market" and urged for a national plan alongside currency stabilization. He also rejected the Stalinist conception of industrialisation which favoured heavy industry. Rather, he proposed the use of foreign trade as an accelerator and to direct investments by means of a system of comparative coefficients. (1992). 9780748603176, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748603176
Trotsky and the Left Opposition developed a number of economic proposals in response to the scissor crisis which had undermined relations between the workers and peasants in 1923–1924. This included a progressive tax on the wealthier sections of populations such as the and NEPmen alongside an equilibrium of the import-export balance to access accumulated reserves to purchase machinery from abroad to increase the pace of industrialization. The policy was later adopted by members of the United Opposition which also advocated a programme of rapid industrialization during the debates of 1924 and 1927. The United Opposition proposed a progressive tax on wealthier peasants, the encouragement of agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis.
Trotsky as president of the electrification commission along with members of the Opposition bloc had also put forward an electrification plan which involved the construction of the hydroelectric Dnieprostroi dam. According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation. In exile, Trotsky maintained that the disproportions and imbalances which became characteristic of Stalinist planning in the 1930s such as the underdeveloped consumer base along with the priority focus on heavy industry were due to a number of avoidable problems. He argued that the industrial drive had been enacted under more severe circumstances, several years later and in a less rational manner than originally conceived by the Left Opposition.
Ernest Mandel argued the economic programme of Trotsky differed from the forced policy of collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928 due to the levels of brutality associated with its enforcement. Notably, Trotsky sought to raise taxation on wealthier farmers and encourage farm labourers along with poor peasants to form collective farms on a voluntary basis in conjunction with the allocation of state resources to agricultural machinery, fertilizers, credit and agronomic assistance.
In 1932–33, Trotsky insisted upon the need for mass participation in the operationalisation of the planned economy:
"Insoluble without the daily experience of millions, without their critical review of their own collective experience, without their expression of their needs and demands and could not be carried out within the confines of the official sanctums.... even if the Politburo consisted of seven universal geniuses, of seven Marxes, or seven Lenins, it will still be unable, all on its own, with all its creative imagination, to assert command over the economy of 170 million people".
British cybernetician Stafford Beer who worked on a decentralization form of economic planning, Project Cybersyn from 1970 to 1973, was reported to have read and been influenced by Trotsky's critique of the nomenklatura."Beer also read Trotsky and found inspiration in Trotsky's critique of the Soviet bureaucracy".
The economic platform of a planned economy combined with an authentic worker's democracy as originally advocated by Trotsky has constituted the programme of the Fourth International and the modern Trotskyist movement.
He explicitly emphasised the core need for the programme::
"It is explicitly necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat".
The transitional programme features three types of proposals for action. This includes democratic demands such as labor rights and self-determination; immediate demands which are concerned with everyday struggles such as equal pay and transitional demands which are directed at the capitalist system such as worker's control of production .
Prior to his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotsky had encouraged empirical studies with the use of Marxist methods for social and historical development. He also insisted on the need for a freedom of science, including theoretical research, in 1925 for socially useful purposes. Trotsky defended Einstein’s theory of relativity in Soviet intellectual circles but this became an anathema during the Stalin era and was only rehabilitated following the latter's death.
In line with the scientific outlook of Marxist philosophy, Trotsky placed a heavy emphasis on science to alleviate the level of backwardness among the Soviet masses. Concurrently, he viewed socialism as a progressive struggle for science, culture and morality in which science should be given the maximum scope for development. In 1918, he had supported Taylorism along with Lenin as a means of scientifically managing industries with the support of foreign engineers. Multiple historians have stressed the technocratic nature of his governance proposals compared to Stalin and Bukharin with a higher reliance on "bourgeois" experts and specialists.
Trotskyists have emphasised the dialectical relationship between objective, material conditions and subjective factors such as party, leadership in understanding the nature of change in historical events.
After he was exiled and politically marginalized by Stalinism, Trotsky continued to argue for a united front against fascism in Germany and Spain. According to Joseph Choonara of the British Socialist Workers Party in International Socialism, his articles on the united front represent an essential part of his political legacy.Joseph Choonara, "The United Front" , International Socialism, 117.
Trotsky also formulated a theory of fascism based on a dialectical interpretation of events to analyze the manifestation of Italian fascism and the early emergence of Nazi Germany from 1930 to 1933.
Marxist theorist and economist Hillel Ticktin argued that his political strategy and approach to fascism such as the emphasis on an organisational bloc between the German Communist Party and Social-Democratic party during the interwar period would very likely have prevented Adolf Hitler from ascending to political power.
Trotsky was elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the Russian Revolution of 1905. He pursued a policy of proletarian revolution at a time when other socialist trends advocated a transition to a "bourgeois" (capitalist) regime to replace the essentially feudal Romanov state. This year, Trotsky developed the theory of permanent revolution, as it later became known (see below). In 1905, Trotsky quotes from a postscript to a book by Milyukov, The Elections to the Second State Duma, published no later than May 1907:
Milyukov suggests that the mood of the "democratic public" was in support of Trotsky's policy of the overthrow of the Romanov regime alongside a workers' revolution to overthrow the capitalist owners of industry, support for strike action and the establishment of democratically elected workers' councils or "soviets". This differed from variations of Council Communism in Germany due to the Russian Peasantry and the role they have in overall Leninism including Trotskyism compared to the role they have in Council Communism
As a result of his role in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the theory of permanent revolution was embraced by the young Soviet state until 1924.
The Russian revolution of 1917 was marked by two revolutions: the relatively spontaneous February 1917 revolution and the 25 October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, who had gained the leadership of the Petrograd soviet.
Before the February 1917 Russian revolution, Lenin had formulated a slogan calling for the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", but after the February revolution, through his April Theses, Lenin instead called for "all power to the Soviets". Nevertheless, Lenin continued to emphasise (as did Trotsky) the classical Marxist position that the peasantry formed a basis for the development of capitalism, not socialism.
Also, before February 1917, Trotsky had not accepted the importance of a Bolshevik-style organisation. Once the February 1917 Russian revolution had broken out, Trotsky admitted the importance of a Bolshevik organisation and joined the Bolsheviks in July 1917. Although many, like Stalin, saw Trotsky's role in the October 1917 Russian revolution as central, Trotsky wrote that without Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, the October revolution of 1917 would not have taken place.
Other Bolshevik figures such as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Moisei Uritsky and Dmitry Manuilsky agreed that Lenin's influence on the Bolshevik party was decisive but the October insurrection was carried out according to Trotsky's, not to Lenin's plan.
As a result, since 1917, Trotskyism as a political theory has been fully committed to a Leninist style of democratic centralist party organisation, which Trotskyists argue must not be confused with the party organisation as it later developed under Stalin. Trotsky had previously suggested that Lenin's method of organisation would lead to a dictatorship. However, it is essential to emphasise that after 1917, orthodox Trotskyists argue that the loss of democracy in the USSR was caused by the failure of the revolution to spread internationally and the consequent wars, isolation, and imperialist intervention, not the Bolshevik style of organisation.
Lenin's outlook had always been that the Russian revolution would need to stimulate a Socialist revolution in Western Europe so that this European socialist society would come to the aid of the Russian revolution and enable Russia to advance towards socialism. Lenin stated:
This outlook matched Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution precisely. Trotsky's permanent revolution had foreseen that the working class would not stop at the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution but proceed towards a workers' state, as happened in 1917. The Polish Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher maintains that in 1917, Lenin changed his attitude toward Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution, and after the October revolution, it was adopted by the Bolsheviks.
Lenin was met with initial disbelief in April 1917. Trotsky argues that:
During 1922–1924, Lenin suffered a series of strokes and became increasingly incapacitated. In a document dictated before his death in 1924 while describing Trotsky as "distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities—personally he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee" and also maintaining that "his non-Bolshevik past should not be held against him", Lenin criticized him for "showing excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work" and also requested that Stalin be removed from his position of General Secretary, but his notes remained suppressed until 1956. Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin in 1925 and joined Trotsky in 1926 in what was known as the United Opposition.
In 1926, Stalin allied with Nikolai Bukharin, who led the campaign against "Trotskyism". In The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky quotes Bukharin's 1918 pamphlet, From the Collapse of Czarism to the Fall of the Bourgeoisie, which was re-printed in 1923 by the party publishing house, Proletari. Bukharin explains and embraces Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution in this pamphlet: "The Russian proletariat is confronted more sharply than ever before with the problem of the international revolution ... The grand total of relationships which have arisen in Europe leads to this inevitable conclusion. Thus, the permanent revolution in Russia is passing into the European proletarian revolution". Yet it is common knowledge, Trotsky argues, that three years later in 1926 "Bukharin was the chief and indeed the sole theoretician of the entire campaign against 'Trotskyism', summed up in the struggle against the theory of the permanent revolution."
Trotsky wrote that the Left Opposition grew in influence throughout the 1920s, attempting to reform the Communist Party, but in 1927 Stalin declared "civil war" against them:
Internationally, Trotsky's opposition and criticism of the ruling troika received support from several, Central Committee members of foreign communist parties. This included Christian Rakovsky, Chairman of the Ukrainian SSR, Boris Souvarine of the French Communist Party and the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party which was led by prominent theoreticians such as Maksymilian Horwitz, Maria Koszutska and Adolf Warski.
The defeat of the European working class led to further isolation in Russia and further suppression of the Opposition. Trotsky argued that the "so-called struggle against 'Trotskyism' grew out of the bureaucratic reaction against the October Revolution of". He responded to the one-sided civil war with his Letter to the Bureau of Party History (1927), contrasting what he claimed to be the falsification of history with the official history of just a few years before. He further accused Stalin of derailing the Chinese revolution and causing the massacre of the Chinese workers:
Trotsky was sent into internal exile, and his supporters were jailed. For instance, Victor Serge first "spent six weeks in a cell" after a visit at midnight, then 85 days in an inner GPU cell, most of it in solitary confinement. He details the jailings of the Left Opposition. However, the Left Opposition worked secretly within the USSR. Trotsky was eventually exiled to Turkey and moved to France, Norway and finally Mexico.
After 1928, the various Communist Parties worldwide expelled Trotskyists from their ranks. Most Trotskyists defend the economic achievements of the planned economy in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s, despite the "misleadership" of the Soviet bureaucracy and what they claim to be the loss of democracy. Trotskyists claim that in 1928 inner party democracy and soviet democracy, which was at the foundation of Bolshevism, had been destroyed within the various Communist Parties. Anyone who disagreed with the party line was labelled a Trotskyist and even a fascist.
In 1937, Stalin again unleashed what Trotskyists say was a Great Purge against their Left Opposition and many of the remaining (those who had played vital roles in the October Revolution in 1917) in the face of increased opposition, particularly in the army.. Also see the chapter 'Trotskyists in the camps': "A new, young generation of Trotskyists had grown up in the Soviet Union...lots of them go to their deaths crying 'Long live Trotsky!' " Until this research became available after the fall of the Soviet Union, little was known about the strength of the Trotskyists within the Soviet Union.
Trotsky said that only the Fourth International, based on Lenin's theory of the vanguard party, could lead the world revolution and that it would need to be built in opposition to the capitalists and the Stalinists.
Trotsky argued that the defeat of the German working class and the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933 was due in part to the mistakes of the Third Period policy of the Communist International and that the subsequent failure of the Communist Parties to draw the correct lessons from those defeats showed that they were no longer capable of reform and a new international organisation of the working class must be organised. The transitional demand tactic had to be a key element.
At the time of the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, Trotskyism was a mass political current in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and slightly later Bolivia. There was also a substantial Trotskyist movement in China which included the founding father of the Chinese communist movement, Chen Duxiu, amongst its number. Wherever Stalinists gained power, they prioritised hunting down Trotskyists and treated them as the worst enemies.
The Fourth International suffered repression and disruption through the Second World War. Isolated from each other and faced with political developments quite unlike those anticipated by Trotsky, some Trotskyist organizations decided that the USSR could no longer be called a degenerated workers' state and withdrew from the Fourth International. After 1945, Trotskyism was smashed as a mass movement in Vietnam and marginalised in many other countries. The International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI) organised an international conference in 1946 and then World Congresses in 1948 and 1951 to assess the expropriation of the capitalists in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, the threat of a Third World War and the tasks of revolutionaries. The Eastern European Communist-led governments, which came into being after World War II without a social revolution, were described by a resolution of the 1948 congress as presiding over capitalist economies. By 1951, the Congress had concluded that they had become "deformed workers' states". As the Cold War intensified, the ISFI's 1951 World Congress adopted theses by Michel Pablo that anticipated an international civil war. Pablo's followers considered that the Communist Parties, under pressure from the real workers' movement, could escape Stalin's manipulations and follow a revolutionary orientation.
The 1951 Congress argued that Trotskyists should start to conduct systematic work inside those Communist Parties, followed by the majority of the working class. However, the ISFI's view that the Soviet leadership was counterrevolutionary remained unchanged. The 1951 Congress argued that the USSR took over these countries because of the military and political results of World War II and instituted nationalized property relations only after its attempts at placating capitalism failed to protect those countries from the threat of incursion by the West.
Pablo began expelling many people who disagreed with his thesis and did not want to dissolve their organizations within the Communist Parties. For instance, he expelled most of the French section and replaced its leadership. As a result, the opposition to Pablo eventually rose to the surface, with the Open Letter to Trotskyists of the World, by Socialist Workers Party leader James P. Cannon.
The Fourth International split in 1953 into two public factions. Several sections of the International established the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) as an alternative centre to the International Secretariat, in which they felt a revisionist faction led by Michel Pablo had taken power and recommitted themselves to the Lenin-Trotsky Theory of the Party and Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. From 1960, led by the U.S Socialist Workers Party, many ICFI sections began the reunification process with the IS, but factions split off and continued their commitment to the ICFI. Today, national parties committed to the ICFI call themselves the Socialist Equality Party.
After the Cuban Revolution, a variety of socialist writers like C. Wright Mills, Paul Sweezy, Herbert Matthews, and Paul Johnson were delivering polemics in defense of the new Fidelista government. In 1961 Encounter magazine asked Theodore Draper to write an assessment of the Cuban Revolution and the new provisional government. Draper published Castro's Cuba - A Revolution Betrayed in which, Draper presents a Marxist analysis which claims that "Castroism" is a rudimentary nationalism which ignores the principles of Marxism, and that Fidel Castro is a demagogue. Draper also describes his Betrayal thesis by alluding to Trotsky's allegation that Stalin "betrayed" the Russian Revolution. Draper alleges that Castro had "betrayed" the Cuban Revolution in a similar manner.
Trotskyists in general, were split about Castroism. Trotskyists like J. Posadas celebrated Castroism, and claimed that Cuba is on the road to socialism, while the British and French sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, claimed that the Cuban Revolution only developed a form of state capitalism in Cuba.
In Argentina, the Workers' Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores, PRT) lay in the merger of two leftist organizations in 1965, the Revolutionary and Popular Amerindian Front (Frente Revolucionario Indoamericano Popular, FRIP) and Worker's Word (Palabra Obrera, PO). In 1968, the PRT adhered to the Fourth International, based in Paris. That same year, a related organisation was founded in Argentina, the ERP (People's Revolutionary Army), which became South America's most powerful rural guerrilla movement during the 1970s. The PRT left the Fourth International in 1973. During the Dirty War, the Argentine military regime suppressed both the PRT and the ERP. ERP commander Roberto Santucho was killed in July 1976. Owing to the ruthless repression, PRT showed no signs of activity after 1977. During the 1980s in Argentina, the Trotskyist party founded in 1982 by Nahuel Moreno, MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, Movement for Socialism), claimed to be the "largest Trotskyist party" in the world before it broke into many different fragments in the late 1980s, including the present-day Workers' Socialist Movement (MST), Socialist Workers' Party (PTS), Socialist Left (IS), Self-determination and Freedom (AyL, which is not outspoken Trotskyist). In 1989, an electoral front with the Communist Party and MRS called Izquierda Unida ("United Left") retrieved 3.49% of the vote, representing 580,944 voters. The Workers' Party (Partido Obrero) in Argentina later founded with other Trotskyist groups the Workers' Left Front which is represented in parliament.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declared himself a Trotskyist during the swearing-in of his cabinet two days before his inauguration on 10 January 2007. Venezuelan Trotskyist organizations do not regard Chávez as a Trotskyist, with some describing him as a bourgeois nationalist. In contrast, others consider him an honest revolutionary leader who made significant mistakes due to his lack of a Marxist analysis.
Trotsky engaged with members of the American Socialist Workers Party on reaching the Black population. He had correspondence with C.L.R. James on the question of self-determination and expressed support for Black Americans seeking equal rights and an autonomous state.
There is a Trotskyist-influenced caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America, Reform and Revolution.
The Democratic Socialist Movement (Nigeria) exists in Nigeria, it was founded in 1986 among a confederation of labour and student socialists. It is affiliated to the Committee for a Workers' International.
In 1949, the Revolutionary Communist Party of China (中國革命共產黨; RCP) fled to Hong Kong. Since 1974, the party has been legally active as October Review, its official publication.
For a period in the 1930s, Ta Thu Thau's Struggle group, centred around the newspaper La Lutte, was sufficiently strong to induce "Stalinists" (members of the then Indochinese Communist Party) to collaborate with the Trotskyists in support of labour and peasant struggles, and in the presentation of a common Workers Slate for Saigon municipal, and Cochinchina Council, elections. Ta Thu Thau was captured and executed by the Communist-front Viet Minh in September 1945. Many, if not most, of his fellow luttuers were subsequently killed, caught between the Viet Minh and the French effort at colonial reconquest.
After the war, the Sri Lanka section split into the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP). In the general election of 1947, the LSSP became the main opposition party, winning ten seats, the BSP winning a further 5. It joined the Trotskyist Fourth International after fusion with the BSP in 1950 and led a general strike (Hartal) in 1953.
In 1974, a secret faction of the LSSP, allied to the Militant group in the United Kingdom, emerged. In 1977, this faction was expelled and formed the Nava Sama Samaja Party, led by Vasudeva Nanayakkara.
In India, the BLPI fractured. In 1948, at the Fourth International's request, the party's rump dissolved into the Congress Socialist Party as an exercise in entryism.
One of the more prominent Trotskyist parties in Britain has been the Socialist Workers Party, formerly the International Socialists (IS) and traces its history back to 1950. The SWP has helped found several organisations through which they have sought to exert influence over the broader left, such as the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s and the Stop the War Coalition in 2001. It also allied with George Galloway and Respect Party, whose dissolution in 2007 caused an internal crisis in the SWP. A more serious internal crisis, leading to a significant decline in the party's membership, emerged in 2013 over allegations of rape and sexual assault made against a leading party member.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) was formed in 2010 between the Socialist Party, the SWP and Socialist Resistance, along with the RMT union, has participated in several general elections. The TUSC stood 40 candidates at the 2024 United Kingdom general election.
In April 2019, a 1970s splinter from IS made headlines when three former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party campaigned in the European Parliamentary election as candidates for the Brexit Party, and a fourth, Munira Mirza, was appointed head of the Number 10 Downing Street policy unit by the new Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The RCP's rejection of the SWP's critical engagement with the Labour Party and trade unions had morphed into embracing right-wing libertarian positions.
The French section of the Fourth International was the Internationalist Communist Party (PCI). In 1952 the party split when the Fourth International removed its Central Committee and split again when in 1953, the Fourth International itself divided. Further divisions occurred over which independence faction to support in the Algerian War. In 1967, the rump of the PCI renamed itself the "Internationalist Communist Organisation" (Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, OCI). It proliferated during the May 1968 student demonstrations but was banned alongside other far-left groups, such as the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left). Members temporarily reconstituted the group as the Trotskyist Organisation but soon obtained a state order permitting the reformation of the OCI. By 1970, the OCI was able to organise a 10,000-strong youth rally. The group also gained a strong base in trade unions. However, further splits and disintegration followed.
Today, France remains a hub for Trotskyist activity, represented by groups such as Lutte Ouvrière. In 2002, three trotskyist candidates ran in the election. Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvrière got 5.72%, Olivier Besancenot of the Revolutionary Communist League (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire) got 4.25% and Daniel Gluckstein of the Workers' Party (Parti des Travailleurs) got 0.47%. In 2016 Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly of the ICO, launched the left-wing political platform La France Insoumise (Unbowed France), subsequently endorsed by several parties, including his own Left Party and the French Communist Party. In the 2017 French Presidential Election, he received 19% in the first round. In the same election, Philippe Poutou of the New Anticapitalist Party, into which the Revolutionary Communist League dissolved itself in 2008, won 1.20% of the vote. The only openly Trotskyist candidate, Nathalie Arthaud of Workers' Struggle, won 0.64% of the vote.
The International Committee of the Fourth International maintains its independent organization and publishes the World Socialist Web Site. They have full sections in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Australia with sympathizing groups in Russia, Ukraine, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Croatia, Ireland, and other countries.
The Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) was founded in 1974 and has sections in over 35 countries. Before 1997, most organisations affiliated with the CWI sought to build an entrist Marxist wing within the large social democratic parties. The CWI has adopted a range of tactics, including working with trade unions, but in some cases working within or supporting other parties, endorsing Bernie Sanders for the 2016 U.S. Democratic Party nomination and encouraging him to run independently.
In France, the LCR is rivalled by Lutte Ouvrière, the French section of the Internationalist Communist Union (UCI), with small sections in a handful of other countries. It focuses its activities, whether propaganda or intervention, on the industrial proletariat.
The Committee for a Marxist International (CMI) founders claims they were expelled from the CWI when the CWI abandoned entryism. The CWI claims they left, and no expulsions were carried out. In 2006, it became the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). CMI/IMT groups continue the policy of entering mainstream social democratic, communist or radical parties. Known as the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) since 2024, it is headed by Alan Woods.
The list of Trotskyist internationals shows that there are a large number of other multinational tendencies that stand in the tradition of Leon Trotsky.
However, literary critic Jeffrey Meyers who reviewed the political allegories in Orwell’s work stated that:
"Orwell ignores the fact that Trotsky passionately opposed Left Opposition, which featured Siberian prison camps, the deliberately created Ukraine famine and the massive slaughter during the Great Purges.”
Meyers further added that Orwell drew on the views of a right-wing combatant to reinforce his arguments. In contrast, Meyers cited Isaac Deutscher biographical account of Trotsky which presented him to be a much more civilised figure than Stalin and suggested that he would not have purged the Red Army generals or millions of Soviet citizens.
Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has also questioned the premise of historical inevitability presented by conservative critics such as Robert Service in that the Soviet Union would have experienced the same "totalitarian despotism under Trotskyist rule". Fitzpatrick suggested it was implausible that Trotsky like Stalin would have launched an anti-semitic campaign after World War II or initiated the . Rather, she inferred that Trotsky would presumably have provided good leadership during the Second World War but may have struggled to maintain party cohesion as seen during the succession struggle after 1924.
Moreover, several scholars such as Richard B.Day, Vadim Rogovin and Robert Vincent Daniels along with Western socialism have considered Trotsky to have represented a more democracy alternative to Stalin. In particular, emphasis has been drawn to his activities in the pre-Civil War period and as leader of the Left Opposition. Proponents of this view have specified further differences with Stalinism, which emerged during the succession struggle, over intraparty democracy, autonomy of the Comintern and the dogmatization of Leninist orthodoxy. Mandel and Deutscher maintain that his intra-party reforms from 1923-1926 would have revitalised party democratization, mass participation, worker's self-management and eventually a multi-party socialist democracy. Trotsky also opposed the policy of forced collectivisation under Stalin and favoured a volunteering, gradual approach towards agricultural production, with greater tolerance for the rights of Soviet Ukrainians. Daniels viewed Trotsky and the Left Opposition as a critical alternative to the Stalin-Bukharin majority in a number of areas. He also stated that the Left Opposition would have prioritised industrialisation but never contemplated the "violent uprooting" employed by Stalin and contrasted most directly with Stalinism on the issue of Soviet democracy.: "While Trotsky was strongly biased toward industrial development, there is little basis to suppose that he would have adopted Stalin’s forcible collectivization, slapdash economic planning, anti expert campaigns, or cultural know-nothingism. Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin would have pursued anything like Stalin’s pseudo-revolutionary 'third period' foreign policy and his connivance in the advent of Hitler, another product of his political manoeuvring against the Bukharinists."
Other figures such as Baruch Knei-Paz and Victor Serge acknowledge some affinities with Stalinism in regards to the use of coercion but have also recognised clear differences between Trotsky and Stalin. On the culture, Knei-Paz highlighted their contrasting attitudes towards matters such as the arts and sciences. According to Knei-Paz, it does not seem credibility that Trotsky would have treated culture and society with the same total, brutal disregard as Stalin. He also argued that Trotsky sought far-reaching economic, commercial relations with European countries which was at variance with the economic policy of isolationism and harsher measures pursued under Stalin. In the view of Knei-Paz, the most discernible difference between Trotsky and Stalin was their respective approaches towards international affairs. In this matter, Trotsky firmly adhered to the notion that socialism in Russia as “Underdevelopment” was dependent on revolution in the West. Biographer Geoffrey Swain believed that the Soviet Union under the leadership of Trotsky would have been more technocratic as he would have made far more use of "technicians" in the planning process, and inferred this from his conduct during the Civil War along with his writings in the early 1920s. Swain also expressed the view that the Soviet Union under Trotsky would certainly have been a less terrorised society yet was critical of his military methods barrier troops and hostage taking during the Civil War.
In post-exile, Trotsky challenged claims from American socialist Norman Thomas that the Soviet Union would have been no better under his leadership. Trotsky countered that it was not a question of personality but opposing, social interests represented by the bureaucracy and the working class. More specifically, Trotsky attributed the retraction of the Soviet Decree of the October revolution, the mass purge and Soviet foreign policy as seen in Spanish Civil War to the interests of the bureaucracy rather than the socialist proletariat or Bolshevik tradition. He asserted that the excessive form of totalitarianism under Stalinism would not have emerged under his variant of Bolshevism. Comparatively, he viewed his interpretation of Marxism to represent a political and morality regeneration of the Soviet Union against the Stalinist nomenklatura.
Separately, Trotsky would defend his military decisions as necessary and argued that had draconian measures rather than excess "magnanimity" been shown to opponents at the start of the October Revolution then Russia would have experienced far less human casualties. He made a historical comparison between his military endeavours with Abraham Lincoln ruthlessness during the American Civil War. Deutscher drew attention to the fact that Trotsky preferred to exchange hostages and prisoners rather than execute them. He recounts that Trotsky had released Pyotr Krasnov on parole in 1918 after the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising during the initial stage of the Civil War but the general would take up arms against the Soviets shortly again afterwards.
Trotskyist Marxist theory have disputed the view that the Stalinist dictatorship was a natural outgrowth of the Bolsheviks' actions as most of the original, central committee members from 1917 were later eliminated by Stalin. George Novack stressed the initial efforts by the Bolsheviks to form a multi-party government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and bring other parties such as the Mensheviks into political legality. Upon the Menshevik walkout from the Soviet congress, Trotsky released a number of arrested, socialist ministers of the Provisional government from prison, at the request of Julius Martov. Tony Cliff argued the Bolshevik-Left Socialist Revolutionary coalition government dissolved the Constituent Assembly due to a number of reasons. They cited the outdated voter-rolls which did not acknowledge the split among the Socialist Revolutionary party and the assemblies conflict with the Congress of the Soviets as an alternative democratic structure. David North has argued that Trotsky's policies would have averted the dismantlement of Soviet defenses alongside the high levels of human casualties associated with Operation Barbarossa and the Second World War.
Trotsky was not defeated by bureaucratic decisions or Stalin's control of the Party apparatus—as his partisans and Trotskyite historians claim. He had his day in court and finally lost because his whole position flew in the face of Soviet and world realities. He was doomed to defeat because his ideas were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people.
Other figures associated with Marxism–Leninism criticized Trotskyist political theory, including Régis Debray and Earl Browder.
In 1966, Fidel Castro said that "Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction."
Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski wrote: "Both Trotsky and Bukharin were emphatic in their assurances that forced labour was an organic part of the new society."
Sociologist Peter Beilharz was critical of Trotskyism and viewed it as the most complete expression of Jacobinism. Although, Beiharz acknowledged that Trotsky had opposed Jacobinism as a young democrat but in his view had extended the tradition during the period of war communism and through his ideological defence of terror. On the other hand, historian Paul Le Blanc found Beilharz's historical comparisons between Trotsky and earlier Jacobin figures to be unconvincing and suggested his analogies were more centred in rhetoric rather than in analysis due to his blurring of ideological concepts.
Some left communists, such as Paul Mattick, claim that the October Revolution was totalitarian from the start. Therefore, Trotskyism has no fundamental differences from Stalinism in practice or theory. French historian and Trotskyist Pierre Broue rejected this form of criticism and characterised it in the following way:
"The theory according to which Stalin and Trotsky were two rival wild beasts which is useful for historians serving those in power: the establishment of an equivalence between Stalinism and Trotskyism aids the idea of a continuity from Bolshevism and Leninism to Stalinism and strengthens a regime which fears revolutionary sentiments".(1992). 9780748603176, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748603176
British historian Christian Høgsbjerg believed that the academic literature and wider criticisms of Trotskyist organisations had minimised its historical role in building wider social movements. Høgsbjerg stressed the key role of British Trotskyists in various movements such as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (1966–71), the Anti-Nazi League (1977–81), the Anti Poll Tax Federation (1989–91) and the Stop the War Coalition (2001).
In the United States, Dwight Macdonald broke with Trotsky and left the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party by raising the question of the Kronstadt rebellion, which Trotsky, as leader of the Soviet Red Army, and the other Bolsheviks had brutally repressed. He then moved towards democratic socialism and anarchism. Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (1960). This was later republished with the title Politics Past. The Lithuanian-American anarchist Emma Goldman raised a similar critique of Trotsky's role in the events around the Kronstadt rebellion. In her essay "Trotsky Protests Too Much", she says: "I admit, the dictatorship under Stalin's rule has become monstrous. That does not, however, lessen the guilt of Leon Trotsky as one of the actors in the revolutionary drama of which Kronstadt was one of the bloodiest scenes".
Trotsky defended the actions of the Red Army in his essay "Hue and Cry over Kronstadt". He would also argue that the attitudes and social composition of the Kronstadt sailors had changed over the course of the Civil War. Trotsky further argued that the isolated location of the naval fortress would have enabled financial funding to flow between Kronstadt and White army emigres. Separately, he would also argue that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved after the Civil War.
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