"When Erin has ceased with their memory to groan, she will smile through the tears of revival on thine”. Those were the words with which an English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, addressed the Irish Republican Robert Emmett, who in 1803, at 25, had been hanged, cut down still alive, disembowelled and then chopped up by a servant of the then all-powerful British government of Ireland.
When the working class has ceased to groan at the memory of the Stalinist tyranny, it will smile on the memory of Leon Trotsky, who defended the working class and the name and principles of international socialism against the Stalinist cataclysm that overwhelmed socialism and Marxism 60 years ago.
To relearn what millions of European workers already knew at the beginning of this century. That is the price we pay for the betrayals of workers’ interests by reformists and Stalinists, and the defeats they brought down on our heads.
But the working class can learn what socialism is, and it will learn, under the whip of the class struggle, with the help of socialists whose ideas embody the memory and experience of working-class history.
And Trotsky now, 50 years after his death? Let the author of an article in the Sunday Telegraph answer that question.
“It is largely due to the pervasive influence of Trotskyism that the failure of communism has not been accompanied by the instant demise of Marxist influence in British intellectual circles. It is Trotsky, after all, who has been the great hero of the British left”.
The article, by Janet Daley, is entitled “Don’t let Trotsky save socialism”. It is a tedious and clumsy rehash of vintage anti-socialist polemic.
The Sunday Telegraph has a nightmare: that Trotsky did succeed in saving socialism and that now, when the Stalinists are relinquishing their claim to be the socialists and their systems are collapsing, Trotskyism will prove to be the seed for a new growth of unfalsified socialism.
It is the hope and belief — translated into bourgeois nightmare — that sustained tiny persecuted groups of Trotskyists through a long unequal struggle. For Daley and the serious bourgeois press, as for those who have kept Trotsky’s cause alive, the name of Trotsky, fifty years after his death, has come to be the name of the real social- ism, the name of the real threat looming over the future of the bourgeoisie. It is the name of the hope which inspires us. When liberated socialist humanity has ceased to groan at the memory of bourgeois and Stalinist rule, it will recall the name and the memory of Leon Trotsky with gratitude and love.
