Taking on Trotskyism

The first things that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed, immediately after the October revolution, were the soviets, the workers' councils and all the democratic bodies. In this respect Lenin and Trotsky were the worst enemies of socialism in the 20th century.

Certain characteristics are shared by most Trotskyist groups.

(1)   They are committed to the outdated concept of Bolshevism and fail to see revolution as involving the vast majority of the working class, but as a minority action in which the party leads the masses to the violent overthrow of the existing State. All Trotskyist organisations start from the premise that workers are too stupid to understand or want socialism by their own volition. Therefore, revolutionary ideas have to be introduced from outside the working class by all-knowing 'professional revolutionaries' who will lead workers to the promised land.

(2)   Trotskyists have a Bolshevik attitude to political democracy. Not only are their organisations based on Leninist democratic centralism whereby power flows from the leadership downwards.

(3)   They accept the Leninist conception of socialism (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as 'the first stage' of Communism and reject the claim that socialism and communism both mean a stateless, propertyless, classless society which can be attained immediately.

(4)    Trotskyists are reformists, advocating a list of what Trotsky called 'transitional demands'. These range from demands for a minimum wage to giving advice to the Government on how to run foreign policy. In theory, Trotskyists claim to be under no illusion that the reforms demanded could be achieved within the framework of capitalism but are posed as bait to get workers to struggle for them and that the workers would learn in the course of the struggle that these demands could not be achieved within capitalism and so would come to struggle (under the leadership of the vanguard party) to abolish capitalism.

In discussion with them you gain the clear impression that they share the illusion that the reforms they advocate can be achieved under capitalism (as, indeed, some of them could be). In other words, they are often the victims of their own "tactics".

(5)   They usually all advise workers to vote for the Labour Party when it comes to election time despite their professed recognition that Labour is a capitalist party. The sad thing is they think they are changing the Labour Party yet it is Labour is changing them.

The Socialist Party is hostile to all defenders of capitalism, but none more than those who preserve capitalism in the name of fighting for socialism. Trotsky was no different in principle than Stalin. As Anton Ciliga  put it:

“Trotsky as well as Stalin wished to pass off the State as being the proletariat, the bureaucratic dictatorship over the proletariat as the proletarian dictatorship, the victory of State capitalism over both private capitalism and socialism as a victory of the latter.”

 In exile Trotsky played the role of "loyal opposition" to the Stalin regime in Russia. He was very critical of the political aspects of this regime (at least some of them, since he too stood for a one-party dictatorship in Russia), but to his dying day defended the view that the Russian revolution had established a "Workers State" in Russia (whatever that might be) and that this represented a gain (whatever that was) for the working class both of Russia and of the whole world. how could the adjective "workers" be applied to a regime where workers could be sent to a labour camp for turning up late for work and shot for going on strike? Trotsky was only able to sustain his point of view by making the completely unmarxist assumption that capitalist distribution relations (the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could exist on the basis of socialist production relations. Marx, by contrast, had concluded, from a study of past and present societies, that the mode of distribution was entirely determined by the mode of production. Thus the existence of privileged distribution relations in Russia should itself have been sufficient proof that Russia had nothing to do with socialism. Trotsky rejected the view that Russia was state capitalist on the flimsiest of grounds: the absence of a private capitalist class, of private shareholders and bondholders who could inherit and bequeath their property. He failed to see that what made Russia capitalist was the existence there of wage-labour and capital accumulation not the nature and mode of recruitment of its ruling class.

Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. This meant that, in contrast to Lenin who mistakenly saw state capitalism as a necessary step towards socialism, Trotsky committed the different mistake of seeing state capitalism as the negation of capitalism. Trotskyism, the movement he gave rise to, is a blend of Leninism and Reformism, committed on paper to replacing private capitalism with state capitalism through a violent insurrection led by a vanguard party, but in practice working to achieve state capitalism through reforms to be enacted by Labour governments.

Our analysis of Trotskyism is not based upon some narrow sectarianism—it's based upon principle. We do not, nor have we ever, supported capitalist parties, especially those that dress up in revolutionary garb in order to hoodwink the workers. Trotskyists represent all the political mistakes made by the working class last century—from the Labour Party to the Soviet Union. Trotskyism is the mirror image of Stalinism. Trotskyists have never liked to admit that they are simply Leninists who did not like Stalin's continuation of what Lenin began. We do not doubt that well-meaning individuals get caught up in such chicanery for no other reason than a desire to see a better world. However, sentiment can never be a substitute for truth.