Meeting for the 70th anniversary of Trotsky's death. Speakers include Sean Matgamna, Jill Mountford, John McDonnell, Farooq Tariq, Kim Moody, Yvan Lemaitre.
An assessment of the Socialist Labour League, then by far the biggest Trotskyist group in Europe, in response to their assault on a member of the Mandel Fourth International and use of the libel laws to gag comment on it by the left press.
Why, although he wrote much that implied Russia was a new form of exploiting class society, did Trotsky continue to insist Russia was a degenerated workers’ state until his death in 1940?
In Trotsky’s last months, he argued that Russia was only conditionally progressive, the condition being that that the workers made a new (“political”) revolution.
By October 1939, Trotsky had in effect abandoned the idea that Russia was a degenerated workers' state, insisting only on a further period of seeing what happened before explicitly rejecting the theory and accepting that it was a new form of class society.
For Trotsky it was a given that easten Poland, annexed by Stalinist Russia in 1939, would be transformed it into a replica of the USSR. By the late 1940's, however, that 'bureaucratic revolution' had become the basis of a new world outlook in the Trotskyist movement.
Amidst a great US public outcry against Hitler’s ally Stalin over Finland, the US Trotskyist press tried to pretend that Finland was the same Finland as that of 1918, when the Finnish ruling class had responded to the danger of the workers’ revolution spreading from Russia to Finland by White Terror.
Why did Trotsky hold on to the view that Russia remained a degenerated workers’ state, when other socialists argued that it was a new form of exploitative class society by basing themselves on his accounts of Stalinism?
The great tragedy is that Leon Trotsky, removed from the scene by a Stalinist assassin in 1940, bequeathed very great confusion on the movement that continued in his name.
In his writings “about” Rizzi in 1939, Trotsky did not even allude to most of Rizzi’s ideas. What interested him was Rizzi’s idea that the world was evolving towards a new bureaucratic-collectivist class system.
Trotsky, who organised the October insurrection, said that if he had been present in St Petersburg in 1917 and Lenin absent, the revolution would have been defeated. But where Lenin could by returning to Russia change things and pull the Bolshevik Party policy in 1917 into line with the new possibilities and the drives of its militant working class supporters, Trotsky died in the struggle with Stalin, leaving theoretical chaos to his comrades from which the movement never recovered. It was, indeed, as if Lenin “had died in Switzerland at the beginning of 1917”.
30 July 2010
| W H Auden, Miriam Gould, M. Casanova, Hal Draper, Paul Hampden, Chris Hickey, Robert Martin, Sean Matgamna, John McNair, George Orwell, Martin Thomas, Leon Trotsky
21 reports and comments on the Spanish Revolution 1936-1937, and an excerpt from W H Auden's poem, "Spain 1936", which was published as a pamphlet by the Communist Party.
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