Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was, alongside Vladimir Lenin, the greatest revolutionary leader of the 20th century.

Trotsky and Lenin led the Bolshevik Party and the Russian working class in the 1917 October Revolution, which established the first workers state in human history. In 1923, Trotsky founded the Left Opposition to oppose the growth of a nationalist bureaucracy, headed by Joseph Stalin, as it usurped power in the Soviet Union. In 1933, following the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany, facilitated by the disastrous policies of the Comintern that Trotsky had opposed, Trotsky called for the founding of the Fourth International to carry forward the fight for Marxism against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Third International.

Two years after the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, Trotsky was assassinated at the hands of a Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, in Coyoacán, Mexico. His assassination was the most conscious attempt by Stalinism and world imperialism to decapitate the leadership of the international working class in the midst of the slaughter of World War II.

The Fourth International founded by Trotsky is today led by the International Committee, which publishes the World Socialist Web Site. The International Committee of the Fourth International has defended the program and principles of genuine Trotskyism since 1953.

The perspective that guided the Bolshevik Party in the seizure of power in October 1917 was based upon the theory of permanent revolution, which had been elaborated by Trotsky eleven years earlier, in 1906. Trotsky had subjected the experience of the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution to a thorough Marxist analysis.

The theory of permanent revolution insists upon the independent and leading political role of the working class in achieving the democratic tasks of a revolution in countries of a belated capitalist development and oppressed by imperialism, such as national unification and liberation from colonial, landlordist and caste oppression. Moreover, it insists upon the historical inseparability of those tasks from the struggle for international socialism.

In October 1917, in the midst of the slaughter of World War I, the Russian working class, led by the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladmir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, overthrew the capitalist provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky and established the first workers’ state in world history. Less than nine months earlier, Russia had been ruled by a monarchical dynasty headed by Tsar Nicholas II. The revolution was the beginning of the end of the imperialist war.

The Russian Revolution marked a new stage in world history. The overthrow of the capitalist Provisional Government proved that an alternative to capitalism was not a utopian dream, but a real possibility that could be achieved through the conscious political struggle of the working class.

The principled strategy of bringing about the reform of the Russian Communist Party and Comintern had guided the International Left Opposition since its founding in 1923. 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 Hitler’s victory, Trotsky waited to see if any criticism of the policies pursued by Stalin would emerge from any of the parties of the Comintern. On April 7, 1933, the Communist International unequivocally endorsed the policies of the German Communist Party. Trotsky concluded that a new course was necessary. In a statement dated July 15, 1933, he called for a break with the Comintern and the building of a new International. The entire remainder of his life was devoted to this struggle.

The signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in August 1939 and the subsequent outbreak of World War II led to a political crisis inside the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. A political faction led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern argued that the Soviet Union could no longer be designated a workers’ state. Flowing from this change in their definition of the class nature of the Soviet State—which Burnham now characterized as “bureaucratic collectivist”—they stated that the Fourth International should not call for the defense of the USSR in the event of war.

Trotsky replied that the characterization of the Stalinist regime as “bureaucratic collectivist”—a new and unprecedented form of exploitative society, unforeseen by Marxism—had far-reaching political and historical implications. At issue, in the final analysis, was the historical viability of the Marxist project itself.

In the final months of his life, Trotsky contributed several documents to the struggle within the SWP, that are among his most brilliant and far-sighted. In April 1940, the faction of Burnham and Shachtman split from the Fourth International.