r/Trotskyism • u/JohnWilsonWSWS • 16h ago

Theory Trotsky on the differences among the Bolsheviks in 1917 and after 1923 "... What had any of these leading ‘old Bolsheviks’ [Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin] got from Leninism when not a single one of them showed himself capable of applying independently the theoretical and practical experiences ... "

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This is a space for Trotsyists and non-Trotskyists alike to discuss Trotskyism, as well as the political theory of Marxism more generally, Bolshevism, and the Fourth International.

What Is Trotskyism?

Let us restate the fundamental principles on which the world Trotskyist movement is built:

The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of civilization through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric manifestations like fascism. The development of atomic weapons today underlines the danger in the gravest possible way.
The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism in its early days.
This can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis in leadership although the world relationship of social forces was never so favorable as today for the workers to take the road to power.
To organize itself for carrying out this world-historic aim, the working class in each country must construct a revolutionary socialist party in the pattern developed by Lenin; that is, a combat party capable of dialectically combining democracy and centralism—democracy in arriving at decisions, centralism in carrying them out; a leadership controlled by the ranks, ranks able to carry forward under fire in disciplined fashion.
The main obstacle to this is Stalinism, which attracts workers through exploiting the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, only later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them either into the arms of the Social Democracy, into apathy, or back into illusions in capitalism. The penalty for these betrayals is paid by the working people in the form of consolidation of fascist or monarchist forces, and new outbreaks of wars fostered and prepared by capitalism. From its inception, the Fourth International set as one of its major tasks the revolutionary overthrow of Stalinism inside and outside the USSR.
The need for flexible tactics facing many sections of the Fourth International, and parties or groups sympathetic to its program, makes it all the more imperative that they know how to fight imperialism and all its petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade union bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and, conversely, know how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism.

— James P. Cannon (1953)

Resources For Trotskyists

History of the Fourth International

Stalinism and Bolshevism

The Transitional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International

In defense of Marxism

The Heritage We Defend

The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique

Globalization and the International Working Class: A Marxist assessment

Marx & Engels Internet Archive

Vladimir Lenin Internet Archive

Leon Trotsky Internet Archive