Trotskyism

The name

The term "Trotskyism" was first used by Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), who in his 1907 collection on the elections to the Second State Duma recalled the "revolutionary illusions" of Trotskyism at the meetings of October–November 1905. In the 1905 Revolution Trotsky, as chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet, pursued a policy of proletarian revolution, and in that year developed what became known as the theory of permanent revolution.

Inside the Bolshevik party the word returned in the "literary discussion" of autumn 1924. When Trotsky published "Lessons of October" as the preface to the third volume of his collected works, a Pravda editorial written by Bukharin used the term "Trotskyism" for the first time since 1917; in November Kamenev's "Leninism or Trotskyism?", Zinoviev's "Bolshevism or Trotskyism?" and Stalin's "Trotskyism or Leninism?" followed. Lenin had never mentioned the concept after Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. Trotsky called it the "legend of Trotskyism" formulated by Zinoviev and Kamenev with Stalin in 1924, but as a label for views hostile to Lenin's it remained in official Soviet historiography and Marxism until the late 1980s. Its adherents called themselves the Left Opposition, Bolshevik–Leninists or revolutionary Marxists.

Theory

Trotsky named five elements distinguishing his programme: the strategy of permanent revolution against his opponents' two-stage theory; criticism of the post-1924 Soviet leadership and, after 1933, support for political revolution in the USSR; social revolution in the advanced capitalist countries through working-class mass action; proletarian internationalism; and a transitional programme of demands bridging daily struggles and the socialist transformation of society.

At the centre of the analysis of the USSR stands the degenerated workers' state. Trotsky held that the October Revolution had laid a socialist foundation by expropriating the means of production, but that roughly between 1923 and 1929 the bureaucracy took power from the proletariat. He treated the bureaucracy as a specific caste, not a new class — it held no shares or bonds and was recruited through the administrative hierarchy — and rejected describing it as a class of "state capitalists". Trotskyism is also associated with the united front against the far right, workers' control and soviet democracy, voluntary collectivisation and rapid industrialisation. Its main texts are The Permanent Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed (1936) and The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938), the Transitional Programme that became the Fourth International's programme.

From party opposition to international current

In October 1923 Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee and Central Control Commission demanding more democracy in the party, while his supporters sent the Politburo the Declaration of the 46. The Left Opposition thus formed joined Zinoviev and Kamenev in the United Opposition of 1926 and was defeated. Trotsky was removed from power in October 1927, expelled from the party in November, exiled to Alma-Ata in January 1928 and deported from the USSR in February 1929. After 1928 communist parties worldwide expelled Trotskyists, and anyone who disagreed with the party line was labelled a Trotskyist; almost all Trotskyists within the party were executed in the Great Purges of 1937–1938.

Abroad, Trotsky founded the International Left Opposition in 1930 as an opposition within the Comintern. Since members were expelled at once, it concluded that new organisations were needed, became the International Communist League in 1933, and formed the basis of the Fourth International founded in Paris in 1938, on the view that the Comintern had been irretrievably "lost to Stalinism". On 20 August 1940 Trotsky was attacked in Mexico City by the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader and died the next day.

Trotskyist movements

When the Fourth International was founded in 1938, Trotskyism was a mass current in Vietnam and Sri Lanka and, slightly later, Bolivia. In China, Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Chinese communist movement, joined the Communist League of China formed in 1931 at Trotsky's urging. In Saigon, Tạ Thu Thâu's La Lutte group was strong enough for a time to run a common workers' slate with the Indochinese Communist Party, until Tạ Thu Thâu was executed by the Viet Minh in September 1945. Sri Lanka's Lanka Sama Samaja Party, founded in 1935, expelled its pro-Moscow wing in 1940 to become Trotskyist-led and was the main opposition after the 1947 election. Bolivia's Revolutionary Workers' Party (POR) became a mass party in the late 1940s and early 1950s and played a central role in the Bolivian National Revolution. Wherever Stalinists gained power, they hunted Trotskyists as their worst enemies.

After 1945 Trotskyism was smashed as a mass movement in Vietnam and marginalised in many other countries. The Fourth International described the new Eastern European regimes as "deformed workers' states" in 1951 and split in 1953 over Michel Pablo's line. Trotskyist coalitions such as Argentina's Workers' Left Front still hold parliamentary seats.

Neighbouring concepts

Trotskyism is distinct from its components and organisations. Permanent revolution, formulated by Trotsky in 1905, became its defining characteristic, but Trotskyism also comprises the theory of the degenerated workers' state, the transitional programme and the building of an international. The Left Opposition was the 1920s faction within the Soviet party; the Fourth International is the international organisation the current founded in 1938. Its relation to Leninism is contested. Trotskyists hold that since 1917 Trotskyism has been fully committed to Leninist democratic-centralist organisation and cite Lenin's testament and his 1922–23 alliance with Trotsky against the Soviet bureaucracy; Stalinists called Trotskyists revisionists whose views differed from Lenin's, and Trotskyists, while claiming Leninism, do not call themselves Marxist–Leninists. On the Marxist spectrum Trotskyists are usually placed on the left, though distinct from today's left communism, which is usually non-Bolshevik.