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.
Despite its rhetoric, the CPM-K is a pro-capitalist, nationalist organisation articulating the interests of sections of the bourgeoisie and middle class. It is positioning itself as an alternative for elites frustrated with Kenya’s alignment with the US, seeing China as a more lucrative alternative.
The TİP failed to base its split with the Stalinist Communist Party on a study and assimilation of the great strategic and world-historical issues raised by Leon Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism. This is a common feature of all the tendencies that emerged from the disintegration of the Stalinist parties after the collapse of the USSR.
The recent strike wave by workers in Kenya, following the Gen Z-led uprising, reflects deep-seated anger towards the regime of President William Ruto and its International Monetary Fund-backed austerity measures. Workers and the youth must forge a new path grounded in Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution—the programme that inspired the October 1917 Russian Revolution. It is essential to revive the struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism, Maoism, Pabloism, and bourgeoisie nationalism.
Tuesday’s lecture will address the historical struggle of the Left Opposition and its contemporary relevance under conditions of imperialist war, economic crisis and a new upsurge of militant class struggle.
The event reflects the objective change that has been underway for some time in the relationship between Trotskyism and the international working class.
Last Wednesday, a delegation led by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North visited the Prinkipo Municipality in Istanbul to organize an event to commemorate Leon Trotsky’s life and his stay on the island from 1929 to 1933 while in exile.
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.
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.
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.
The five years between Trotsky’s call for the Fourth International in 1933 and the holding of a founding conference in 1938 were marked by a continuous struggle against a wide range of centrist political organizations active during this period, particularly in Europe , many of which professed sympathy with Trotsky’s perspective and some of which declared themselves for the Fourth International.
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 20th century in order to prepare for the struggles of the 21st.
The Soviet intervention in Spain can best be understood as an attempt to strangle a developing revolution, to physically liquidate its leading representatives, terrorize wider layers of workers and peasants and prevent their spontaneous revolutionary strivings from acquiring a more politically conscious form.
This is the founding document of the Fourth International, published in September of 1938. It was previously drafted by Trotsky and discussed widely by sections of the Trotskyist movement. 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. The strategic task of the upcoming period -- "the overcoming of the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard" -- is linked to the program of transitional demands that embodied the experience of the revolutionary movement to this point.
One of the clearest rebuttals to those who claim that Stalinism is the natural outcome of Marxism and Bolshevism. In responding to anarchists, Mensheviks and other critics who were using Stalin's Moscow Trials as a pretense to attack Bolshevism, Trotsky presents the theoretical heritage which only the Fourth International was able to defend: “an analysis of the imperialist epoch as an epoch of wars and revolutions; of bourgeois democracy in the era of decaying capitalism; of the correlation between the general strike and the insurrection; of the role of party, soviets and trade unions in the period of proletarian revolution; in its theory of the soviet state, of the economy of transition, of fascism and Bonapartism in the epoch of imperialist decline, and finally in its analysis of the degeneration of the Bolshevik party itself and of the soviet state.”
The following speech was delivered by James Cogan to a meeting in Sydney held by the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) on September 28 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International.
This speech was delivered to an International Rally for Socialism in Detroit, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Workers League. It examines the struggle of the Workers League in the context of the history of the fight for Trotskyism in the United States against Stalinism and opportunism.
The murder of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of the bloody campaign undertaken by the Stalinist bureaucracy to physically exterminate the Bolshevik leaders who had led the October Revolution of 1917.
The following exchange with students took place during the trip by David North, the national secretary of the Workers League, to the Soviet Union in November, 1989.
In November 1989, David North, the national secretary of the Workers League, travelled to the Soviet Union on behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
