The fact that
Trotskyism developed in Russia and for a short period "coexisted"
with Marxism-Leninism in the Bolshevik Party had an enormous impact
on the development of Trotskyism, its fate and role. By virtue of
this, Trotskyism became especially suitable for operating and
maneuvering both in relation to social democracy and communism.
Defected
revolutionary hero
It is well known
that Trotsky, by virtue of his considerable personal skill, became
one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution and the Civil
War. During this period, Trotsky did not dare to openly attack Lenin
and Leninism, who had enormous authority within the Bolshevik Party
and the international communist movement that organized the Third
International, the Comintern.
Trotsky's
ideological and political platform –fully developed Trotskyism –
was completely rejected by the Bolshevik Party in 1927. Of its nearly
750,000 members, the Trotskyist platform (which denied that it was
possible to build socialism in the Soviet Union alone) received the
support of less than one percent. But Trotsky (and the rest of the
opposition in the Bolshevik Party) also had supporters in a number of
communist parties in the capitalist countries. In the late 1920s and
early 30s, there was a struggle in a number of parties between the
line of supporters of Lenin and Stalin, on the one hand, and the line
of Trotsky and the opposition, on the other. The battle ended in
defeat for the Trotskyists and the opposition. Many of them went over
to the social democratic parties.
From 1923
Trotsky began to talk about the "degeneration" of the party
and Soviet power. Later, he began to describe the Soviet Union as a
society that was neither capitalist nor socialist, but a degenerate
workers' state, ruled by a bureaucracy that held power and used it
for everything evil. When Trotsky went into exile, he was welcomed
with open arms in the imperialist world, including by the Social
Democrats, who saw Trotsky's defection as confirmation of their own
criticism of the revolution. Then followed the period of Trotsky's
struggle against Stalin and the socialist Soviet Union from abroad,
and the secret subversion by the Trotskyists inside the country, in
the party and in the state.
Trotskyism came
into vogue. It became international. It came as life-giving water to
the western media's propaganda mill, which had used the white
counterrevolutionaries' outright lies about the communists. Trotsky's
weapons against the Soviet Union, Stalin and the Communists had the
advantage that they did not come from an overtly bourgeois group –
which had an obvious interest in capitalism and possibly the
restoration of tsarism – but from the mouth of a revolutionary
hero. And his attack came from the "left".
It was at that
time that it became common in the US and Western press, owned by
multimillionaires, to attack Stalin and the CPSU for having
"betrayed" the revolution, for not being revolutionary,
socialist and communist enough.
In Trotsky's
articles and books, anti-communist intellectuals and bourgeois
propagandists found new formulations and angles for their attacks on
the construction of socialism, and they were more effective than
traditional anti-communist propaganda.
Trotskyism as
an international current
Trotsky was not
content to be a renegade revolutionary hero who earned large sums of
money by allowing himself to be used by the imperialist media. He
became the central figure in the attempts to build an international
political movement with Trotskyism as an ideological basis, the
Trotskyist world movement.
First he
organized his colleagues in the "International Left Opposition",
and in 1938 founded the Fourth International, for which he formulated
the theoretical basis of the so-called "Transitional Program".
This is still the basic material for the organization and its
national sections, e.g. the SAP [Socialist Workers Party] in Denmark.
Trotskyism,
however, had great difficulty in finding a "political space"
as an independent current. In the 1920s and 30s right up to the 60s,
two major organized currents existed in the labor movement: the mass
social democratic parties on a reformist basis and the communist
parties. Although Trotskyists relied heavily on gaining a foothold in
the Communist Parties, they were expelled not only from the CPSU, but
from the entire international communist movement. The social
democratic parties that supported Trotsky as a "defector"
and anti-Bolshevik did not need his talk of world revolution and his
other left-wing phrases.
In this
situation, the Trotskyists developed the so-called tactic of
"entryism " – a tactic that consists of infiltrating the
social democratic and communist parties and other organizations and
gradually finding Trotskyist supporters.
However, this
tactic was not particularly successful. Nowhere did it lead to the
mass support of social democratic and communist workers, as they had
hoped. The Trotskyist world movement entered into a protracted
crisis, which intensified during and after the war due to the fall of
Hitler and the emergence of the socialist camp.
The movement
broke into small groups fighting among themselves. However, the
tactics of entryism helped to ensure its survival. But it wasn't
until the 1960s – after the CPSU's 20th
Congress,
the "de-Stalinization" and the split in the international
communist movement – that the international Trotskyist movement
began to see light at the end of the tunnel. A broader political
field was now created for the Trotskyists in connection with the
growing crisis of social democracy and the advance of modern
revisionism in the international communist movement.
The Trotskyists
had some influence in the student revolt of 1968 and played their own
role in the development of the anti-communist “New Left" in
those years, not the least on the ideological level. Many of the
ideas and analyses of Trotskyism became part of the legacy of this
"New Left".
During this
period, the tactics of entryism were abandoned by most Trotskyist
organizations, but not by all. At the Fourth International’s 10th
World Congress in 1974, they passed a resolution on the building of
"revolutionary-Marxist" parties in Europe, parties which
supposedly would be "capable of leading the proletariat towards
the victory of the socialist revolution", as they stated. This
also assumed that the Fourth International was strengthened as the
leading center of the "world revolution".
Today, the
Trotskyist world movement feels strong enough to make a global push
against the revolutionary movement, to replace Marxism and Leninism
with Trotskyism as its ideological foundation, as the basic theory
and program of contemporary revolutionary movements.
Therefore, there
is every reason to take Trotskyism seriously as an international
current. After more than half a century of directing its main attacks
on the Soviet Union, the socialist countries and the communist
parties, Trotskyism is now actively working to deal a decisive blow
to communism and eradicate the theory and practice of the socialist
revolution, Marxism-Leninism, which the ruling imperialist
bourgeoisie still fears.
When we talk
about the Trotskyist world movement, we must be aware that it is not
an organizational or politically coherent entity. This is primarily
due to the Trotskyist ideology and platform itself, which is the
basis for countless divisions.
Ernest Mandel's
Fourth International headquartered in Brussels, for example, is not
the only one calling itself that. At a certain point in the 1970s,
there were as many as six centers that called themselves the Fourth
International.
Again and again,
new Trotskyist organizations and groups emerge in different
countries, and it always ends with infighting and competition between
them over strategy, tactics and politics.
Nevertheless,
they spring from a common ideology and share the same basic
principles and attitudes. They have the same basic features that
characterize all Trotskyist organizations, and their efforts are
pulling in the same direction. All this makes it perfectly justified
to sum up the fighting organizations and groupings as one political
current, Trotskyism, or the Trotskyist world movement.
Permanent
hopelessness
A main component
of Trotskyism is the theory of the permanent revolution, which
appears as the very key to the solution of the problems of world
revolution. In reality, it should be called the theory of permanent
hopelessness, because it concretely denies the possibility of the
victory of the revolution and the construction of socialism in a
particular country.
In short, the
starting point of the theory of the permanent revolution is the
particular Trotskyist analysis of imperialism. This analysis argues
that with the outbreak of the First World War, the death knell rang
for all national programs: the time for the world revolution has come
and it must be understood as a worldwide process, a global explosion,
or rather chain of explosions, in which capitalism is replaced by
socialism on a world scale.
According to
this theory, imperialism has transcended all national borders and has
become a whole that cannot be broken down step by step. This is
justified by capitalism's objective tendency towards the
globalization of the world economy and the domination of monopolies
over all key capitalist positions.
A simultaneous
global showdown with capitalism is therefore the necessary form that
the transition from capitalism to socialism must take. The task of
the revolutionaries is to await and prepare for this situation,
having created in advance a revolutionary organization on a world
basis to lead the revolution, a "General Staff of the World
Revolution". It is this role that the Fourth International has
awarded itself.
Consequently, no
concrete revolution can prevail, and socialism cannot be built in a
single country or group of countries. A revolution in a single
country, such as the October Revolution in Russia, can at most be the
spark that ignites the world revolution.
The construction
of a socialist society over a long period of time in a country or
group of countries is therefore, by definition, impossible.
Trotsky
described the world revolution as this all-encompassing global
explosion, and the Trotskyists have repeatedly proclaimed that the
world revolution is "just around the corner", "only a
few years" away. Of course, it has not appeared, but Trotskyism
acts the same way as the religious prophets of doom who set a date
for the end of the world. Every time it turns out that it does not
succeed, there will always be a new opportunity sometime in the
future.
On the basis of
this deeply unscientific and anti-Marxist theory of revolution,
Trotskyism must necessarily reject and criticize concrete revolutions
and attempts to build socialism that are actually taking place and
that the working class and its allies have carried out in a number of
countries in this [19th] century. None of them has been the spark
that could trigger the chain of explosion of the world revolution.
It is therefore
inherent in the theory of the permanent revolution that all concrete
revolutions in individual countries are doomed to failure.
/—/
Mandel’s
Fourth International described the Soviet Union as "a
bureaucratically deformed workers' state", as a special,
degenerate transitional society between capitalism and socialism, but
acknowledged that the October Revolution overthrew the capitalist
system in Russia. Others (such as the International Socialist
movement) start from the theory of the impossibility of building
socialism in one or more countries and deny that the Soviet Union
ever abolished capitalism. What Lenin and Stalin built was not
socialism, but "state capitalism" from start to finish.
Revolution
and the class struggle
For the
Trotskyists, history stopped in a certain sense in 1923. The world
revolution failed, according to Trotskyist concepts, as the Russian
Revolution did not trigger victorious revolutions in Western Europe,
as a springboard to the "final showdown".
Therefore,
Trotskyism perceives the great and rich revolutionary history of the
20th century as a single long "Stalinist" perversion.
According to the
Trotskyists, no real socialism was ever built in the USSR or the
other socialist countries. Trotskyism usually called them "degenerate
workers' states", a kind of transitional society that was
neither capitalist nor socialist.
The Trotskyists
claim that after Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union, the
revolution developed into a caricature, ruled by a perverted
"Stalinist bureaucracy". This "analysis" was then
repeated for all new socialist societies and countries.
It is a fact
that as soon as the revolution has triumphed in one country, the
Trotskyists have been busy slandering it, because according to their
logic it is impossible in every way. On the basis of the permanent
revolution, Trotskyism has strongly attacked all attempts to build
socialism, and above all the Soviet Union in Stalin's time,
ostensibly because they "postpone the world revolution" and
lead the world revolutionary process astray.
Thus, they also
have a ready-made explanation of why the "world revolution"
that they themselves have predicted has failed. It is Stalin and the
Communists' fault!
Crushing the
"Stalinist bureaucracies", according to the Trotskyists,
would have a necessary and stimulating effect on the progress of the
world revolution. Therefore, the Trotskyists greeted the
counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the other former socialist
countries with enthusiasm!
The crucial
problem for the Trotskyists is that reality, revolution and the
actual experiences of the international working class do not match
their theorizing and formulas.
The working
class has carried out the proletarian revolution in a large number of
countries and, furthermore, a large number of anti-colonial and
anti-imperialist revolutions have been carried out in this [19th]
century.
Socialism has
actually been built successfully in one country and later in a number
of countries. First of all, in the USSR, which, according to
Trotsky's predictions, had no chance of survival, not even for a few
years. Before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, he proclaimed that
the country would be crushed by the Nazi war machine.
But socialism
proved capable of resisting the fascist war of aggression, the most
brutal war the world has ever seen.
/—/
Lenin's
theoretical justification for the possibility of the revolution
triumphing and socialism being built in one country or group of
countries was the uneven development of imperialism. The victory of
the revolution in Russia and later elsewhere in the world and the
construction of these countries as socialist societies have, of
course, in practice disproved the Trotskyists' theory of the
impossibility of socialism. This is true even if these are former
socialist societies where capitalism has been resurrected. This is
not because of the "impossibility of socialism", but
because the class struggle continues in the socialist countries in
conjunction with the pressure and subversion of imperialism and
reaction to destroy socialism.
The fact that
socialism was concretely frustrated and defeated at a certain point
says nothing about the possibility or reality of revolution and
socialism in this country or these countries. On the other hand, it
tells us something about the sharp class struggle between socialism
and capitalism on a world scale. It tells us that the class struggle
continues even after the victory of the revolution and that there is
still the possibility of counterrevolution in one form or another,
and not only through imperialist war or invasion. It was something,
for example, that Lenin and Stalin constantly emphasized with great
severity, and they carried out the necessary countermeasures against
the counterrevolutionary forces.
Socialism in
one country
Let us for a
moment accept the Trotskyists' presumptions that all attempts to
build socialism have been defeated. That only capitalism exists in
the world. That a handful of imperialist powers control the whole
world; even in this case, the theory of permanent revolution does not
hold.
The revolution
is and will remain a concrete process in concrete countries or groups
of countries, not a simultaneous revolution across the globe.
This is as true
today as it was before the October Revolution.
During the First
World War, Trotsky himself linked his hopes not to a proletarian
revolution in Russia, but to the slogan of a United States of Europe.
He wrote: "In
these historical circumstances the working class, the proletariat,
can have no interest in defending the outlived and antiquated
national ‘fatherland’, which has become the main obstacle to
economic development. The task of the proletariat is to create a far
more powerful fatherland, with far greater power of resistance –
the Republican United States of Europe, as the foundation of the
United States of the World.
Against the stagnation of imperialism, the proletariat can only make
a socialist organization of the world economy as today's political
program."
Later, his
successors repeated this nonsense with many variations, including the
idea of a Republican United States of Europe. And it has even become
practical bourgeois politics. Lenin replied that the slogan of a
United States of Europe under capitalism
is "either impossible or reactionary":
A United States of the World
(not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and
freedom of nations which we associate with socialism -- until the
time when the complete victory of communism brings about the total
disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate
slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would
hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism;
second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the
victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may
also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to
the others….
“Hence, the victory of
socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist
country alone."
(Lenin:
On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, Aug. 1915)
A
revolutionary alternative?
The Trotskyist
theory of permanent revolution encompasses a wide range of aspects
beyond the erroneous conception of the world revolutionary process
and the rejection of the possibility of the victory of socialism in a
single country or group of countries. These other aspects of
Trotskyist ideology are also fundamentally opposed to Marxism and the
Leninist theory of revolution.
The ideology is
based on the lack of faith in the victory of the revolution in a
single country or group of countries and in the distrust of the
ability of the working class to rally allies around it in the
revolution, both in individual countries and on a world scale.
It denies the
gradual development of concrete revolutions and of the various
elements of the revolutionary world process. It denies the need for a
revolutionary strategy and tactics based on the level of development
of each country at all times and on the objective revolutionary tasks
facing it.
It therefore
underestimates the importance of the general democratic tasks, the
importance of the national, anti-imperialist and democratic aspect of
the revolutionary development on a world scale. It replaces a
complicated formulation of strategy and tactics based on the national
and international balance of forces, including the creation of the
broadest possible class and popular alliances and a broad, concrete
political program for the revolutionary movement in a particular
country, with schematic revolutionary formulas which, according to
the Trotskyists, are applicable everywhere.
/—-/
The basic
programmatic document expressing Trotskyism's conception of the
strategy and tactics of the revolutionary movement is still Trotsky's
"Transitional Program" of 1938.
The essence of
right-wing opportunism is to separate the day-to-day struggle from
the strategy for socialism, from the revolution and the socialist
goal. The social democratic parties of all shapes and sizes make the
day-to-day struggle everything and socialism nothing. "Left
opportunism", on the other hand, places the main emphasis on the
perspective, the goal, and denies the importance of the day-to-day
struggle and the demands of the day (in the broadest and most
comprehensive sense) as the only thing that can prepare the people
and develop the mass struggle to the level necessary to overthrow
capitalism in a revolutionary situation and replace the state of the
bourgeoisie with the new state of the working class.
Trotskyism
believes it has found an easy way around these questions: instead of
setting a series of day-to-day demands, each of which can be met
under capitalism and which can therefore mobilize and organize broad
fighting movements, the Trotskyist "Transitional Program"
sets out a number of demands. Of these demands it is stated that
"none
of the transitional demands can be fully realized as long as the
bourgeois regime continues to exist".
Thus, the "break with capitalism" can exist
as a concrete political possibility in any strike under capitalism,
any strike can develop into a "general strike" that leads
to "a struggle for power", to the creation of a so-called
"dual power" – in the Trotskyist, not the Leninist sense
– with workers' councils and strike committees. The Trotskyist
organizations raise this whole group of formulas in virtually every
labor struggle of even moderate importance.
These "radical"
demands and methods, which, among many other errors, include the fact
that they constantly overestimate the radicalization of the working
class, in practice work contrary to their intention: the
pseudo-revolutionary ideas are a line of defeat that ultimately give
the social democratic reformists free rein. At the same time, the
importance of the indispensable leading role of the revolutionary
(communist) party is disregarded, both in the day-to-day struggles
under capitalism and in a revolutionary situation.
This
fundamentally subjective assessment of the class movements and class
forces has the consequence that the patient organization of the mass
struggles and mass movement is rejected and means that the
Trotskyists are constantly tailing the spontaneous struggle. The
Trotskyists are always either in the doldrums or in a high state of
"revolutionary" exhilaration, helplessly carried away by
the alternating ebb and flow of the class struggle.
The most serious
flaw in the Trotskyist "Transitional Program" is the
bourgeois and reformist view of state power. In reality, it does not
at all raise the question of the class character of the bourgeois
state and the necessity for the bourgeois state to be overthrown
through revolution. The Trotskyists' conception of the state is
parallel to the social democratic one: the bourgeois state can be
used to promote socialism, so that more and more socialist elements
can be gradually and frictionlessly incorporated into it, for example
through nationalization. When Trotskyism adds certain ideas that a
"dual power", factory councils and soviets can be created,
even under normal capitalist conditions and not in a concrete
exceptional situation with a strong revolutionary wave, it is just a
"left-radical" icing of the old social democratic pie.
Between
social democracy and communism
Trotskyism
emerged as a centrist, conciliatory current between social democracy
and Lenin's Bolshevism, as a special "left wing" rooted in
social-democratic opportunism. This historical origin makes
Trotskyism particularly suitable for maneuvering between the two
basic lines of the workers' movement: social democratic reformism and
the line of revolutionary class struggle, the communist line, which
brings together class-conscious workers at the head of the entire
working class and broad popular forces in all the struggles of this
great revolutionary century.
Within this
field, Trotskyism as an international current has shifted in the
various historical periods – from before the October Revolution, in
the period as opposition in the CPSU, in the 1930s and during the
Second World War in the form of a current in exile that sought an
international foothold, and in the different post-war periods.
In the different
periods, the Trotskyists have used different tactics to establish a
kind of "third way" between the reformist, social
democratic line, which advocates preserving capitalism forever, and
the communist line of revolution, destroying the capitalist state and
building a new socialist society.
In its obituary
for Ernest Mandel, the International Socialists praised him precisely
for emphasizing the need to build a revolutionary alternative to both
the social democratic and the "Stalinist (read: communist)
parties" throughout the post-war period.
The fact that in
the post-war period, and especially since the 1960s, Trotskyism has
been given greater political scope is due to a number of factors:
The betrayal of
the working class and socialism by social democratic reformism has
become increasingly apparent and has led social democracy into a
strategic crisis. Its obvious role as the main support of capitalist
society, which is often preferred by the ruling bourgeois party,
naturally leads to disillusionment in the social base of the party,
among the members and voters from the working class. This is the main
reason for the strategic crisis in, among others, the Western
European social democratic parties, a crisis that for many decades
has undermined their positions and led to widespread defections of
their members and supporters.
Trotskyism is
addressed not the least to the ever-renewed current of the left that
is breaking with social democracy and reformism. The so-called
"revolutionary alternative" is intended to prevent the flow
from shifting to clearly revolutionary, communist positions.
/—/
In reality,
there are only two basic directions that are possible for the labor
movement: the bourgeois direction, reformism and opportunism, or
proletarian Marxism-Leninism. Either the path of class collaboration
to maintain capitalism, or the path of scientific socialism to create
the new socialist society. /—/
The parasitic
nature of Trotskyism
The ideology and
political sphere of action of Trotskyism, its historical role and
development, are the basis of one of the conspicuous features of the
movement and all its organizations: the role of parasites on the main
political currents of the labor movement and the mass struggle.
Trotskyism looks
right and left at the same time. Trotskyist organizations rarely
refer to themselves as Trotskyist, preferring other terms:
"revolutionary Marxists", "revolutionary socialists"
or even "democratic socialists" when they look to the
Social Democrats, while they present themselves as "Leninists"
and "Bolsheviks" when they look in the direction of the
communists.
In
above-mentioned resolution of the 10th World Congress of the Fourth
International, which put the building of "revolutionary parties"
on the agenda, these parties are called "revolutionary" and
"revolutionary-Marxist". They should be built on the basis
of the emergence of "a new vanguard of a mass character",
as it is called.
/—/
The confusion of
terms for the same thing – the organization and ideology of
Trotskyism – obviously contributes to making it difficult to
identify this current, which uses the definitions of other political
currents without inhibition.
The Trotskyists
regard the concrete struggles and movements of the working class both
as an opportunity to spread the Trotskyist schemes and formulas, and
as a field of activity for recruitment to the Trotskyist
organizations. It is the Trotskyist ideology and organizational
thinking that allows them not only to support such struggles in order
to develop them to the maximum, but always to introduce extraneous
purposes and intentions into the struggle, and it always ends with a
call to organize with the Trotskyists.
A furious
hatred of communism
The most
prominent feature of Trotskyism as an international current, a
feature that characterizes all Trotskyist groupings, is an
uncontrollable hatred of the communist parties based on the
foundations of Marxism-Leninism, and of all the successful
revolutions and attempts to build socialism that have taken place in
this century.
The history of
Trotskyism is first and foremost a constant struggle against
communism and Marxism-Leninism under the slogan of the "struggle
against Stalinism". Today, Trotskyism actively and to a large
extent contributes to revising the history of the working class and
socialism, a process that bourgeois historians are also engaged in.
Its aim is to rewrite and reinterpret the revolutionary struggles in
an anti-revolutionary direction.
The struggle of
Trotskyism against the Soviet Union and the international communist
movement during the Stalin era is well known.
During the
Gorbachev period, when the final transition to a Western-style
capitalist system was being prepared in the Soviet Union, the trials
of the 1930s against Trotskyists and others condemned as
counterrevolutionaries were labeled "show trials" and the
judgments "annulled." Western Trotskyists such as Isaac
Deutscher were summoned as Soviet experts and advisers to governments
on matters of the rehabilitation of the "innocent victims of
Stalin's terror" at the very time when the privatization of
social property was gaining momentum.
They were
accused of undermining socialism and trying to restore capitalism. It
is not accidental, of course, but historically perfectly logical,
that forces such as Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who actually carried out
the final restoration of capitalism and the dissolution of the Soviet
Union, acquitted their predecessors, who had been slowed down in
their counterrevolutionary activities.
However,
capitalist Russia's issuance of certificates of innocence and the
award of honors to the pioneers of the counterrevolution cannot
change the historical truth about these forces, which were fought
against under socialism and celebrated under capitalism.
We have to note
that the temporarily last act of socialism in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe also took place with expert Trotskyist assistance.
In the
service of counterrevolution
Today,
international Trotskyism is eagerly trying to rewrite the
revolutionary history of the 20th century in a Trotskyist spirit.
This is partly as a continuation of three-quarters of a century of
struggle against the international communist movement, and partly in
the attempt to replace Leninism with the theory and political
practice with Trotskyism.
Trotskyist
historiography is characterized by a pronounced hostility and
supercritical attitude towards the actual revolutions that have taken
place, by its attempts to hide or whitewash the real positions and
role of the Trotskyist movement as an active participant in these
processes, and by its attempts to hide the fact that it coincides
with a bourgeois revision of history.
It would take
far too far to review the entire revolutionary history of the [last]
century and the role of the Trotskyists in it. On all crucial points,
international Trotskyism has chosen a line that would have led to
defeat if it had been translated into mass politics. It would not
only have been, as it has been, a more or less limited obstacle to
the revolution, a source of confusion and division of the
revolutionary forces.
Let us take the
attitude of Trotskyism to the fight against fascism as an example:
Trotskyism was
opposed to support for the democratic countries attacked by fascism.
When the Soviet Union was later attacked by Hitler's Germany, and the
character of World War II thus changed, the Trotskyists declared that
the war was still a war between the imperialist powers, and opposed
the alliance between the Soviet Union, the United States and Great
Britain, which had a significant impact on the defeat of Hitler and
fascism.
In the post-war
period, Trotskyism's denial of the possibility of revolution and
socialism in one or several countries, the rejection of the
anti-fascist popular fronts and of the national and democratic
elements of the anti-imperialist struggle, have led the Trotskyists
into direct confrontation with national liberation movements led by
communist parties. In the Chinese Revolution, in Vietnam, Korea and
many other places, the Trotskyist groups and the Fourth International
itself stood against the strategies and lines that led to the victory
of these revolutions.
/—/
The Trotskyist
literature is overflowing with an unquenchable hatred of the
Communist Parties and, not the least, of their leaderships. It is a
sewer of invective and aggressive attacks on all the "Stalinists"
who spearheaded the greatest and most important popular struggles and
revolutions of this last (20th) century: Stalin and the leadership of
the CPSU, Georgi Dimitrov, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi-Minh, Kim Il Sung,
Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro and many more have been and continue to be
targets of the raging Trotskyist propaganda of incitement. Sometimes
it tries to camouflage the incitement as a "criticism of the
personality cults", but in its content it is directed at the
concrete revolutions, the construction of socialism and the leading
force in it, the communist parties.
In return, the
Trotskyist Tito and the Titoites defended Yugoslavia in its break
with the former socialist camp and the international communist
movement. They have always looked for fissures and divisions among
the communists in order to exploit them for their own ends. They
enthusiastically received Khrushchev's so-called "secret report"
on Stalin and the "showdown with Stalinism", which
initiated the counterrevolutionary process of modern revisionism,
which eventually led to the fall of socialism and the dissolution of
the Soviet Union. They saw this as a historical confirmation of their
own struggle against the formerly socialist Soviet Union and the
international communist movement.
Even the final
capitalist counterrevolution in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of
the Soviet Union were taken as proof of the correctness of
Trotskyism's theory of permanent revolution and the impossibility of
socialism in one country. Thus, Trotskyism contributes to concealing
the real historical course of the international class struggle and
the class struggle under socialism, thus appearing in parallel with
bourgeois historiography. It sees the entire Soviet period as a
single, static period without its own internal dynamics and course of
development, as an unfortunate parenthesis in world history that
basically "contradicts the course of history".
The genuine
communist parties are systematically slandered as undemocratic,
"Stalinist" command centers, as the dictatorship of the
leadership over the members, built on the discipline of the dead. It
is the Leninist principle of organisation, democratic centralism,
which is particularly attacked. It is this principle that allows the
parties to act uniformly and as a unified force in the class struggle
and revolution, which is the prerequisite for their vigor and makes
them parties of revolutionary action.
The role of
Trotskyism in Eastern Europe
Trotskyist
organizations played a particularly active role in the end game
surrounding the fall of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe. Counterrevolutionary movements such as Solidarity in Poland
and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia were hailed by the Trotskyists as
"genuine revolutionary movements". The Trotskyists combined
their energies with those of imperialism and the entire Western
reaction in supporting the victory of these "popular movements"
– that is, securing imperialism and the key positions of the
international monopolies in the economies of these countries as
Western-style capitalist systems.
In the past,
Tito's break with international communism in 1948, the
counterrevolutionary events in Poland and Hungary in 1956, and
Dubcek's so-called Prague Spring in 1968, his "socialism with a
human face", were hailed by the Trotskyists as genuine
revolutionary movements directed against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
/—/
The
Marxist-Leninists have repeatedly
stressed that the danger of
capitalist restoration also exists in those countries where the
revolution has triumphed and socialism has been built, and that the
class struggle continues under socialism with the support of world
imperialism and reaction. A peaceful counterrevolution is not only a
theoretical and political possibility.
After the defeat
of Hitler's Germany, which had tried in vain to crush socialism by
force of arms, and the development of nuclear weapons, which would
turn a war against socialism into an adventure with enormous risk
also for imperialism, the strategy of peaceful counterrevolution, the
strategy of the degeneration of socialism from within, became the
very core of imperialism's struggle against socialism.
The arms and
nuclear race were also methods which, through sustained pressure,
would contribute to the degeneration of the Communist Parties and the
socialist states, and at the same time increase and sharpen all
contradictions, exploit all the flaws, shortcomings and problems of
these countries in order to fan the flames of discontent and unrest.
It is obvious
that Mandel and his Fourth International, these self-appointed
experts of the socialist revolution, were completely and
fundamentally wrong when they proclaimed that the "political
revolution" they celebrated was no threat to the achievements of
socialism, and would rule out any possibility of returning to
capitalism. The activities and false assurances of the Trotskyists
were an active part of the counterrevolution in the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe.
Mandel
enthusiastically welcomed the fall of the
Wall and the "mass popular movements" used as tools of open
counterrevolution.
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