Trotskyists (and "Trotskyites")

The term "Marxism" was coined by opponents of Marx; the term "Luxemburgism", by denigrators of Luxemburg after her death; "Leninism", after Lenin's death by Stalin and others trying to claim Lenin's authority for ideas very different from Lenin's; and "Trotskyism", by opponents of Trotsky.

It was first used on a large scale in the denunciations of Trotsky and Luxemburg sent resounding through the Communist Parties as Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin worked to tighten them up and make them "monolithic" after Lenin's death in 1924. The campaign was called "Bolshevisation".

Trotsky and his comrades of the Left Opposition rejected the idea that they had a special "-ism": they were just defending against bureaucratic reaction, and continuing as best they could, the basic ideals of working-class socialism, dating back to Marx, Engels, and others, on the basis of which the 1917 revolution had been made.

After a while, as with the term "Marxist", the comrades had to shrug and say: "Want to call us Trotskyists? Or Marxists? OK. We'd prefer a different term, but let's accept your term and move on to the substantive political arguments".

(The term "Stalinist", by the way, was put into wide usage not by our comrades or by hostile commentators, but by Stalin himself and his own followers, as they built up what would later be called "the cult of the personality").

The forerunner group of Workers' Liberty defined what Trotskyism means to us in the following words, in 1967:

"Trotskyism is the basic Marxist programme of the conquest of power by the international working class. It is the unfalsified Programme, method and experience of the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky. It embodies the world experience of the workers' struggles, including the defence and development of Bolshevism by Trotsky and the Left Opposition in battle against the Stalinist counter-revolution in the Soviet Union.

"Trotskyism is the only developed working class alternative to venal Stalinism and supine Social Democracy. It means reliance on the self-controlling activity of the masses of the working class, which it strives to mobilise on the Programme of transitional demands as a bridge to the overthrow of capitalism and the attainment of workers' power. It is the Programme of the workers' revolution, organically linked with the practical struggle to aid its development.

"It is not only a programme, but the struggle to build a revolutionary party to fight for that programme.

"Its traditions are those of the Bolsheviks and the Left Opposition: workers' democracy, unremitting struggle for theoretical clarity, revolutionary activism, unbending hostility to and struggle against capitalism and those within the labour movement who stand for its continuation".

We'd still stand by that.

To us, "Trotskyism" is not a particular personal school of thought, but a broad political tradition, finding its origins in the very start of the workers' movement, in which Trotsky was an important leader and writer during a particular phase.

To us, the idea that "Trotskyism" could mean uncritical devotion to every particular view that Leon Trotsky had, or some belief that Trotsky said the last word on political issues, is utterly contrary to the spirit of real Trotskyism.

We've also concluded that since the 1940s "Trotskyism" in the general sense has divided into at least two distinct broad currents, one that called itself "Orthodox Trotskyism" and the other which could be called "Heterodox" or "Third Camp" Trotskyism. Our origins as a group were within a strand of "Orthodox Trotskyism", but we now believe that the "Heterodox Trotskyist" current offers better political anchor-points.

Some people ask: "Trotskyite" or "Trotskyist"? There is a difference.

"Trotskyite" was the Stalinist term for what they also called "Trotsky-fascists" or “Trotskyite wreckers". To be categorised as a "Trotskyite" in the USSR in the 1930s was to be categorised as deserving to be killed. Stalin killed all the "Trotskyites" he could find. Every single one of the tens of thousands of actual Trotskyists in the USSR was killed, along with greater numbers of people called “Trotskyite” because they had made some criticism or because they had sympathised with “Trotskyism” in the past.

Stalinists also killed "Trotskyites" in other times and places where they were relatively strong, for example in Greece and Vietnam, and during the Spanish Civil War.

Where the Stalinists were not so strong, or bourgeois-democratic norms were strong enough to restrain them, they might confine themselves to beating up "Trotskyite" leafleters and literature-sellers.

People who saw the "Trotskyists" as people with whom they might dispute, even fiercely, but not automatically subject to the worst physical violence available, would reject the term “Trotskyite”. They would and use “Trotskyist” instead.

"Trotskyite" came into wide usage as the Stalinist terror unfolded. The first Moscow show trial in 1936 was labelled: "Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre". The -ite/-ist distinction does not exist in Russian and some other languages. But the show trials were for an international audience, including English.

In the denunciations of 1924, Zinoviev had been one of the leading polemicists against "Trotskyism", and the arguments, however shoddy, were understood on all sides as one between different ideas within the revolutionary workers' movement. By 1936 Zinoviev was bracketed with Trotsky as the second demon of "the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre". The Stalinists were denouncing "Trotskyites" not as mistaken comrades but as fascist agents. And in the following years they were murdering them en masse, where they could..

That is why "Trotskyite" has a different connotation from "Trotskyist". Today, some people with politics we would consider soft-Stalinistic (but who sincerely reject “high Stalinism”) object to the use of the word “Trotskyite” for that reason. Good!

The “high Stalinists” who still use the word “Trotskyite” are fortunately few in number today, and generally unable to do more than abuse and harass Trotskyists. They still need to be opposed.