On 21st August 1940 Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader assassinated Leon Trotsky.
At the time, the British Trotskyist paper Workers International News(WIN) described how Mercader:
“attacked whilst the two were having tea.. in Trotsky’s home in Mexico City…having posed as a friend and a promulgator of [his] political theories for some time” using ‘the crudest of all conceivable methods: battering in the head of a political opponent with an Axe,…aptly typif[ing] the Moscow director of the crime and the cruel unbridled tyranny of the political regime which he personifies… [T]he murder of the last remaining Bolshevik leader apart from the perpetrators of the crime Stalin and Molotov.”’
WIN asked:
“Why this uncontrolled terrorism and violence on Stalin’s part? Why this compulsion to remove Leon Trotsky?”
Trotsky had been amongst the principal leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution. His role was so central that it was reported that many workers believed ‘Lenin Trotsky’ to be one man. He had led the Red Army to defeat the Tsarist ‘White Armies’ and 180,000 strong armies of intervention from 16 capitalist powers between 1918 and 1921 securing the workers’ state.
Aged 26, he had been the president of the 1905 Petrograd Soviet, the prototype of the workers’ councils with which the Bolsheviks won and secured state power, on the basis of workers’ democracy, 12 years later.
Permanent revolution
Following the defeat of that uprising in a pamphlet Results and Prospects, he set out the theory of ‘Permanent Revolution’ outlining the method on which the October revolution was based. Trotsky explained how in the era of imperialist crisis and war, the small working class of a peripheral power such as Russia could use their social weight and independence to come to the head of the masses, overthrowing feudalism and Tsarist despotism.
The weakness of the Russian capitalist class, and their subaltern subjection to the major imperialist powers and the Tsarist state made them incapable of achieving tasks which, at the dawn of capitalism, in states such a Britain, France and the USA, the capitalist class could, to a greater or lesser extent, complete: ending autocracy and national oppression, and solving the land question. Workers’ power could place land and economic independence in the hands of the peasant majority for the first time in history.
In order to secure the new workers’ state it would be necessary to take over the capitalist monopolies and develop a democratic socialist plan of production meeting the needs of the whole population and develop society. In Lenin’s words: ‘Socialism = Soviet Power + Electrification”.
But it would also be necessary to spread the revolution beyond the boundaries of Russia, to forestall counter-revolutionary invasion by superior powers and draw on their industrial resources to build a voluntary socialist federation: a ‘Socialist United States’, initially of Europe, and ultimately worldwide. In Trotsky’s theory, Permanent Revolution, meant not ‘perpetual upheaval’ but the uninterrupted passing of the revolution from the tasks of the bourgeois to the workers’ revolution and from the Russian national revolution to the world revolution.
This was why Trotsky, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership expended time and precious resources of the fledgling workers’ state to establish the Communist International in 1919 and Trotsky opposed Stalin’s policy of ‘Socialism in One Country’ – which falsely extolled defeat and isolation as victory, in the interests of the bureaucratic caste which hauled itself to power, feasting atop the corpse of the world revolution.
Revolution Betrayed
In his 1936 analysis Revolution Betrayed and many articles and pamphlets Trotsky exposed Stalin, the bureaucracy he personified, and their role in the bureaucratic counter-revolution at home, and the betrayal and butchery of the revolutionary workers of China, Germany and Spain, and countless other nations worldwide.
Amongst the most important passages in Revolution Betrayed, is Trotsky’s indictment of the counter-revolution in gender relations, the ‘Thermidor in the Family’ in which he described how the usurpation of state power by a privileged bureaucracy and its reconciliation with capitalist rule beyond the borders of the Soviet Union led directly to re-establishing the family as a tool of gender and generational oppression:
“The marriage and family laws established by the October revolution, once the object of its legitimate pride, are being made over and mutilated by vast borrowings from the law treasuries of the bourgeois countries. And as though on purpose to stamp treachery with ridicule, the same arguments which were earlier advanced in favor of unconditional freedom of divorce and abortion – “the liberation of women,” “defense of the rights of personality,” “protection of motherhood” – are repeated now in favor of their limitation and complete prohibition…The most compelling motive of the present cult of the family is undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations, and for the disciplining of youth by means of 40,000,000 points of support for authority and power”
For these reasons, despite having forced him into exile, stranded 10,000km from home in the words of New York Times alone ‘on a planet without a visa’, Stalin and the bureaucracy feared Trotsky as a living, breathing indictment of their monstrous dictatorship and his survival as a vindication of every life lost and body incarcerated in the gulag.
A new International
His life in exile was dedicated to the task of organising those comrades who rejected the betrayals of Stalinism into the nuclei of new revolutionary parties, first as the International Left Opposition (ILO) and from 1938 as a new ‘Fourth International” under the shadow of fascism and the looming prospect of a new world war.
Eight decades on, the PRMI is resuming this task in a new era of reaction, war, and genocide and we have much to learn from how Trotsky approached it in his last decade. He believed that if an international was to survive it needed to sink deep roots amongst the most oppressed masses. In 1932 he wrote to the ILO secretariat emphasising the importance of a letter they had received from 24 black workers in South Africa.
“The Left Opposition (Bolshevik-Leninists) can and must become the banner for the most oppressed sections of the world proletariat, and consequently, first and foremost, for the Negro workers. Upon what do I base this proposition?
“The Left Opposition represents at present the most consistent and most revolutionary tendency in the world. Its sharply critical attitude to any and all varieties of bureaucratic haughtiness in the labor movement makes it possible for it to pay particular attention to the voice of the most oppressed sections of the working class and the toilers as a whole.
“The South African comrades expressed particular interest in the… Chinese Revolution. This… is wholly justified. The working masses of the oppressed peoples who have to carry on the struggle for elementary national rights and for human dignity, are precisely those who incur the greatest risk of suffering the penalties for the muddled teachings of the Stalinist bureaucracy…The programme of the permanent revolution based on the incontestable historic experience of a number of countries can and must assume primary significance for the liberation movement of the Negro proletariat.
“The Johannesburg comrades may not as yet have had the opportunity to acquaint themselves more closely with the views of the Left Opposition on all the most important questions. But this cannot be an obstacle in our getting together with them as closely as possible at this very moment, and helping them fraternally to come into the orbit of our programme and our tactics.
“When ten intellectuals, whether in Paris, Berlin, or New York, who have already been members of various organizations, address themselves to us with a request to be taken into our midst, I would offer the following advice: Put them through a series of tests on all the programmatic questions; wet them in the rain, dry them in the sun, and then after a new and careful examination accept maybe one or two.
“The case is radically altered when ten workers connected with the masses turn to us. …. But if a proletarian group functions in an area where there are workers of different races, and in spite of this remains composed solely of workers of a privileged nationality, then I am inclined to view them with suspicion. Are we not dealing perhaps with the labor aristocracy? Isn’t the group infected with slave-holding prejudices, active or passive?
“It is an entirely different matter when we are approached by a group of Negro workers. Here I am prepared to take it for granted in advance that we shall achieve agreement with them, even if such an agreement is not actual as yet. Because the Negro workers, by virtue of their whole position, do not and cannot strive to degrade anybody, oppress anybody, or deprive anybody of his rights. They do not seek privileges and cannot rise to the top except on the road of the international revolution.
“We can and we must find a way to the consciousness of the Negro workers, the Chinese workers, the Indian workers, and all the oppressed in the human ocean of the colored races to whom belongs the decisive word in the development of mankind”