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Trotskyism
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Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual^[1][2] Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg.

Trotsky advocated for a decentralized form of economic planning,^[3] elected representation of Soviet socialist parties,^[4][5] mass soviet democratization,^[6] the tactic of a united front against far-right parties,^[7] cultural autonomy for artistic movements,^[8] voluntary collectivisation,^[9][10] a transitional program^[11] and socialist internationalism.^[12] He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, and a dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", which Marxists argue is a major component of capitalism) based on working-class self-emancipation and council democracy. Trotsky also adhered to scientific socialism and viewed this as a conscious expression of historical processes.^[13] Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favour of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists criticize the bureaucracy and anti-democratic current developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky, despite their ideological disputes, were close personally prior to the London Congress of Social Democrats in 1903 and during the First World War. Lenin and Trotsky were close ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Trotskyists and some others call Trotsky its "co-leader".^{[note 1][14]} This was also alluded to by Rosa Luxemburg.^[15] Lenin himself never mentioned the concept of "Trotskyism" after Trotsky became a member of the Bolshevik party.^[16] Trotsky was the Red Army's paramount leader in the Revolutionary period's direct aftermath. Trotsky initially opposed some aspects of Leninism^[17][18] but eventually concluded that unity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was impossible and joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky played a leading role with Lenin in the October Revolution. Trotskyists have traditionally drawn upon Lenin's testament and his alliance with Trotsky in 1922–23 against the Soviet bureaucracy as primary evidence that Lenin sought to remove Stalin from the position of General Secretary.^[19] Various historians have also cited Lenin's proposal to appoint Trotsky Vice-Chairman of the Soviet Union as further evidence that he intended Trotsky to be his successor as head of government.^{[20][21][22][23][24]}

Assessing Trotsky, Lenin wrote:

"Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on, there has been no better Bolshevik."^[25]

In 1927, Trotsky was purged from the Communist Party and Soviet politics. In October, by order of Stalin,^[26] Trotsky was removed from power and, in November, expelled from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (aka: VKP(b)). He was exiled to Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in January 1928 and then expelled from the USSR in February 1929. As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose what he termed the degenerated workers' state in the USSR. On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent, and died the next day in a hospital. His murder is considered a political assassination. Almost all Trotskyists within the VKP(b) were executed in the Great Purges of 1937–1938, effectively removing all of Trotsky's internal influence in the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev had come to power as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine, signing lists of other Trotskyists to be executed. Trotsky and the party of Trotskyists were still recognized as enemies of the USSR during Khrushchev's rule of the USSR after 1956.^[27] Trotsky's Fourth International was established in the French Third Republic in 1938 when Trotskyists argued that the Comintern or Third International had become irretrievably "lost to Stalinism" and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power.^[28]

Definition

According to Trotsky, his programme could be distinguished from other Marxist theories by five key elements:

• Support for the strategy of permanent revolution in opposition to the two-stage theory of his opponents.^[29][30]
• Criticism of the post-1924 leadership of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and analysis of its features,^[31] after 1933, also support for political revolution in the USSR and what Trotskyists term the degenerated workers' states.
• Support for social revolution in the advanced capitalist countries through working-class mass action.
• Support for proletarian internationalism.^[32]
• Use of a transitional programme of demands that bridge between daily struggles of the working class and the maximal ideas of the socialist transformation of society.^[33]

On the political spectrum of Marxism, Trotskyists are usually considered to be on the left. In the 1920s, they called themselves the Left Opposition, although today's left communism is distinct and usually non-Bolshevik. The terminological disagreement can be confusing because different versions of a left-right political spectrum are used. Anti-revisionists consider themselves the ultimate leftists on a spectrum from communism on the left to imperialist capitalism on the right. However, given that Stalinism is often labelled rightist within the communist spectrum and left communism leftist, anti-revisionists' idea of the left is very different from that of left communism. Despite being Bolshevik-Leninist comrades during the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War, Trotsky and Stalin became enemies in the 1920s and, after that, opposed the legitimacy of each other's forms of Leninism. Trotsky was highly critical of the Stalinist USSR for suppressing democracy and the lack of adequate economic planning.^[26]

Theory

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Until 1905, some revolutionaries^[34] claimed that Marx's theory of history posited that only a revolution in a European capitalist society would lead to a socialist one. According to this position, a socialist revolution could not occur in a backward, feudal country such as early 20th-century Russia when it had such a small and almost powerless capitalist class. In 1905, Trotsky formulated his theory of permanent revolution, which later became a defining characteristic of Trotskyism.

The theory of permanent revolution addressed how such feudal regimes were to be overthrown and how socialism could establish itself, given the lack of economic prerequisites. Trotsky argued that only the working class could overthrow feudalism and win the peasantry's support in Russia. Furthermore, he argued that the Russian working class would not stop there. They would win their revolution against the weak capitalist class, establish a workers' state in Russia and appeal to the working class in the advanced capitalist countries worldwide. As a result, the global working class would come to Russia's aid, and socialism could develop worldwide.

According to political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz, Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” was grossly misrepresented by Stalin as defeatist and adventurist during the succession struggle when in fact Trotsky encouraged revolutions in Europe but was not at any time proposing “reckless confrontations” with the capitalist world.^[35]

Capitalist or bourgeois-democratic revolution

Revolutions in Britain in the 17th century and in France in 1789 abolished feudalism and established the essential requisites for the development of capitalism. Trotsky argued that these revolutions would not be repeated in Russia.

In Results and Prospects, written in 1906, Trotsky outlines his theory in detail, arguing: "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."^[36] In the French Revolution of 1789, France experienced what Marxists called a "bourgeois-democratic revolution"—a regime was established wherein the bourgeoisie overthrew the existing French feudalistic system. The bourgeoisie then moved towards establishing a regime of democratic parliamentary institutions. However, while democratic rights were extended to the bourgeoisie, they were not generally extended to a universal franchise. The freedom for workers to organize unions or to strike was not achieved without considerable struggle.

Passivity of the bourgeoisie

Trotsky argues that countries like Russia had no "enlightened, active" revolutionary bourgeoisie which could play the same role, and the working class constituted a tiny minority. By the time of the European revolutions of 1848, "the bourgeoisie was already unable to play a comparable role. It did not want and was not able to undertake the revolutionary liquidation of the social system that stood in its path to power."

The theory of permanent revolution considers that in many countries that are thought under Trotskyism to have not yet completed a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the capitalist class opposes the creation of any revolutionary situation. They fear stirring the working class into fighting for its revolutionary aspirations against their exploitation by capitalism. In Russia, the working class, although a small minority in a predominantly peasant-based society, was organised in vast factories owned by the capitalist class and into large working-class districts. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, the capitalist class found it necessary to ally with reactionary elements such as the essentially feudal landlords and, ultimately, the existing Czarist Russian state forces. This was to protect their ownership of their property—factories, banks, etc.—from expropriation by the revolutionary working class.

Therefore, according to the theory of permanent revolution, the capitalist classes of economically backward countries are weak and incapable of carrying through revolutionary change. As a result, they are linked to and rely on the feudal landowners in many ways. Thus, Trotsky argues that because a majority of the branches of industry in Russia originated under the direct influence of government measures—sometimes with the help of government subsidies—the capitalist class was again tied to the ruling elite. The capitalist class was subservient to European capital.^[37]

The incapability of the peasantry

The theory of permanent revolution further considers that the peasantry as a whole cannot take on the task of carrying through the revolution because it is dispersed in small holdings throughout the country and forms a heterogeneous grouping, including the rich peasants who employ rural workers and aspire to landlordism as well as the poor peasants who aspire to own more land. Trotsky argues: "All historical experience shows that the peasantry are absolutely incapable of taking up an independent political role".^[38]

The key role of the proletariat

Trotskyists differ on the extent to which this is true today. However, even the most orthodox tend to recognise in the late twentieth century a new development in the revolts of the rural poor: the self-organising struggles of the landless, along with many other struggles that in some ways reflect the militant united, organised struggles of the working class, which to various degrees do not bear the marks of class divisions typical of the heroic peasant struggles of previous epochs. However, orthodox Trotskyists today still argue that the town- and city-based working-class struggle is central to the task of a successful socialist revolution linked to these struggles of the rural poor. They argue that the working class learns of the necessity to conduct a collective struggle, for instance, in trade unions, arising from its social conditions in the factories and workplaces; and that the collective consciousness it achieves as a result is an essential ingredient of the socialist reconstruction of society.^[39]

Trotsky himself argued that only the proletariat or working class were capable of achieving the tasks of that bourgeois revolution. In 1905, the working class in Russia, a generation brought together in vast factories from the relative isolation of peasant life, saw the result of its labour as a vast collective effort, also seeing the only means of struggling against its oppression in terms of a collective effort, forming workers councils (soviets) in the course of the revolution of that year. In 1906, Trotsky argued:

The factory system brings the proletariat to the foreground The proletariat immediately found itself concentrated in tremendous masses, while between these masses and the autocracy there stood a capitalist bourgeoisie, very small in numbers, isolated from the "people", half-foreign, without historical traditions, and inspired only by the greed for gain.

— Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects^[40]

For instance, the Putilov Factory numbered 12,000 workers in 1900 and, according to Trotsky, 36,000 in July 1917.^[41]

Although only a tiny minority in Russian society, the proletariat would lead a revolution to emancipate the peasantry and thus "secure the support of the peasantry" as part of that revolution, on whose support it will rely.^{[38][note 2]} However, to improve their conditions, the working class must create a revolution of their own, which would accomplish the bourgeois revolution and establish a workers' state.

International revolution

Only fully developed capitalist conditions prepare the basis for socialism. According to classical Marxism, a revolution in peasant-based countries such as Russia ultimately prepares the ground for capitalism's development since the liberated peasants become small owners, producers, and traders. This leads to the growth of commodity markets, from which a new capitalist class emerges.

Trotsky agreed that a new socialist state and economy in a country like Russia would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world and the internal pressures of its backward economy. Trotsky argued that the revolution must quickly spread to capitalist countries, bringing about a socialist revolution that must spread worldwide. In this way, the revolution is "permanent", moving out of necessity first, from the bourgeois revolution to the workers' revolution and from there uninterruptedly to European and worldwide revolutions.

An internationalist outlook of permanent revolution is found in the works of Karl Marx. The term "permanent revolution" is taken from a remark of Marx in his March 1850 Address: "it is our task", Marx said:

to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far—not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world—that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.

— Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League^[42]

His biographer, Isaac Deutscher, has explicitly contrasted his support for proletarian internationalism against his opposition to revolution by military conquest as seen with his documented opposition to the war with Poland in 1920, proposed armistice with the Entente and temperance with staging anti-British revolts in the Middle East.^[43]

Socialist democracy

Prior to the October Revolution, Trotsky had been part of an old radical democracy which included both Left Mensheviks and Left Bolsheviks.^[44] His work, Our Political Tasks, published in 1904 reviewed issues related to party organisation, mass participation and the potential dangers of substitutionism which he foresaw in a Leninist party model.^[45] In 1917, he had proposed the election of a new Soviet presidium with other socialist parties on the basis of proportional representation.^[4]

In 1922, Lenin allied with Leon Trotsky against the party's growing bureaucratisation and the influence of Joseph Stalin.^{[46][47][48][49][50]} In 1923, Trotsky and a number of Old Bolsheviks signed The Declaration of 46 which paralleled Lenin's proposed party reforms before his death. This group demanded a greater expansion of inner-party democracy along with the elections of congress delegates, regional-level and central-level committees.^[51] Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Trotskyism
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