What is Trotskyism?

What is Trotskyism?

1. THEORY OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION. This claims that socialism can only be successful if revolution occurs in all the advanced capitalist countries at once; and that all attempts at building socialism in a single country that has carried out a successful revolution are bound to fail.

Since this hypothetical simultaneous revolution has so far failed to materialise in real life (and is unlikely ever to do so), this position simply means that Trotskyists always end up denouncing all the real revolutions that have taken place, and furiously attacking any country that has not only carried out a revolution but actually had the temerity to go on and try to build socialism.

2. ANTI-LENINISM IN ORGANISATION. Leninism calls for the building of a revolutionary, disciplined proletarian revolutionary party, which is able to act with unity and is hostile to opportunist elements. Trotskyism stands for a loose mish-mash of whoever wants to sign up; for reformists and opportunists to be allowed into the ranks of the proletarian party; for the formation of groups, factions and cliques within a single party. No wonder no Trotskyist party has ever led a revolution!

3. HOSTILITY TO LENINIST LEADERS. We are constantly told that Trotsky was the true ‘inheritor’ of Lenin and one of the authors of the Russian revolution, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Trotsky was an enemy of Lenin and Leninism until the eve of the revolution, and only joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 when it was obvious they were going to win. In 1913, Trotsky described Lenin as a “professional exploiter of every kind of backwardness in the Russian working-class movement”, and went on to say that the “entire edifice of Leninism at the present time is built on lies and falsification and bears within itself the poisonous elements of its own decay”. (Letter to Chkeidze)

If Trotsky could express such ill-mannered views about Lenin before the revolution, while doing his best to undermine the building of a truly revolutionary party in Russia, it is not surprising that he went on to shower vile abuse on Lenin’s faithful pupil Stalin after the revolution – while furiously working to undermine the building of socialism in the USSR that was being led by the Bolshevik party. Trotsky’s attacks on ‘Stalinism’ were actually just the continuation of his lifelong struggle against Leninism. The counter-revolutionary nature of Trotskyism explains why Trotsky is held up to schoolchildren throughout the imperialist world as the ‘real’ revolutionary!

Uniting the counter-revolutionaries

Because of its reactionary content, Trotskyism inevitably attracted all those elements that were striving to weaken and destroy socialism in the USSR. With a passionate hatred of socialism and workers’ power, these elements strove for the overthrow of the Soviet regime, and, fully backed by imperialism, supported Trotsky abroad after his expulsion from the USSR. And the same type of people have continued to call on workers to rally around Trotskyism, even after it morphed from being a mistaken political trend within the working-class movement into “a frantic and unprincipled gang of wreckers, diversionists, spies and murderers acting on the instructions of the intelligence services of foreign states”. (Stalin, March 1937)

Ever since then there has been a kind of division of labour between the imperialists and the Trotskyists, who have worked in tandem to slander and defame the Soviet system, its government, its institutions and its leadership – all so as to belittle and discredit the achievements of socialist construction.

Trotsky went to the despicable length of equating fascism with ‘Stalinism’, and imperialists have hung on to that useful slander ever since, using it to confuse workers and combat communist influence. Moreover, Trotsky actually predicted the defeat of the USSR in WWII. He would have been devastated to witness the crowning victory of socialism over fascism, but was saved that final humiliation thanks to his assassination by one of his own followers in Mexico in 1941.

Not surprisingly, Trotskyism has supported every counter-revolutionary movement against socialism, from the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the so-called Prague Spring of 1968 to the counter-revolutions that swept through eastern and central Europe in the late 1980s, and which finally brought down the once great and glorious USSR in 1991.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, as a result of the revisionist economic and political policies set in place under Khrushchev after Stalin’s death, Trotskyite organisations went delirious with joy. Beside a photograph of a toppled statute of the great Lenin, the Socialist Worker declared that “Communism has collapsed. It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing. ” It even claimed that Yeltsin’s counter-revolution had brought “the workers of the Soviet Union closer to the spirit of the socialist revolution of 1917, not further form it”. (31 August 1991)

Two years later, Labour’s 1993 election defeat led the same SWP to suffer a deep “depression” and “post-election demoralisation”, declaring that “the election was a disaster for everyone who wants a better society”. What could better demonstrate the incurably anti-popular nature of the SWP than its malicious glee at the fall of the Soviet Union and its heart-aching pain at the fourth consecutive electoral defeat of the imperialist Labour party, with its proven track record of attacks on the working class at home and wars against the oppressed peoples abroad?

Trotskyism is a thoroughly counter-revolutionary trend marked by double-speak and cynical hypocrisy. It practises sectarianism and factionalism while calling for unity; it supports imperialist wars against the oppressed while mouthing phrases about anti-imperialism; it facilitates attacks on the working class through its cretinous support for the Labour party, while pretending to oppose such attacks; it supports counter-revolutions everywhere in the name of defending revolution.

Right in essence and left in form is the best way of describing this malicious tendency, which everywhere sows confusion and division in the working-class movement, making us weaker to defend ourselves against the onslaught of imperialism. If we wish to liberate our world from imperialist exploitation and oppression, we must first rid our movement of all pro-imperialist, social-democratic ideology, not least the r-r-revolutionary garbage of Trotskyism.