Trotskyism

Leon Trotsky, at the last minute, joined in the Bolshevik coup that became Russia’s October Revolution in 1917. He believed that revolution would be achieved by a coalition of forces rather than through the leadership of the vanguard party.

Although the architect of the Red Army, Trotsky fell into disfavour with the Soviet leadership, and by 1923 he was running an International Left Opposition to Lenin. He was driven into exile in Mexico, where in 1938 he established the Fourth International, the organisation that propagated the ideology later known as Trotskyism. This included the ideas of “permanent revolution” and “the revolution betrayed” – a belief that under Stalin, the Soviet Union had become a degenerate bureaucracy, which would in turn be swept away on the tide of revolution. Trotsky was famously assassinated in Mexico, in 1940, by an agent of Stalin’s Comintern, wielding an ice-pick.

The Trotskyite following grew after the “missed opportunities” for revolution, in particular the German Communist Party’s failure to prevent Hitler taking power in 1933. Trotskyites became the ideological enemies of the (Moscow-aligned) Communist parties and opposed Stalin’s alliance with the ‘imperialist’ allies in World War Two. They were prominent in the events of 1968 in Paris, and at the forefront of many solidarity movements with the Third World. With the possible exception of a junior coalition partner in Sri Lanka in the early 1960s, no Trotskyite party has ever been in government.

The Forth International

Established by Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1938, this body’s leaders became the political heirs to Trotsky after his death. From its conception, Trotsky’s International worked closely with Latin American Marxists, including Posada’s Argentinian party and the artist Diego Rivera. The International subsequently split into numerous factions. By 1945, the Fourth International was held together by a devolved International Secretariat (IS). The nominal head of the IS was Michel Pablo who ran affairs in continental Europe. In Britain, the International was run by Ted Grant, Tony Cliff and Gerry Healy (the last two eventually split to form the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party respectively), who regularly got into scraps with British Posadists. James P Cannon ran the show in the United States, while the powerful Latin American Bureau of the Fourth International came under the direction of Juan Posadas.

Posadas dominated Fourth International affiliates in Latin America, sending delegates to the International’s Second Congress in 1948. Around 1953, the ‘Pabloists’ under Michel Pablo began to split from the Fourth International, taking Posada’s Latin American Bureau with them, to form their own version of the Fourth International, the International Secretariat. Attempts were made to reconcile the various factions, with Posadas often chosen to act as mediator.

In 1959, the Posadists began to drift away from the Pabloists, taking advantage of the arrest of the Pabloist leadership in Amsterdam in 1962 for their role in assisting the Algerian independence struggle. By that year, the Posadist split from all other factions of the Fourth International was complete. Posadas established his own version – the Posadist Fourth International (Trotskyist).

A small nucleus of the original Fourth International survives today based in Amsterdam, publishing International Views under the leadership of Christophe Aguiton. It aligns itself strongly with the broader anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movement.

Other Trotskyite groups like ‘Militant’ are not splits from the Fourth International but invented themselves, inspired by the ‘tradition’ of Trotsky.

Pabloists

A faction around Michel Pablo (above) – aka Michel Raptis – de facto leader of the Fourth International on Trotsky’s death. He came to believe that the revolution was not around the corner, but would take many centuries.

He also saw enormous potential in the Algerian independence struggle, and became an advisor to the country’s first post-independence President, Ahmed Ben Bella, from 1962 up to the 1966 coup.

Other Fourth International leaders did not share Pablo’s enthusiasm, and he split over the Algeria issue to form his own International Secretariat faction, taking the Posadists with him.

Posadas fell out with him in 1962, denouncing him as ‘Liquidator Pablo’ and his faction as ‘capitulationists’. Pablo became an advisor to the Greek Socialist President Papandreou up to 1982.

Workers' States

Defined in orthodox Marxist-Leninism as a nation that has state ownership of the means of production and a monopoly of foreign trade, all of which is regarded as a Very Good Thing. Trotskyites insisted that the Soviet Union was a ‘degenerate’ or ‘distorted’ Workers’ State. They generally declined to confer the title on its Eastern Bloc satellite states or on China, and there were splits on the question of whether Cuba was a Workers’ State. A quirk of Posadism was that it declared Third World nations as Workers’ States pretty much at random: Guinea Bissau, “from Dahomey to Ethiopia”, the Seychelles, South Yemen, they were all ‘Workers’ States’ according to Posadists. (“If the data which has been sent to us is verified, Syria is a Workers’ State,” Posadas told the International Secretariat in 1967.)

Posadism

An unorthodox and eccentric branch of Trotskyism ‘informed’ by the seemingly endless thoughts of Comrade Juan Posadas, including posthumously published transcripts of his tape-recorded musings. It is distinguished by an optimism at the potential for Third World revolution, an enthusiasm for nuclear war, a readiness to describe practically any African or Middle Eastern country as a ‘Workers’ State’, a peculiar attitude to Cuba, an admiration for Soviet and Chinese space hardware, an esoteric concern for “harmonisation” and “man’s relationship to the earth, to nature and to the cosmos”. And of course a belief that UFOs come from a socialist future or alien socialist planet. Fringe science experiments involving dolphins and ‘water birthing’ are also popular themes.

Dialectical Materialism (aka The Dialectic)

Nobody will give you a simple definition on this one; it’s a bit like asking for a simple definition of Christianity. Nor does the tendency of many Marxists towards mystification or long-windedness help our understanding. No doubt many Marxist thinkers will shoot down in flames the following attempt at a definition of the dialectic, but here goes anyway:

Dialectical materialism was introduced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in German Ideology (1845) and expounded on in Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). It was meant to provide a general world view and a specific method for investigating scientific problems. It states that everything is material and that change takes place through “the struggle of opposites”. The working class and the bourgeoisie, for example, can only be fully understood by taking into account their changing interdependent relationship to each other.

The dialectic became the official philosophy of Communism. Trotsky took this philosophy further in his (mercifully short) ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939), which – although it acknowledges its origins in ancient Greek and Hindu philosophy – states that dialectics is “neither fiction nor mysticism, but a science.” Trotskyite dialectics expands on the idea of a thing or concept changing over time, and prefigures Stephen Hawking by asking if “the moment is purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time?” Just as Marx name-checked the discoveries of Darwin as evidence for the validity of the dialectic, so Trotsky name-checked the latest discoveries at the level of theoretical particle physics and, bafflingly, asserted that “in reality A is not equal to A”.

Dialectics was intended as a tool to help our understanding of the processes of history. Posadas expounded on dialectic concepts with his emphasis on “harmonisation” and “man’s place in nature and the cosmos”, and used the dialectic to enter fantastic new realms of alien time zones or planets populated by perfect beings organised into a socialist society.

The latest twist to Marxist dialectical materialism is the impenetrable Juceh (Independence) philosophy attributed to North Korea’s late ‘Great Leader’ Kim Il Sung and the living ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il. It claims to reveal the “absolutely correct way of shaping man’s destiny”, but what it all actually means is anybody’s guess.

Revolutionary Workers' Party (Trotskist) aka RWP(T)

The British section of the Posadist Fourth International. National sections tended to be called ‘Revolutionary Workers’ Party’ in the local language – Partido Revolucionario Obrero was the name of the influential parties in Argentina and Cuba. Not to be confused with their sworn enemies bearing the nearly identical name, the sex scandal-ridden Workers’ Revolutionary Party under Gerry Healy, with Vanessa Redgrave as one of its better-known members.

Entryism

The tactic of ‘entering’ established reformist political parties in an attempt to influence them in a more revolutionary direction. Posadas stood as a candidate in the Communist Partido Socialista Obrero party in the early days, while Britain’s Posadist Revolutionary Workers’ Party was preoccupied with influencing the Labour Party, the Communist Party, the Young Socialists, the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the Trade Unions.