What is Trotskyism and how does it differ from Stalinism?
Trotskyism is the political ideology developed by Leon Trotsky as a branch of Marxism and Leninism. It differs from Stalinism primarily in its opposition to the theory of socialism in one country, its support for permanent revolution and socialist internationalism, its advocacy for workers' democracy and decentralized economic planning, and its condemnation of the bureaucratic authoritarianism that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
What is Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution?
Trotsky formulated the theory of permanent revolution in 1905. It holds that in feudal countries like Russia, only the working class could overthrow the old regime and that the revolution would not stop at a bourgeois-democratic stage but proceed to a workers' state. From there, the revolution must spread internationally because a socialist economy in one backward country could not sustain itself against a hostile capitalist world.
When and where was Leon Trotsky assassinated?
Leon Trotsky was attacked on the 20th of August 1940 in Mexico City by Ramon Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent. He died in a hospital the following day. His murder is considered a political assassination ordered by Stalin.
When was the Fourth International founded and why?
The Fourth International was founded in Paris in 1938. Trotsky and his supporters established it after concluding that the Comintern, or Third International, had become irretrievably lost to Stalinism and incapable of leading the international working class. The defeat of the German working class and Hitler's rise to power in 1933 accelerated that judgment.
Where did Trotskyism become a mass movement outside Europe?
At the time of the Fourth International's founding in 1938, Trotskyism was a mass political current in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Bolivia. In Sri Lanka, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party became the main opposition party in the 1947 general election. In Bolivia, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario played a central role during the Bolivian National Revolution in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
What did Leon Trotsky write about art and culture?
Trotsky wrote Literature and Revolution, which Soviet scholar Robert Bird described as the first systematic treatment of art by a Communist leader. He also co-authored the 1938 Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art with the endorsement of Andre Breton and Diego Rivera. Trotsky defended cultural autonomy, advocated tolerance and limited censorship, and argued that a proletarian culture was transitional and would eventually give way to a culture above class divisions.