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Leon Trotsky, whose policies and politics played a role in the
October Revolution in Russia in 1917
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and Bolshevik–Leninist, a follower of Marx, Engels, and Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism, and a dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", which Marxists argue defines capitalism) based on working-class self-emancipation and mass democracy. 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.
Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky, despite their ideological disputes, 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, and Trotskyists and some others call Trotsky its "co-leader". 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.
Assessing Trotsky, Lenin wrote: "Trotsky long ago said that unification
is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on, there has
been no better Bolshevik."
In 1927, Trotsky was purged from the Communist Party and Soviet politics. In October, by order of Stalin, Trotsky was removed from power and, in November, expelled from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). He was exiled to Alma-Ata (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 Soviet Union. 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 All-Union
Communist Party (Bolsheviks) were executed in the Great Purges of 1937–1938, effectively removing all of Trotsky's internal influence in the Soviet Union. 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 Soviet Union from 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.
In contemporary English language usage, an advocate of Trotsky's ideas
is often called a "Trotskyist". A Trotskyist may be called a
"Trotskyite" or "Trot", especially by a critic of Trotskyism.
Definition
According to Trotsky, his program could be distinguished from other Marxist theories by five key elements:
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-revisionists
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 critical of the Stalinist USSR for suppressing democracy and the lack of adequate economic planning.
Theory
In 1905, Trotsky formulated his theory of permanent revolution, which later became a defining characteristic of Trotskyism. Until 1905, some revolutionaries claimed that Marx's theory of history
posited that only a revolution in a European capitalist society would
lead to a socialist one. According to this position, a socialist
revolution could not occur in a backward, feudal country such as early
20th-century Russia when it had such a small and almost powerless
capitalist class.
The theory of permanent revolution addressed how such feudal
regimes were to be overthrown and how socialism could be established
given the lack of economic prerequisites. Trotsky argued that only the
working class could overthrow feudalism and win the peasantry'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.
Capitalist or bourgeois-democratic revolution
Revolutions in Britain
in the 17th century and in France in 1789 abolished feudalism and
established the essential requisites for the development of capitalism.
Trotsky argued that these revolutions would not be repeated in Russia.
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.
Passivity of the bourgeoisie
Trotsky argues that countries like Russia had no "enlightened, active" revolutionary bourgeoisie
which could play the same role, and the working class constituted a
tiny minority. By the time of the European revolutions of 1848, "the
bourgeoisie was already unable to play a comparable role. It did not
want and was not able to undertake the revolutionary liquidation of the
social system that stood in its path to power."
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 were
subservient to European capital.
The incapability of the peasantry
The theory of permanent revolution further considers that the peasantry
as a whole cannot take on the task of carrying through the revolution
because it is dispersed in small holdings throughout the country and
forms a heterogeneous grouping, including the rich peasants who employ
rural workers and aspire to landlordism
as well as the poor peasants who aspire to own more land. Trotsky
argues: "All historical experience [...] shows that the peasantry are
absolutely incapable of taking up an independent political role".
The key role of the proletariat
Trotskyists
differ on the extent to which this is true today. However, even the
most orthodox tend to recognise in the late twentieth century a new
development in the revolts of the rural poor: the self-organising
struggles of the landless, along with many other struggles that in some
ways reflect the militant united, organised struggles of the working
class, which to various degrees do not bear the marks of class divisions
typical of the heroic peasant struggles of previous epochs. However,
orthodox Trotskyists today still argue that the town- and city-based
working-class struggle is central to the task of a successful socialist
revolution linked to these struggles of the rural poor. They argue that
the working class learns of the necessity to conduct a collective
struggle, for instance, in trade unions, arising from its social
conditions in the factories and workplaces; and that the collective
consciousness it achieves as a result is an essential ingredient of the
socialist reconstruction of society.
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:
The
factory system brings the proletariat to the foreground [...] The
proletariat immediately found itself concentrated in tremendous masses,
while between these masses and the autocracy there stood a capitalist
bourgeoisie, very small in numbers, isolated from the "people",
half-foreign, without historical traditions, and inspired only by the
greed for gain.
— Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects
For instance, the Putilov Factory 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. 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.
International revolution
According to classical Marxism,
a revolution in peasant-based countries such as Russia ultimately
prepares the ground for capitalism's development since the liberated
peasants become small owners, producers, and traders. This leads to the
growth of commodity markets, from which a new capitalist class emerges.
Only fully developed capitalist conditions prepare the basis for
socialism.
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:
[...]
to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied
classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the
proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the
proletarians has progressed sufficiently far—not only in one country but
in all the leading countries of the world—that competition between the
proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces
of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.
— Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
History
Origins
Trotsky in exile in Siberia, 1900
According to Trotsky, the term "Trotskyism" was coined by Pavel Milyukov (sometimes transliterated as Paul Miliukoff), the ideological leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) in Russia. Milyukov waged a bitter war against Trotskyism "as early as 1905".
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:
Those
who reproach the Kadets with failure to protest at that time, by
organising meetings, against the "revolutionary illusions" of Trotskyism
and the relapse into Blanquism, simply do not understand [...] the mood of the democratic public at meetings during that period.
— Pavel Milyukov, The Elections to the Second State Duma
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".
Trotskyism and the 1917 Russian Revolution
During his leadership of the Russian revolution of 1905, Trotsky argued
that once it became clear that the Tsar's army would not come out in
support of the workers, it was necessary to retreat before the armed
might of the state in as good an order as possible. In 1917, Trotsky was again elected chairman of the Petrograd soviet, but this time soon came to lead the Military Revolutionary Committee, which had the allegiance of the Petrograd garrison and carried through the October 1917 insurrection. Stalin wrote:
All
practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was
done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of
the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is
indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid
going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient
manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was
organized.
—
Joseph Stalin, Pravda, November 6, 1918
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.
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 Soviet
Union 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:
We have stressed in a good
many written works, in all our public utterances, and in all our
statements in the press that [...] the socialist revolution can triumph
only on two conditions. First, if it is given timely support by a
socialist revolution in one or several advanced countries.
— Vladimir Lenin, Speech at Tenth Congress of the RCP(B)
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:
[...]
up to the outbreak of the February revolution and for a time after
Trotskyism did not mean the idea that it was impossible to build a
socialist society within the national boundaries of Russia (which
"possibility" was never expressed by anybody up to 1924 and hardly came
into anybody's head). Trotskyism meant the idea that the Russian
proletariat might win the power in advance of the Western proletariat,
and that in that case it could not confine itself within the limits of a
democratic dictatorship but would be compelled to undertake the initial
socialist measures. It is not surprising, then, that the April theses
of Lenin were condemned as Trotskyist.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
"Legend of Trotskyism"
"Bolshevik freedom" with nude of Trotsky in a Polish propaganda poster, Polish–Soviet War (1920)
In The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky argues that what he calls the "legend of Trotskyism" was formulated by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in collaboration with Stalin in 1924 in response to the criticisms Trotsky raised of Politburo policy. Orlando Figes
argues: "The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the
Politburo, was in itself a crucial factor in Stalin's rise to power".
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:
During the first ten years of its
struggle, the Left Opposition did not abandon the program of ideological
conquest of the party for that of conquest of power against the party.
Its slogan was: reform, not revolution. The bureaucracy, however, even
in those times, was ready for any revolution in order to defend itself
against a democratic reform.
In
1927, when the struggle reached an especially bitter stage, Stalin
declared at a session of the Central Committee, addressing himself to
the Opposition: "Those cadres can be removed only by civil war!" What
was a threat in Stalin’s words became, thanks to a series of defeats of
the European proletariat, a historic fact. The road of reform was turned
into a road of revolution.
— Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, p. 279, Pathfinder
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 1917]". 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:
In the
year 1918, Stalin, at the very outset of his campaign against me, found
it necessary, as we have already learned, to write the following words:
"All
the work of practical organization of the insurrection was carried out
under the direct leadership of the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet,
comrade Trotsky..." (Stalin, Pravda, 6 November 1918)
With full
responsibility for my words, I am now compelled to say that the cruel
massacre of the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese Revolution at its
three most important turning points, the strengthening of the position
of the trade union agents of British imperialism after the General Strike of 1926,
and, finally, the general weakening of the position of the Communist
International and the Soviet Union, the party owes principally and above
all to Stalin.
— Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification, p. 87, Pathfinder (1971).
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 Soviet Union. 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 Soviet Union 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 political terror against their Left Opposition and many of the remaining Old Bolsheviks (those who had played vital roles in the October Revolution in 1917) in the face of increased opposition, particularly in the army.
Founding of the Fourth International
Trotsky founded the International Left Opposition in 1930. It was meant to be an opposition group within the Comintern,
but anyone who joined or was suspected of joining the ILO was
immediately expelled from the Comintern. The ILO, therefore, concluded
that opposing Stalinism
from within the communist organizations controlled by Stalin's
supporters had become impossible, so new organizations had to be formed.
In 1933, the ILO was renamed the International Communist League (ICL),
which formed the basis of the Fourth International, founded in Paris in 1938.
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 Soviet Union 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 counter-revolutionary remained unchanged. The 1951
Congress argued that the Soviet Union 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.
Trotskyist movements
Latin America
Trotskyism has influenced some recent major social upheavals, particularly in Latin America.
The Bolivian Trotskyist party (Partido Obrero Revolucionario,
POR) became a mass party in the late 1940s and early 1950s and,
together with other groups, played a central role during and immediately
after the period termed the Bolivian National Revolution.
In Brazil, as an officially recognised platform or faction of the
PT until 1992, the Trotskyist Movimento Convergência Socialista (CS),
which founded the United Socialist Workers' Party (PSTU) in 1994, saw a number of its members elected to national, state and local legislative bodies during the 1980s. The Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) presidential candidate in the 2006 general elections, Heloísa Helena, is a Trotskyist member of the Workers Party of Brazil
(PT), a legislative deputy in Alagoas and in 1999 was elected to the
Federal Senate. Expelled from the PT in December 2003, she helped found
PSOL, in which various Trotskyist groups play a prominent role.
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 strongest 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 Toward 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 MST, PTS, Nuevo MAS, IS, PRS,
FOS, etc. In 1989, an electoral front with the Communist Party and
Christian nationalist groups called Izquierda Unida ("United Left") retrieved 3.49% of the vote, representing 580,944 voters. Today, the Workers' Party in Argentina has an electoral base in Salta Province in the far north, particularly in the city of Salta itself; and has become the third political force in the provinces of Tucumán, also in the north; and Santa Cruz, in the south.
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 while others consider him an honest revolutionary leader who made significant mistakes due to him lacking a Marxist analysis.
Asia
In China, various left opposition groups in the late 1920s sought to
engage Trotsky against the Comintern policy of support for the
Kuomintang.
In 1931, at Trotsky's urging, the various factions united in the
Communist League of China, adopting Trotsky's document "The Political
Situation in China and the Task of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition".
Prominent members include Chen Duxiu, Wang Fanxi and Chen Qichang. The League was persecuted by the Nationalist government and by the Chinese Communist Party.
In 1939, Ho Chi Minh,
then a Comintern agent in southern China, reported that "everyone
united to fight the Japanese except the Trotskyists. These traitors . . .
adopted the ‘resolution’: ‘In the war against the Japanese, our
position is clear: those who wanted the war and have illusions about the
Kuomintang government, those concretely have committed treason. The
union between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang is nothing but
conscious treason’. And other ignominies of this kind." The Trotskyists
were to be "crushed." In 1949, the Revolutionary Communist Party of China (Chinese: 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.
In French Indochina during the 1930s, Vietnamese Trotskyism, led by Tạ Thu Thâu, was a significant current, particularly in Saigon, Cochinchina. In 1929, in the French Left Opposition La Vérité, Ta Thu Thau condemned the Comintern for leading Chinese Communists (in 1927) to "the graveyard" through its support for the Kuomintang. The "'Sun Yat-sen-ist'
synthesis of democracy, nationalism and socialism" was "a kind of
nationalist mysticism." In Indochina, it could only obscure "the
concrete class relationships, and the real, organic liaison between the
indigenous bourgeoisie and French imperialism," in the light of which
the call for independence is "mechanical and formalistic." "A revolution
based on the organisation of the proletarian and peasant masses is the
only one capable of liberating the colonies ... The question of
independence must be bound up with that of the proletarian socialist
revolution."
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.
In Sri Lanka, a group of Trotskyists (known as the "T Group"), including South Asia's pioneer Trotskyist, Philip Gunawardena, who had been active in Trotskyist politics in Europe, and his colleague N. M. Perera, were instrumental in the foundation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
(LSSP) in 1935. It expelled its pro-Moscow wing in 1940, becoming a
Trotskyist-led party. In 1942, following the escape of the leaders of
the LSSP from a British prison, a unified Bolshevik–Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma (BLPI) was established in India, bringing together the many Trotskyist groups in the subcontinent. The BLPI was active in the Quit India Movement
and the labour movement, capturing the second oldest union in India.
Its high point was when it led the strikes which followed the Bombay Mutiny.
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 1964, the LSSP joined a coalition government with Sirimavo Bandaranaike, with three members, NM Perera, Cholomondeley Goonewardene, and Anil Moonesinghe,
brought into the new cabinet. This led to the expulsion of the party
from the Fourth International. A section of the LSSP split to form the
LSSP (Revolutionary) and joined the Fourth International after the LSSP
proper was expelled. The LSSP (Revolutionary) later split into factions
led by Bala Tampoe and Edmund Samarakkody. Another faction, the "Sakthi" Group, led by V. Karalasingham, rejoined the LSSP in 1966.
In 1968, another faction of the LSSP (Revolutionary), led by
Keerthi Balasooriya split, to form the Revolutionary Socialist League –
more commonly known as the "Kamkaru Mawatha Group", after the name of their publication – and joined the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). In 1987, the group changed its name to Socialist Equality Party.
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.
Europe
In Britain during the 1980s, the entryist Militant group operated within the Labour Party with three members of parliament and effective control of Liverpool City Council. Described by journalist Michael Crick as "Britain's fifth most important political party" in 1986,
it played a prominent role in the 1989–1991 anti-poll tax movement,
which was widely thought to have led to the downfall of British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The most enduring of several Trotskyist parties in Britain has been the Socialist Workers Party, formerly the International Socialists (IS). Its founder Tony Cliff
rejected the orthodox Trotskyist view of the USSR as a "deformed
worker's state." Communist-party regimes were "state capitalist."
The SWP has founded several front 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,
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. Allegations of rape and sexual assault
made against a leading party member developed into a dispute over the practice of democratic centralism (defended by the party's international secretary Alex Callinicos).
In April 2019, a rival 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 Socialist Party in Ireland was formed in 1990 by members who had been expelled by the Irish Labour Party's leader Dick Spring. It has had support in the Fingal electoral district and the city of Limerick. In 2018, it had three elected officials in Dáil Éireann. Paul Murphy representing Dublin West (Dáil constituency),
Mick Barry representing Cork North-Central (Dáil constituency), and Ruth Coppinger representing Dublin West (Dáil constituency). The Socialist Party was also involved in different alliances such as Solidarity, United Left Alliance, People Before Profit–Solidarity and Cross-Community Labour Alternative with other left-wing and often trotskyist movements.
In Portugal's October 2015 parliamentary election, the Left Bloc won 550,945 votes, translating into 10.19% of the expressed votes and 19 (out of 230) deputados (members of parliament).
Although founded by several leftist tendencies, it still expresses much
of the Trotskyist thought upheld and developed by its former leader, Francisco Louçã.
In Turkey, there are some Trotskyist organizations, including the International Socialist Tendency's section (Revolutionary Workers' Socialist Party), Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International's section (Revolutionary Workers' Party), Permanent Revolution Movement (SDH), Socialism Magazine (sympathizers of the International Committee of the Fourth International), and several small groups.
- France
LCR protesters marching in a workforce demonstration in favour of public services and against privatization
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.
In 2002, three trotskyist candidates ran in the election. Arlette Laguiller of Workers' Struggle (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.
International
The Fourth International derives from the 1963 reunification of the two public factions into which the Fourth International split in 1953: the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI) and some sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International
(ICFI). It is often referred to as the United Secretariat of the Fourth
International, the name of its leading committee before 2003. The USFI
retains sections and sympathizing organizations in over 50 countries,
including France's Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) and sections in Portugal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Pakistan.
The International Committee of the Fourth International maintains its independent organization and publishes the World Socialist Web Site.
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 claim they were expelled from the CWI when the CWI abandoned entryism. The CWI claims they left, and no expulsions were carried out. Since 2006, it has been known as the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). CMI/IMT groups continue the policy of entering mainstream social democratic, communist or radical parties. Currently, International Marxist Tendency (IMT) 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.
Criticism
Trotskyism has been criticised from various directions. In 1935, Marxist–Leninist Moissaye J. Olgin
argued that Trotskyism was "the enemy of the working class" and "should
be shunned by anybody who has sympathy for the revolutionary movement
of the exploited and oppressed the world over." The African American Marxist–Leninist Harry Haywood,
who spent much time in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s,
stated that although he had been somewhat interested in Trotsky's ideas
when he was young, he came to see it as "a disruptive force on the
fringes of the international revolutionary movement" which eventually
developed into "a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Party and
the Soviet state". He continued to put forward his following belief:
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.
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."
Some left communists, such as Paul Mattick,
claim that the October Revolution was totalitarian from the start and,
therefore, Trotskyism has no fundamental differences from Stalinism in practice or theory.
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. 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".
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