Trotskyism

[52] Historian Robert Vincent Daniels believed that the practical differences, in the domain of international policy, between the Left Opposition and other factions had been exaggerated and he contended that Trotsky was no more prepared than other Bolshevik figures to risk war or for the loss of trade opportunities despite his support for world revolution.

[72] Polish historian and biographer, Isaac Deutscher, viewed his inner-party reforms in 1923–24 as arguably the first act in the restoration of free Soviet institutions which the party had sought to establish in 1917 and the return of worker's democracy which would correspond with a gradual dismantlement of the single-party system.

[91] He found allies among a circle of economic theorists and administrators which included Evgenii Preobazhensky along Georgy Pyatakov, deputy chairman of the Council of the National Economy[92] and had more broadly the support of many party intellectuals.

The change from the system of small individual peasant holdings to socialist methods of land cultivation is only conceivable after a number of consecutive stages of progress in technical science in economics and culture.

This included a progressive tax on the wealthier sections of populations such as the kulaks and NEPmen alongside an equilibrium of the import-export balance to access accumulated reserves to purchase machinery from abroad to increase the pace of industrialization.

[103] In exile, Trotsky maintained that the disproportions and imbalances which became characteristic of Stalinist planning in the 1930s such as the underdeveloped consumer base along with the priority focus on heavy industry were due to a number of avoidable problems.

[108] The economic platform of a planned economy combined with an authentic worker's democracy as originally advocated by Trotsky has constituted the programme of the Fourth International and the modern Trotskyist movement.

In 1938, Trotsky had written Their Morals and Ours which consisted of ethical polemics in response to criticisms around his actions concerning the Kronstadt rebellion and wider questions posed around the perceived, "amoral" methods of the Bolsheviks.

It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.

However, it is essential to emphasise that after 1917, orthodox Trotskyists argue that the loss of democracy in the USSR was caused by the failure of the revolution to spread internationally and the consequent wars, isolation, and imperialist intervention, not the Bolshevik style of organisation.

Trotsky argues that: [...] up to the outbreak of the February revolution and for a time after Trotskyism did not mean the idea that it was impossible to build a socialist society within the national boundaries of Russia (which "possibility" was never expressed by anybody up to 1924 and hardly came into anybody's head).

In a document dictated before his death in 1924 while describing Trotsky as "distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities—personally he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee" and also maintaining that "his non-Bolshevik past should not be held against him", Lenin criticized him for "showing excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work" and also requested that Stalin be removed from his position of General Secretary, but his notes remained suppressed until 1956.

Isolated from each other and faced with political developments quite unlike those anticipated by Trotsky, some Trotskyist organizations decided that the USSR could no longer be called a degenerated workers' state and withdrew from the Fourth International.

[162][page needed] In Brazil, as an officially recognised platform or faction of the PT until 1992, the Trotskyist Movimento Convergência Socialista (CS), which founded the United Socialist Workers' Party (PSTU) in 1994, saw a number of its members elected to national, state and local legislative bodies during the 1980s.

While a decade later in 1963 the majority of the SWP reunited with Pablo's supporters, a minority group persisted in their independence and criticisms of what they deemed to be the ISFI's abandonment of Permanent Revolution and their promotion of Stalinst regimes and parties.

[188] In 2024 with assistance from European comrades, particularly in France, many of who fled the Sri Lankan Civil War a historic Tamil translation of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed was published, accompanied with public meetings for the book’s launch.

[191] Notable cases involved the execution of Andreu Nin, former government minister in Revolutionary Catalonia, Jose Robles, a left-wing academic and translator along with many members of the Trotskyist-aligned POUM faction, such as Mary Stanley Low.

Described by journalist Michael Crick as "Britain's fifth most important political party" in 1986,[196] it played a prominent role in the 1989–1991 anti-poll tax movement, which was widely thought to have led to the downfall of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In Russia on 23 February 2018, the centenary of the formation of the Red Army under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, a group named the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists (YGBL) was formed.

[211] On 25 April 2024 a leading Ukrainian member of the YGBL, Bogdan Syrotiuk, was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine on charges of being a Russian agent and undermining the territorial integrity of Ukraine, claims that the ICFI and David North (socialist), chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, have completely rejected and say are the “latest example of the Zelensky regime’s brutal repression of left wing movements whose opposition to the war is finding a growing response within the Ukrainian working class”.

They have full sections in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Australia with sympathizing groups in Russia, Ukraine, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Croatia, Ireland, and other countries.

In contrast, Meyers cited Isaac Deutscher's biographical account of Trotsky which presented him to be a much more civilised figure than Stalin and suggested that he would not have purged the Red Army generals or millions of Soviet citizens.

[232] Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has also questioned the premise of historical inevitability presented by conservative critics such as Robert Service in that the Soviet Union would have experienced the same "totalitarian despotism under Trotskyist rule".

[249] Biographer Geoffrey Swain believed that the Soviet Union under the leadership of Trotsky would have been more technocratic as he would have made far more use of "bourgeois experts" the planning process and inferred this from his conduct during the Civil War along with his writings in the early 1920s.

[251] More specifically, Trotsky attributed the retraction of the progressive gains of the October revolution, the mass purge and Soviet foreign policy as seen in Spanish Civil War to the interests of the bureaucracy rather than the socialist proletariat or Bolshevik tradition.

[254] Separately, Trotsky would defend his military decisions as necessary and argued that had draconian measures rather than excess "magnanimity" been shown to opponents at the start of the October Revolution then Russia would have experienced far less human casualties.

[261] David North has argued that Trotsky's policies would have averted the dismantlement of Soviet defenses alongside the high levels of human casualties associated with Operation Barbarossa and the Second World War.

[269] On the other hand, historian Paul Le Blanc found Beilharz's historical comparisons between Trotsky and earlier Jacobin figures to be unconvincing and suggested his analogies were more centred in rhetoric rather than in analysis due to his blurring of ideological concepts.

Høgsbjerg stressed the key role of British Trotskyists in various movements such as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (1966–71), the Anti-Nazi League (1977–81), the Anti Poll Tax Federation (1989–91) and the Stop the War Coalition (2001).

[277][278] Separately, he would also argue that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved after the Civil War.