The Progressive Labor Party recognizes that Trotskyism is phony communism, also called “revisionism” – capitalist ideas in a left disguise. Many people, including many Trotskyists themselves, don’t understand the reactionary essence of Trotskyism.

In this pamphlet we’ll expose the fallacies of Trotskyism in two ways.

• We’ll discuss some facts about Trotsky himself that expose how reactionary he was.

• We’ll expose the idealist* – non-Marxist, anti-materialist – basis of Trotskyism.

*Idealism: here, the belief that knowledge of reality can be gotten from applying a fixed set of ideas, rather than through a scientific process of study and struggle. Trotskyism is one form of idealism disguised as Marxism-Leninism.

Trotskyist groups trace their beginnings in pro-Trotsky factions within the Bolshevik Party – called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union/Bolshevik, or CPSU(b) – during the 1920s. When Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet in 1928, his supporters were also expelled from other parties in the Communist International, or ‘Comintern’, or quit on their own. Some of these groups formed new Trotskyist parties in various countries, continuing after Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. They attracted some left-leaning and anti-Soviet intellectuals, though few workers. Their determined struggle against the Soviet Union and Comintern earned them publicity by the capitalists far beyond their numbers.

Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin in 1956 and 1961, but especially with the end of the USSR in the early ‘90s, the pro-Soviet revisionist groups shrank in numbers and influence. The disappearance of pro-China communist groups after Deng Xiao-ping led the Chinese Communist Party swiftly to the right upon Mao Tse-tung’s death in 1976 completed the collapse of the old Communist movement. Trotskyist political parties have become more prominent in a much smaller “left” no longer dominated by pro-Soviet groups.

Cult of “Great Leaders” Always Reactionary

Even if Trotsky had been a great revolutionary and theorist like Marx or Lenin, Trotskyism would still be reactionary, because Trotskyist groups treat him as an unquestionable authority. In reality, Trotsky was a dishonest reactionary, whose arrogance and great ego led him to be one of the main founts of anti-communism for capitalist exploiters.

We in PLP do not intend to simply continue the “Stalin – Trotsky” battles of the past. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote that workers “have nothing to lose but their chains.” The working class has no reason to hang on to outmoded ideas, refight old battles, or embrace errors made by our heroic ancestors in the communist movement.

We have studied Trotskyism, ready to learn whatever we might find that was valuable. If Trotskyism, and Trotskyist parties, offered anything positive, we would embrace it. If Trotskyists were forces we ever could unite with, we would do so.

But we can’t. Trotskyism has nothing positive to offer the world’s working class and the struggle for a communist world. It is a reactionary, idealist philosophy.

Leon Trotsky 1879-1940

Trotsky was a Russian radical Marxist, a fluent and prolific writer, a powerful public speaker and, until August 1917, a Menshevik. The Mensheviks believed that only after capitalism had industrialized a country could a socialist revolution be successful.

By the middle of 1917 the Tsar had abdicated and a government of big capitalists had taken over Russia. The working class in the large cities had proven open to revolutionary leadership. Trotsky and some others, the “Mezhraiontsy” or Inter-district committee, joined the Bolshevik Party, where Lenin immediately put Trotsky on the Central Committee. He played an important role as military and political leader during the four-year long Civil War that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917.

Trotsky shared with Lenin and the rest of the Bolsheviks the view that the working class in Russia could not long hold power without revolutions in the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe. However, Trotsky was on the “right” of this continuum of views, believing more firmly than most that a failure of such revolutions would inevitably doom the socialist revolution in Russia. Others were less fatalistic.

This belief led Trotsky to advocate devoting all efforts to stimulating international revolutions. That, in turn, earned Trotsky a reputation as a “leftist”. But note that this “super-revolutionary” attitude proceeds from a Menshevik – an economic determinist, pessimistic, and ultimately “right” –analysis: that capitalism still had a “progressive” role to play in industrializing Russia, unless this could be done with the aid of more advanced socialist countries.

Trotsky’s Arrogance

Many former Mensheviks became good Bolsheviks. All Bolsheviks had doubts and questions about how to develop “socialism in one country” if – as proved the case – there were no helpful revolutions in advanced capitalist societies. What determined Trotsky’s reactionary political path were his class position as an elitist Russian intellectual, and his personality.

Intellectuals as a stratum of the petty bourgeoisie, were drawn to Menshevik analysis since it left capitalism and its relations of production, in place, and so justified a continuation of the relatively privileged position of intellectuals, and those with education generally, above workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks regarded this as a “necessary evil”, a form of bribery to win technically-skilled intellectuals to help educate and industrialize the workers’ state.

The Mensheviks went much further, rejecting the Bolshevik revolution as illegitimate in the absence of revolutions in more industrialized countries. Trotsky had abandoned the Mensheviks because he hoped the Russian Revolution would spark revolutions in advanced industrial countries like Germany, which could then help backward Russia advance.

Not all Bolshevik intellectuals took this line, however. Central to Trotsky’s political career was his extreme individualism. Trotsky was convinced that he himself was a world-class genius and the only one who deserved to succeed Lenin as leader of the Bolshevik Party. Arrogant in his personal relations, he angered even his greatest admirers like Max Eastman. Arrogance is an extreme form of idealism.

Politically, this meant that Trotsky was constantly trying to gain power, forming alliances with other prominent Bolsheviks rather than supporting the party’s line.

Factionalism

During the 1920s the Bolsheviks had annual Conferences and Congresses in which they open debated the future course of the revolution. Trotsky’s positions were consistently defeated. Trotsky’s Menshevist ideas implied that, without further socialist revolutions in industrial countries, Russia’s own revolution was doomed. Capitalism, Trotsky thought, was essential to industrializing Russia, which was too economically backward to do it alone.

Most working-class Bolsheviks recognized this as defeatist. Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders said the working class could industrialize the country by itself. This position won out in the great debates at the annual Party Conferences during the 1920s. Trotsky’s line was overwhelmingly defeated. Since his great ego could not accept this, Trotsky continued to form secret alliances with other dissident communists, even after such “factions” had been outlawed by a party vote in 1921.

Democratic Centralism

According to Democratic Centralism, all communists must fight to put the party’s line into practice once it has been decided upon by debate and vote. There is no other way to judge whether the Party’s line is correct or not. For, if all members do not try to put it into effect with all their effort, who can say, in the case of failure, whether the line was incorrect, or whether it was correct but just never carried out?

Factionalism creates a situation where party members spend their time organizing around their own line, rather than vigorously trying to put the party’s line into effect. It is similar to “democratic” capitalist politics, where different parties, and even different factions within a party, spend all their time trying to advance themselves by “beating the other guy.” In a communist party, this is a recipe for disaster.

Trotsky was called to account time and again for his factional activity in the party debates of the 1920s. Each time he recanted, but went right back to doing the same thing. Eventually the exasperated Bolsheviks expelled him for incorrigible factionalizing.

Stalin was among the last to agree to this expulsion; Trotsky’s later allies in the secret Opposition, including Bukharin, wanted to expel Trotsky much sooner! When he and some followers organized a counter-demonstration at the Bolshevik Revolution’s 10th anniversary in 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the Party, exiled to a remote city, and finally deported from the USSR in January 1929.

Trotsky’s ‘Cult of Personality’

Utterly lacking in modesty and self-criticism, Trotsky rationalized his factional activity by attributing his political defeats to dishonest maneuvers by his opponents – “stacking the votes”, admitting “politically immature” workers as members, and counter-factionalizing. He never accepted that his ideas were, or could be, wrong. He had no faith in the collective discussions and struggles of the Bolshevik party. He was out of touch with reality. In short, he was an idealist.

To account for his defeats Trotsky always complained about a “lack of democracy” in the Party But within the ranks of his own followers he tolerated no disagreement.

[Source pdf continues on p. 19.]