This page is dedicated to the memory of Leon Trotsky
on the 60th anniversary of his murder by the Stalinists.
If you are interested in learning about Trotskyism, then this is the page for you. Here, you can discover for yourself what Trotsky wrote and did during his life and how supporters of Trotskyism are continuing this work today. Trotskyism and Marxism have been under a truly massive attack by the whole of the Western bourgeois media, by the monstrous Stalinist lie machine, by soggy liberal academics, posturing anarchist muddleheads and by the Stalinophobic and Stalinophilic far left. They have been smothered by a mountain of downright lies, half-truths, distortions and the cynical, selective use of facts. Academics have made their careers by writing a lot of drivel about Marxism and Trotskyism. So forget all the rubbish you have been taught in your schools and universities about Marxism (and some of us work in these institutions, for our sins, so we know what goes on). Open your eyes, and minds, and learn!
Overview of Trotskyism -- a quick summary of Trotskyism.
What is the Fourth International? -- an introduction to the international organisation which Trotsky established in 1938.
Perhaps the best place to start a study of Trotsky's works is his brief, but extremely enlightening, account of why he and his co-thinkers, the Left Opposition, were defeated by Stalin after Lenin died: How Did Stalin Defeat the Opposition? (1935). Here is an Introduction (May 2005) to this short but very important document.
1) The Transitional Programme, the founding document of the Fourth International (1938).
2) Results and Prospects and The Theory of Permanent Revolution (two works written in 1905 and 1932)
3) History of the Russian Revolution
4) My Life (Trotsky’s autobiography)
5) The Class Nature of the Soviet State
6) Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism
9) Fascism (pamphlet)
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Eisenstein's "Potemkin"
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Eisenstein's "October"
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The titles and text accompanying the clips below are those of the video uploaders at YouTube
Trotsky. (Photo Stills of Trotsky to the Accompaniment of the "Internationale" in Russian)
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Léon Trotsky. (More Photo Stills of Trotsky to the Accompaniment of the "Internationale" in Russian)
Museo Casa de León Trotsky - El Universal Televisión (House Museum of Leon Trotsky)
Reportaje de Válek Rendón sobre el Museo Casa de León Trotsky, en México. El Universal Televisión, transmitido en el canal 40. valek.rendon@gmail.com
Canción a Trotsky (Song to Trotsky)
Canción dedicada a uno de los mas brillantes revolucionarios del siglo 20 leon trotsky. Musica y letra de pato cerpa grupo SiKuS. (Song dedicated to one of the most brilliant revolutionaries of the twentieth century. Words and music by the group SiKus).
Old Clips of Leon Trotsky
The Russian Revolution. Part 1/5
Leon Trotsky — Part 2/5: "The Russian Civil War"
Leon Trotsky — Part 3/5: "The Left Opposition"
Leon Trotsky — Part 4/5: "Exile and the 4th International"
Leon Trotsky — Part 5/5: "Exile and Death"
Trotsky speech about the Moscow Trials (complete)
Transcript: "Stalin's trial against me is built upon false confessions, extorted by modern Inquisitorial methods, in the interests of the ruling clique. There are no crimes in history more terrible in intention or execution than the Moscow trials of Zinoviev-Kamenev and of Radek-Piatakov. These trials develop not from communism, not from socialism, but from Stalinism, that is, from the irresponsible despotism of the bureaucracy over the people! What is now my principal task? To reveal the truth. To show and to demonstrate that the true criminals hide under the cloak of the accusers. What will be the next step in this direction? The creation of an American, a European and subsequently, an international commission of inquiry, composed of people who incontestably enjoy authority and public confidence. I will undertake to present to such a commission all my files, thousands of personal and open letters in which the development of my thought and my action is reflected day by day, without any gaps. I have nothing to hide! Dozens of witnesses who are abroad possess invaluable facts and documents which will shed light on the Moscow frame-ups. The work of the commission of inquiry must terminate in a great countertrial. A countertrial is necessary to cleanse the atmosphere of the germs of deceit, slander, falsification and frame-ups, whose source is Stalin's police, the GPU, which has fallen to the level of the Nazi Gestapo."
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Right click and select "Save Target as" to download an MP3 audio file of Trotsky speaking
Right click and download an MP3 audio file of Lenin speaking.
Midi file of "The
Internationale"
Midi file of "Bandiera Rossa"
Anarchists -- supporters of a petty-bourgeois ideology that opposes Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism. They reject the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Leninist party, and echo the anti-communist slanders of bourgeois ideology about the role of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. Anarchists, while engaging in much militant posturing and provocative actions against the capitalist state, lack class political independence. The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, for example, joined, and politically endorsed (alongside the Stalinists) the bourgeois Republican government in Catalonia.
Bourgeois(ie) -- the employing class, factory owners, bankers, the bosses.
Bourgeois "Democracy" -- a synonym for parliamentary democracy. However, under this system there is no democracy, whatsoever, in any institution that has any real power: the military, the police, the judiciary, the civil service, the media, the education system and other public services. Crucially, there is no democracy, at all, in the workplace in relation to what is produced and how it is distributed. The upper echelons of all othese institutions are firmly in the unelected grip of the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois "democracy" is thus the masked dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Elections under this system amount to the right to choose one's own executioner. Marx, in one of his very first works pointed out that although everyone is equal before the law and has the same right to vote under bourgeois democracy, the massive inequalities in wealth subvert this formal equality. Power resides with money not with a piece of paper, such as the US constitution, that says that the poor person has exactly the same rights as a rich person. Just thinking about what actually goes on in political life confirms this. Bourgeois democracy has been aptly summarised as "the best democracy that money can buy". The rich person has access to the best lawyers, to powerful lobby groups, PR firms, right-wing think-tanks that form the basis of the policy issue communities surrounding all the ministries of state and government. It is these lobby groups, financed by the wealthy and the corporations, that determine what actually happens in government--not the electorate. The corporations, and their lobbyists, have constant direct access to the ministries that make the decisions. And the civil servants and politicians often later find plum jobs in the corporations to which they have awarded lucrative government contracts while in office. The links between the Bush adminstration and Haliburton and Bechtel are a case in point. Both the US mainstream parties are financed by the big corporations. The rich control the mass media which parrots their interests. The tabloid newspapers are their attack dogs deployed against anyone that threatens their interests. Just take a look at any US election campaign. The whole process is a farce from beginning to end. Both of the mainstream political parties are financed by big corporations. It doesn't matter who is voted into office--the politicians are all bought and paid for by the corporations which will decide what the goverrment does through their permanent direct line to the ministries that make the decisions. The corporate media announces in advance who the "front runners" are in any elections for party leadership or government office and quietly ignores, and sidelines, candidates it does not favour. The media does this by over-reporting its favoured candidates and undereporting candidates who are out of favour. Bourgeois democracy is a regime of creeping and patronage. It is actually only "democracy" for those with the money to finance massive election campaigns, democracy for the employers and its corrupted, co-opted agents in the workers' movement. While the working class has formal democracy (the right to vote) it is in practice excluded from real decision-making. It is politically disenfranchised by lack of money, resources, skills, quality education, access to the mass-media, by political illiteracy and by the fraught and chaotic conditions of its existence. The monied capitalist oligarchy has all these resources in abundance. Importantly, bourgeois "democracy" is only tolerated as long as the capitalists are able to have their own way through conning and misleading working people. They do this through the skilful manipulation of ideas. This is accomplished through control of the mass-media, through the promotion of religious obscurantism and the deployment of the warped educational curriculum that teaches only those "facts" that support the continuation of the status quo. When this ideological manipulation fails, "democracy" is suspended and open dictatorship is imposed. This most often happens during war-time and in the poorer countries of the so-called "Third World" where class contradictons are at their sharpest: when the poor revolt against extreme poverty, oppression and war, they are ruthlessly suppressed by the local bourgeoisie, with the tacit support of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries. In the richer countries of the capitalist First World, the superprofits sucked out of the poor Third World countries are used to cushion the upper layers of the working class (the "labour aristocracy") in these countries from the the kind of grinding poverty that is experienced in the Third World. This allows sufficient scope for concessions to the working class so that a state of generalised revolt is rarely reached. The class contradictions are usually not sharp enough to threaten the social and political hegemony of the capitalist elite. Bourgeois democracy is thus a luxury that is generally affordable, on an extended basis, only in the richer countries.
Capitalism -- an economic system in which the predominant means of production (factories, mines, banks etc.) and distribution is owned and controlled by the private sector. That is, industry and banking is owned privately by billionaire individuals or private corporations and not socially (collectively) by the working people who produce the goods. The state may own and adminster some industries (state capitalism), but under capitalism they are subordinated to the interests of the private sector. Under this system, goods (including people) are exchanged as commodities and the capitalist property owners exploit (rob) the workforce of a part of the value it creates during production.
Centrism -- a political tendency which occupies the middle ground between consistently revolutionary politics and consistently counterrevolutionary, that is, reformist politics. A centrist tendency or organisation is neither consistently revolutionary nor consistently reformist. It vacillates (switches) between these two poles periodically according to which way the political winds blow. It is often identified with pacifist positions which are neither the national chauvinist positions of the reformists nor the internationalist positions of consistent revolutionaries. Centrism is usually an unstable, temporary formation. It is associated with the mindset of the intermediate strata between the working class on the one hand and the big bourgeoisie on the other (the petty bourgeoisie). Centrist organisations generally move either towards consistently revolutionary politics or collapse into reformism. There is a wide spectrum of possible centrist positions. Right-centrist tendencies are closer to reformist positions than revolutionary positions. Left-centrist tendencies are closer to revolutionary political positions than reformist positions. But centrists are usually in motion from one position to another under pressure from the working class on one side and the big bourgeoisie on the other. An unusual form of centrism, which has been in existence for much longer than most centrist tendencies, is the phenomenon of Trotskyist-centrism. Almost all of the present day Trotskyist organisations fall into this category. These organisations have been around for over half a century. Their leaderships have proved to be inconsistently revolutionary and they thus fall into the category of centrism. Yet they still formally adhere to the Trotskyist programme and actually implement it, or elements of it, from time to time--albeit in an inconsistent way. A very real, concrete example of this kind of inconsistency is the recent erratic behaviour of the largest Trotskyist organisation, the USFI, in relation to the Lula government in Brazil. The longevity of this type of Trotskyist-centrism is thus explained precisely by its inconsistent relationship, its continuing ambivalent adherence, to the Trotskyist programme and the continuing influence of the ideas of Trotsky on the ranks, and some of the leaders, of these organisations.
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. A much misundertood term because of the untruths that have been spread about its actual meaning by the Western capitalist media and by bought and paid for Western academics. Essentially, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the enforcement of law and order by the security forces of an elected workers government in the immediate aftermath of a socialist revolution. The Bolshevik government was elected by the workers and soldiers councils (soviets) that sprang up when the Czar was overthrown in February 1917. He was overthrown by a population that was sick of the slaughter resulting from Russia's disastrous participation in the First World War. The Bolsheviks ended that participation as soon as they came to power. Since the time of Marx, who first used the term, the dictatorship of the proletariat was seen as a temporary necessity because all revolutions (including bourgeois revolutions) have been followed by reactionary, violent counterrevolutions which attempt to restore the old order. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the domestic and foreign capitalists, rich peasants, feudal landlords, liberals and reformists attempted to sabotage, and forcibly overturn, the revolution. They formed a White Army to attack the workers' government. This led to a 3 year civil war which the Red Army, led by Trotsky, decisively won. The dictatorship of the proletariat was, and is, necessary, on a temporary basis, to defeat such counterrevolutionary forces. Western "historians" (and muddleheaded anarchists) have attempted to muddy the waters by conflating the dictatorship of the proletariat with the Stalinist dictatorship. This is simply disingenuous nonsense. The dictatorship of the proletariat during the period 1917-23 (when Lenin and Trotsky were leading members of the Bolshevik government) consisted of the enforced disarmament of former capitalists, landlords and their White Army supporters who were violently attacking the Bolshevik government. After Lenin died (as a result of health problems resulting from an assassination attempt by a counterrevolutionary) and Trotsky was ousted from the government, the Stalinist dictatorship began, for the first time, to repress workers, poor peasants and dissident Old Bolsheviks as well as capitalists and landlords. Trotsky led a determined struggle against Stalin and the degeneration of the revolution for the rest of his life until he was assassinated by Stalin in 1940. Western "historians" gloss over this inconvenient fact. Trotsky has been airbrushed from history by both Western "historians" and Stalinists. Many radical theories about social and political change, which reject the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, are based on the idea that the wealthy classes and nations can be persuaded to part with their wealth by moral pressure and argument. According to this view, social change can be effected peacefully if a good enough argument is made and sufficent moral pressure is applied to the capitalist oligarchies and the wealthy imperialist governments. Dream on. All history demonstrates that this view, sadly, is naïve in the extreme. Non-violent direct action is simply ineffective. Ghandhiist pacifism demobilised the Indian nationalist movement by refusing to prepare the working class to overthrow British rule and take power into its own hands. This would have removed the possibility of the corrupt native bourgeoisie taking power when the British left. A workers' government would have taken the steps necessary to abolish the conditions of grinding poverty which hundreds of millions of Indians experience today. An important reason for the British withdrawal was the dramatic spread of "Communism" (Stalinism) after the Second World War. Britain feared that India might go the same way as "Communist" China unless formal national "independence" was granted. The British retreated in the face of this perceived threat. Another important factor, of course, was the dramatic growth of US power at the end of the war. The US insisted that the old colonial system should be dismantled and that it should be replaced by a system of Latin American-style semi-colonialism with an equal right to super-exploit the semi-colonies granted to all the imperialist powers. That is, direct colonialism was replaced by "remote control" colonialism. The Western imperialists maintained their oppression of these nations via manipulation, bribery and intimidation of the national bourgeois or feudal classes which they now placed in power as their local agents. The IMF, World Bank and UN "peace keeping" forces (perceptively described as "collective colonialism" by Abdul Nasser) were set up for this very purpose. Ghandhiism, and national independence, failed to liberate the millions of poor people in India from abject, grinding poverty. Mandela's political collapse into a peaceful, negotiated settlement has failed to liberate the black majority in townships like Soweto from massive poverty. The South African white capitalists still control the economy in their own narrow selfish interests. AIDS is rampant among black South Africans because they remain second class citizens and are regarded as expendable. In Ireland, the "troubles" began in the late 1960s as a non-violent protest movement against gerry-mandering and slum housing (see Eamonn McCann's book War in an Irish Town) which was repressed by the Protestant B-Special police auxilliaries and which culminated in the Bloody Sunday massacre. Over a dozen unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by the British parachure regiment. This incident prompted the turn to armed resistance and the dead end of the Provisional IRA bombing campaign. Sinn Fein's recent political collapse into the mis-named "peace process" (actually a reactionary imperialist pacification process) hit the brick wall of Paisleyism for a decade until Sinn Fein abandoned all its principles and embraced the colonial state including the police force that had repressed it for centuries. Sinn Fein implemented privatisation programmes in the first colonial northern Ireland assembly--in effect doing the British imperialists' dirty work for them. The new northern Irish Assembly will see a repeat of these betrayals. Bobby Sands must be rolling in his grave. See the publication Fourthwrite for more on this. In Palestine the PLO's political collapse at Oslo has hit a literal brick wall (the West Bank "Security" Fence). History shows that the monied capitalist classes will fight tooth and nail to hang on to their ill-gotten property. The only time they will part with some of it is if revolutionary movements threaten them with the loss of everything. When the European powers (mistakenly) feared the spread of "Communism" (Stalinism) at the end of World War 2, they granted certain reforms, e.g the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain and national independence in India. At such times, reforms can be prised out of the capitalists' grubby, blood-stained hands, under duress, but only if they fear the loss of all their wealth. Reforms are thus the by-product of revolution or the fear (real or imagined) of revolution. However, reforms can be taken back--and this is exactly what is happening today. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the perception of "Communist" (Stalinist) "threat" has receded and this has led to a sharp acceleration of the privatisation of the NHS and other public services in Britain. We are also seeing the re-emergence of direct colonialism (Grenada, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, the vast expansion of US bases worldwide). [Further reading: Lenin: The State and Revolution. This work was written on the eve of the October Revolution and was written with anarchists in mind].
Fourth International -- the international revolutionary socialist party set up by Trotsky in 1938 to take over from the collapse and betrayal of previous Internationals.
Imperialist -- The term imperialism, in its loosest sense, originates from the words "empire" and "emperor"--the ruler of an empire. But Lenin used the term in a more specific sense in his Marxist classic Imperialism: the Higheest Stage of Capitalism (1916). The imperialist system emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The earlier establishment of colonial empires by the European powers facilitated the looting of resources and money from the colonies and the amassing of wealth and capital in what became known as the rich imperialist powers. The period of imperialism was characterised by the export of some of this capital back to the colonies, not to benefit them, but to further exploit them through the extraction of massive superprofits, which further enriched the imperialist powers at the expense of the colonies. Today, although direct colonial rule has diminished, there is in its place a system of "semi-colonialism" or "neo-colonialism", that is to say, remote control colonialism--a system forced upon the world at the end of World War 2. The direct domination of the European colonial powers was ended by the emergence of the USA as the dominant imperialist power in 1945. As a result, the US's preferred system, the Latin American model of remote-control imperialist domination, gradually became generalised throughout the world during the post war period. This was also a direct result of the emerging power of the Soviet Union which extended its Stalinist system of degenerated workers' states to much of Asia, eastern Europe and Cuba. The possibility of the further spread of Stalinism to other countries, along with the establishment of mass "Communist" (Stalinist) parties in many countries in the immediate post-World War 2 period, brought home to the Western imperialists the fact that they could no longer maintain direct rule over the colonies. The combination of anti-colonial nationalism and "Communism" was very potent. Stalinist-led anti-colonialism was too strong a force for the former colonial powers to handle. The Western imperialists were obliged, therefore, to grant formal independence to their colonies in order to take the nationalist wind out of the sails of the Third World "Communist" movement. For example, Britain did not want a repeat of the 1949 Chinese Revolution in India or Africa so it granted formal independence. A retreat from direct colonial rule to remote control imperialist rule became necessary using the co-opted national bourgeoisie of the colonies as the agency of remote control. The UN also acted as an agency of collective colonialism--as Nasser noted. Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we have see a return to direct rule colonialism in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. The ever present threat of bombing, economic sanctions and recolonistion by the imperialist powers ensures that the process of looting of resources continues in the colonies and semi-colonies.
liberals (with a small "l") -- adherents of a branch of bourgeois ideology, which rejects conservative, narrow-minded prejudices, but defends bourgeois "democracy". The most important consequence of liberalism, and the thing that separates it from Marxism, is capitulation to national chauvinism. In times of major wars between the imperialist powers, liberals support the war effort of their "own" nation. A good example of this was during the First World War when the post-February 1917 governments in Russia continued the war until overthrown by the Bolsheviks--at which point Russia was withdrawn from the war. Liberals' support for war is often rationalised by the idea that they are defending bourgeois "democracy" against real, imagined or fabricated "dictatorship", "fascism" or "weapons of mass destruction" etc. Liberals have contempt for consistent Marxists precisely because they are proletarian internationalists while all liberals are, at bottom, patriotic chauvinists. Liberals occasionally oppose minor wars by big imperialist powers against small Third World nations on pacifist grounds until the fighting actually begins--at which point they collapse. And when major inter-imperialist wars develop, involving their "own" country, they are liable to collapse very quickly. Under pressure from powerful waves of national chauvinist propaganda, they invariably end up supporting war, albeit "reluctantly".
Petty-bourgeois(ie) -- an intermediate layer between the big employers and the working class: small business people (e.g small shop or restaurant owners), small land-owning peasants and farm-owners, self-employed professionals, the lower echelons of the intelligentsia, the lower middle class. Ideological viewpoints which reflect this layer (e.g. anarchism, Stalinism) tend to attack both the ideologies of the big employers (e.g. neo-liberalism) and the working class (i.e. consistent Marxism).
Reformism -- a political tendency that claims that the most that can be done to improve matters for the working class is to seek piecemeal reforms within the capitalist system. A consequence of reformism is social patriotism. In 1914, the reformist parties of the Second International in all European countries, except Russia, supported the war effort of their "own" countries--sending their own working class memberships to fight each other in the bloodbath that was the First World War. Only the Russian section of the Second International (under Bolshevik leadership) opposed the war. Another corrollary of reformism is the consequence that those who argue that improvements can only be achieved by revolutionary means must be violently suppressed. In this sense reformism is counterrevolutionary and it has shown itself to be so on numerous occasions. A classic example of this occurred in Germany at the end of the First World War. The reformist Social Democratic Party (SPD) government was responsible for the violent suppression of the German Revolution in 1919 and the murder of revolutionary socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht.
Stalinist -- supporter of Josef Stalin, his ideas and practices.Stalinophobic left -- a part of the Western far left with a one-sided view of Stalinism, tending towards anti-communism.
Stalinophilic left -- a part of the far left with an unbalanced view of Stalinism, tending towards uncritical cheerleading of Stalinists.
Trotskyism -- ideas and practices of Leon Trotsky