Trotskyism

• 1. Introduction

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  Trotskyism stands as one of the most contested and consequential political traditions of the twentieth century. On the 20th of August 1940, in Mexico City, an NKVD agent named Ramon Mercader attacked Leon Trotsky in his own home, and Trotsky died in a hospital the next day. By that point, almost all Trotskyists inside the Soviet Union had already been shot during the Great Purges of 1937-1938. The man who had led the Red Army, who had co-organized the October Revolution, and whom Lenin once described as "the most able man in the present Central Committee" had been hunted to the end of the earth by the state he helped create. What beliefs made Trotskyism so threatening to Stalinist power? Why did the ideology survive its founder's assassination and spread to Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and beyond? And what did Trotsky actually argue that differed so sharply from the Soviet orthodoxy that sent agents after him across three continents?

• 2. Permanent Revolution

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  In 1905, Trotsky formulated the theory that would become the defining characteristic of the movement bearing his name. At the time, many revolutionaries held that Marx's theory of history required a European capitalist society to undergo revolution first. Russia, they argued, was too feudal, too backward, with too small a working class to sustain socialism on its own. Trotsky rejected this entirely. He argued that only the working class could overthrow feudalism and win peasant support, and that Russia's working class would not stop at removing the tsar. They would go further, overthrowing the weak capitalist class and establishing a workers' state. He developed these arguments in detail in Results and Prospects, written in 1906, in which he quoted the French Revolution of 1789 as a case that Russia could not simply repeat: "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." For Trotsky, the revolution had to be permanent in a precise sense. It would move, without pause, from a bourgeois phase to a workers' revolution, and from there to an international socialist revolution. He drew on a remark from Karl Marx's March 1850 Address, in which Marx had called for revolution to continue "until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions." Trotsky's biographer Isaac Deutscher explicitly contrasted Trotsky's internationalism with any appetite for military adventurism. His documented opposition to the war with Poland in 1920, his proposed armistice with the Entente, and his caution about staging revolts in the Middle East all showed that permanent revolution was a theory, not a reckless program of confrontation. Political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz confirmed that Stalin's portrayal of the theory as defeatist and adventurist was a deliberate misrepresentation during the succession struggle.

• 3. The Split with Stalin

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  Pavel Milyukov, the ideological leader of Russia's Constitutional Democratic Party, coined the term "Trotskyism" as early as 1905 to describe what he saw as a dangerous politics of proletarian insurrection. Trotsky noted this in a postscript to Milyukov's book, The Elections to the Second State Duma, published no later than May 1907. In those early years, the term was a slur. After 1917, Trotsky and Lenin worked closely together, and Lenin never used the concept of Trotskyism after Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks. Historians including E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, and Ronald Suny concluded that Lenin's preferred successor would have been a collective leadership in which Trotsky played an important role and Stalin was demoted or removed. In a document dictated before his death in 1924, Lenin called Trotsky the most able man in the Central Committee. He also requested Stalin's removal from his position of General Secretary. Those notes were suppressed until 1956. What Trotsky called the "legend of Trotskyism" was constructed beginning in 1924 by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in collaboration with Stalin, as a direct response to Trotsky's criticisms of Politburo policy. Historian Orlando Figes argued that the impulse to silence Trotsky was itself a crucial factor in Stalin's rise. By October 1927, Stalin had removed Trotsky from power. By November, he was expelled from the All-Union Communist Party. He was sent to internal exile in Alma-Ata in January 1928 and expelled from the USSR entirely in February 1929, eventually moving through Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico. Meanwhile, the Left Opposition had been quietly organizing inside Russia. Supporters like Victor Serge were arrested. Serge described spending 85 days in a GPU cell, most of it in solitary confinement. Stalin declared at a Central Committee session in 1927, addressing the Opposition directly: "Those cadres can be removed only by civil war!" The threat became, as Trotsky wrote, a historic fact.

• 4. Democracy and Workers' Control

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  Trotsky's book Our Political Tasks, published in 1904, had already flagged the dangers of substitutionism, the tendency for a party to substitute itself for the working class rather than enabling workers to govern themselves. His concern with democratic participation ran throughout his career. In 1905, as chairman of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Delegates, he wrote proclamations calling for improved economic conditions, political rights, and the right to strike. By 1917, he was proposing the election of a new Soviet presidium on proportional representation, with other socialist parties included. In 1923, Trotsky and a group of Old Bolsheviks who signed The Declaration of 46 raised formal concerns to the Politburo about intra-party democracy. They objected to the way provincial conferences, party congresses, and committee elections were being run. The following year, Trotsky published the New Course, developing these arguments further. In 1927, the United Opposition's joint platform demanded that workers hold majority representation in trade union congresses and that at least one-third of elected organs be composed of non-party workers. They called for legal protection of workers' right to criticize, including the right to make independent proposals. According to historian Vadim Rogovin, these measures would have extended workers' control over economic management in a meaningful way. In The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936, Trotsky argued for restoring the right of criticism in economic matters, revitalizing trade unions, and holding free elections of Soviet parties. He also contended that Stalin's excessive authoritarianism had undermined the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan. He cited the case of engineers and economists who had designed the plan and were later put on trial as "conscious wreckers who had acted on the instructions of a foreign power." In 1932-33, Trotsky wrote that running a planned economy was "insoluble without the daily experience of millions, without their critical review of their own collective experience" and could not be accomplished, even by "seven Marxes, or seven Lenins", without mass participation.

• 5. Economics and Planning

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  Trotsky was an early proponent of economic planning from 1923 onward, and in 1921 he had supported the newly established Gosplan and called for strengthening its formal responsibilities. Lenin and members of the Politburo had discussed appointing him deputy chairman with a focus on economic matters. Trotsky had actually proposed the principles underlying the New Economic Policy to the Politburo in 1920 to address the crisis created by war communism, though his position differed from other Soviet leaders in that he believed planning and the NEP should coexist in a mixed framework until socialist industry gradually overtook private business. He found allies among economic theorists and administrators including Evgenii Preobazhensky and Georgy Pyatakov, deputy chairman of the Council of the National Economy. Trotsky and the Left Opposition developed proposals in response to the scissor crisis of 1923-1924, when the gap between industrial and agricultural prices was undermining relations between workers and peasants. Their program included a progressive tax on wealthier sections of the population such as the kulaks and NEPmen, a balanced import-export account to purchase machinery from abroad, and encouragement of agricultural cooperatives on a voluntary basis. As president of the electrification commission, Trotsky also put forward a plan for the construction of the hydroelectric Dniprostroi dam. Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick noted scholarly consensus that Stalin later appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on industrialization and collectivization. The key difference, as Ernest Mandel argued, was brutality. Trotsky sought to raise taxes on wealthier farmers and encourage collective farms voluntarily, with state support in the form of machinery, fertilizers, credit, and agronomic assistance. British cybernetician Stafford Beer, who worked on Project Cybersyn, a decentralized planning initiative, from 1970 to 1973, was reported to have read and been influenced by Trotsky's critique of the Soviet bureaucracy.

• 6. The Fourth International

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  Trotsky founded the International Left Opposition in 1930, originally intending it as a reform pressure group within the Comintern. Membership or even suspected membership led to immediate expulsion, which forced the conclusion that opposing Stalinism from within was impossible. In 1933, the organization renamed itself the International Communist League, and in 1938 it became the Fourth International, founded in Paris. The proximate cause was the defeat of the German working class and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Trotsky argued this outcome flowed directly from the Communist International's Third Period policy, which had refused cooperation with Social Democrats against fascism. He had developed a theory of fascism specifically to analyze the emergence of Italian fascism and the rise of Nazi Germany between 1930 and 1933. Marxist economist Hillel Ticktin argued that Trotsky's strategy, an organizational bloc between the German Communist Party and the Social-Democratic Party, would very likely have prevented Hitler from coming to power. At the time of the Fourth International's founding in 1938, Trotskyism had become a mass political current in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Bolivia. China had a substantial Trotskyist movement that included Chen Duxiu, the founding father of the Chinese communist movement. The transitional programme, drafted for the founding congress, outlined three types of demands: democratic demands such as union rights and self-determination; immediate demands such as wage increases; and transitional demands aimed at the capitalist system itself, like workers' control of production. The Fourth International fractured in 1953 over disagreements about whether the Communist Parties could reform under pressure. Michel Pablo's faction believed they could; James P. Cannon of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party argued they could not, and his Open Letter to Trotskyists of the World became the organizing document for the rival International Committee of the Fourth International.

• 7. Global Reach

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  In Vietnam, the Trotskyist movement led by Ta Thu Thau was a significant force in Saigon and Cochinchina throughout the 1930s. In 1929, writing in the French Left Opposition publication La Verite, Ta Thu Thau condemned the Comintern for leading Chinese communists "to the graveyard" through its support for the Kuomintang. For a period, his Struggle group, centered on the newspaper La Lutte, was strong enough to compel the Indochinese Communist Party to collaborate with Trotskyists in presenting a common Workers Slate for Saigon municipal and Cochinchina Council elections. Ta Thu Thau was captured and executed by the Stalinist-front Viet Minh in September 1945. Many of his fellow organizers were killed in the period that followed, caught between the Viet Minh and the French colonial reconquest. In Sri Lanka, Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera helped found the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in 1935. After expelling its pro-Moscow wing in 1940, the LSSP became a Trotskyist-led party. It won ten seats in the 1947 general election and became the main opposition party. In Bolivia, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario became a mass party in the late 1940s and early 1950s and played a central role during the Bolivian National Revolution. In Britain, the entryist Militant group operated within the Labour Party during the 1980s with three members of parliament and effective control of Liverpool City Council. Journalist Michael Crick described it in 1986 as "Britain's fifth most important political party." In Argentina, the Movimiento al Socialismo founded in 1982 by Nahuel Moreno claimed to be the largest Trotskyist party in the world before fragmenting in the late 1980s. An electoral front including the Communist Party and MRS won 580,944 votes, representing 3.49% of the total, in 1989. Even the late Hugo Chavez declared himself a Trotskyist during the swearing-in of his cabinet two days before his inauguration on the 10th of January 2007, though Venezuelan Trotskyist organizations contested that claim.

• 8. Culture, Morality, Science

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  Literature and Revolution, Trotsky's examination of art and the Russian Revolution, was described by Soviet scholar Robert Bird as the "first systematic treatment of art by a Communist leader" and a starting point for later Marxist cultural theory. In it, Trotsky defended cultural autonomy and criticized Futurism while arguing that socialist culture had to absorb what was valuable in bourgeois artistic traditions. Literary critic Terry Eagleton wrote that Trotsky recognized, like Lenin, the need for socialist culture to absorb "the finest products of bourgeois art." In 1938, Trotsky co-authored the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art with the endorsement of Andre Breton and Diego Rivera. Trotsky also defended Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Einstein's theory of relativity in Soviet intellectual circles during the succession period, before both were marginalized under Stalin and only rehabilitated after Stalin's death. In Problems of Everyday Life, Trotsky argued that cultural development and industrial progress were interrelated, not opposed. He held that Western industrial techniques like radio should not be rejected because they originated under capitalism but should be absorbed into the Soviet framework. His 1923 literary survey, which called for tolerance, limited censorship, and respect for literary tradition, had strong appeal to the New York Intellectuals. On the question of political morality, his 1938 essay Their Morals and Ours responded to critics who accused Bolshevism of operating by the principle that the ends justify the means. Trotsky acknowledged the accusation was not a trivial one and rejected a simple defense. He argued instead that means and ends frequently exchanged places, and that socialism could not be advanced through fraud or the worship of leaders. Honesty and integrity, he insisted, were essential elements of revolutionary morality in dealing with working people. Political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz noted the sharp distinction between Trotsky's approach to culture and Stalin's cultural policies in the 1930s, a gap that shaped the divergent traditions these two figures left behind.