Since the founding of the Left Opposition in 1923, Trotsky had insisted, despite the crimes of the Stalinist leadership, that the fight to reform the Communist International and win its parties back to the revolutionary program of its first four congresses could not be prematurely abandoned. But the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, facilitated by Stalin’s disastrous policies, demanded a reconsideration of this policy.
In the months that followed, Trotsky waited to see if any criticism of Stalin’s policies would emerge from any of the parties of the Comintern. On April 7, 1933, the Comintern endorsed the policies of the German Communist Party. Trotsky concluded that a new course was necessary. A new world revolutionary party was an historical necessity. He devoted the remainder of his life to this struggle.
This conception was substantiated further by his analysis of the Soviet regime, contained in the monumental work, The Revolution Betrayed. The Soviet bureaucracy had not yet destroyed all of the conquests of the 1917 Revolution, but as a privileged and parasitic caste its material interests were irreconcilably opposed to those of the working class. It could not be reformed, but had to be overthrown by means of a political revolution. Confirming Trotsky’s prognosis, the Stalinist bureaucracy assumed a consciously counterrevolutionary role in the 1930s, murdering its left-wing opponents in the Soviet Union in a political genocide and collaborating with world imperialism in the suppression and betrayal of revolutionary struggles by the working class in Spain, France and internationally.
The five years between 1933 and the founding of the Fourth International in September 1938 were marked by a continuous struggle against centrist political organizations, particularly in Europe. Many of them professed sympathy with Trotsky’s perspective, and some declared themselves for the Fourth International, but they refused to undertake the struggle to defend the legacy of Bolshevism.
On October 7, David North, International Editorial Board chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, delivered the following lecture to a well-attended public meeting in Colombo, organised by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka).
The founding of the Fourth International on September 3, 1938, was an event of great historical significance and contemporary relevance.
Reznik’s book, while containing some useful information, constitutes a willful distortion of the history of the Trotskyist Left Opposition, undermining its prolonged and principled struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the 1917 October Revolution.
The following is the introduction to the recently translated Turkish edition of In Defense of Leon Trotsky, written by the book’s author, David North, chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site. The book was originally published in 2013.
In principle, many centrist groups were even prepared to accept the necessity for a new international. But in practice they maintained that the time was not right, that Trotsky’s call was premature or that a new international could not be created in a period of defeats.
The French equivalent of the Spanish POUM was the Workers and Peasants Socialist Party (PSOP). This party, which was founded in 1938 by Marceau Pivert and fell apart at the beginning of the Second World War, has shaped to a large extent the political methods, standpoints and habits that one still finds today amongst French radical organisations.
As far back as 1936, writing as an isolated political exile in Norway (from which he was soon to be deported on the orders of a Social Democratic government), Leon Trotsky warned that the policies of the Stalinist regime, far from having assured the triumph of socialism in the USSR, were actually preparing the ground for the restoration of capitalism.
An understanding of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state—their rise and subsequent degeneration—is critical in politically arming the working class by learning the lessons of the twentieth century in order to prepare for the struggles of the twenty-first.
In the year following Hitler’s victory in Germany in 1933, the Stalinist bureaucracy moved toward the adoption of the Popular Front, which it imposed on all the parties of the Communist International. This policy, formally adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, found its most complete expression in Spain. It meant that Communist Parties renounced the objective of proletarian revolution and instead engaged in cross-class collaboration with bourgeois parties as well as the Social Democrats, in a supposedly common struggle against fascism. The Popular Front subordinated the working class to its own bourgeoisie and betrayed revolutionary internationalist principles by committing the Communist Parties to the defence of their own capitalist nation-states. With the Popular Front, Stalinism for the first time became a consciously and openly counterrevolutionary force.
The Stalinist forces in Spain, including the secret police, worked to strangle the developing revolution, physically liquidate the Trotskyists and others, terrorize wider layers of workers and peasants, and prevent their spontaneous revolutionary strivings from acquiring a more politically conscious form.
In Spain, Trotsky wrote, two irreconcilable program confronted one another. There was the program that consisted of “saving at any cost private property from the proletariat, and saving as far as possible, democracy from Franco; and on the other hand, the program of abolishing private property through the conquest of power by the proletariat.
In this article, written from exile in Norway in 1935, Leon Trotsky exposed the politics of the “People's Front” in France, a coalition comprising the bourgeois Radical Party, the Socialist Party and the Stalinist Communist Party
Eric Hobsbawm recently wrote an article in the Guardian about the Spanish Civil War, partly in memory of the 70th anniversary of that war, and partly to trail his forthcoming book Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism.
Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War (New York, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The Spanish Civil War generates a massive body of historical work every year. This book stands out and merits attention because Andy Durgan is associated with the British Socialist Workers Party.
The conflict over the “First Job Contract” (CPE) has developed into an open confrontation between the government of Dominique de Villepin and Jacques Chirac and broad layers of French society. On the one side stands the government, supported by the employers federations, and on the other the youth, backed by their parents and the large majority of working people.
In September 1938, the Fourth International held its founding congress, a historical milestone for the socialist movement and the international working class. Its founding document, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power) was written by Trotsky and outlined the central tasks facing the socialist movement:
Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.
The subsequent history of the 20th century would prove the correctness of the assessment of the Fourth International as the only genuinely revolutionary leadership.
In this 1938 recorded speech, Trotsky addresses the founding of the Socialist Workers Party, the American section of the Fourth International, and speaks on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Trotskyist movement in the United States, from the founding of the Communist League of America in 1928.
This is the founding document of the Fourth International, published in September 1938. Assessing the historical lessons of the betrayal of the working class by both the Second and Third Internationals, Trotsky outlines the principles upon which to build a new proletarian leadership for the struggles against world imperialism and Stalinism.
In the course of the 1930s, the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy in the Soviet Union headed by Joseph Stalin murdered virtually the entire leadership of the October Revolution. Show trials of Bolshevik leaders were organized between 1936 and 1938, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Rakovsky. These gruesome proceedings, in which the defendants were compelled to denounce themselves (having been falsely promised that such confessions would save themselves and their families), ended invariably with the announcement of death sentences that were carried out within hours. In the few cases where prison sentences were imposed—as with Rakovsky and Radek—the defendants were later murdered in secret. The trials were the public image of only one side of an unprecedented campaign of mass murder, most of which was conducted away from public view.
Trotsky delivered this speech denouncing the Stalinist Moscow Trials and publicizing the calling of the independent Dewey Commission to investigate the charges from Mexico in January, 1937.
“Stalin’s trial against me is built upon false confessions, extorted by modern Inquisitorial methods, in the interests of the ruling clique,” he said. “These trials develop not from communism, not from socialism, but from Stalinism, that is, from the unaccountable despotism of the bureaucracy over the people!”
In carrying out these trials, Joseph Stalin was launching an assault on the legacy and the leaders of the first successful socialist revolution.
This essay was first published on the sixtieth anniversary of the convening of the Dewey Commission. The commission, whose official name was the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, was established in 1937 by supporters of the exiled revolutionary to establish the truth about Joseph Stalin's purge trials. It was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey.
This lecture was delivered by Professor Vadim Rogovin at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, on June 3, 1996
This lecture was delivered by Professor Vadim Rogovin at the University of Melbourne in Australia on May 28, 1996.
Written in the midst of Stalin’s Terror, which exterminated the Old Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution, this pamphlet by Trotsky analyzes Stalin’s claim to be the continuator of Bolshevism.
Never before in history were hundreds of thousands of people torn away from their apartments, thrown into prison, subjected to torture, made to confess to crimes, and then either exterminated or sent to concentration camps.
In this work, Trotsky, writing from the unique vantage point of a leading participant in both the 1905 and the October 1917 revolutions, explains the historical events, socio-economic processes, and political struggles that led to the creation of the world’s first workers’ state.
In the annals of political literature, few works have withstood the test of time so well as Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. More than 70 years after its initial publication, its analysis of the structure and dynamics of Soviet society and of the Soviet Union remains unsurpassed.
