Leon Trotsky

From RationalWiki
(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
m (added Category:Stiffs using HotCat)
m (removed Category:Stiffs using HotCat)
Line 19: Line 19:
 
[[Category:Commies]]
 
[[Category:Commies]]
 
[[Category:History of communism]]
 
[[Category:History of communism]]
[[Category:Stiffs]]
 
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trotsky, Leon}}
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trotsky, Leon}}

Revision as of 01:39, 31 March 2011

Join the party!

Communism

Icon communism.svg
Opiates for the masses
From each
To each
After Trotsky fell from favour, his image was removed from official photographs.
Leon Trotsky was a communist leader, along with Vladimir Lenin, during the Russian Revolution. A split between Trotsky and Lenin's successor Stalin, however, led to Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union and eventual assassination in Mexico in 1940, at the hands of Soviet agents.

Trotskyism

Trotsky founded the Fourth International in 1938, to counter the Soviet-led Third International (or Comintern). After Trotsky's death in 1940 the Fourth International underwent several splits. Trotskyists often used the communist hammer and sickle symbol with the number 4 superimposed on it, a reference to their allegiance to the Fourth International rather than the Third.

At the time of the Stalin-Trotsky split, Stalinist and Trotskyist branches of the world communist movement split and took different ideological directions. Most of the national Communist Parties took their direction from Moscow and expelled Trotsky's supporters. In both the United States and United Kingdom, the Trotskyists became the Socialist Workers Party. Trotskyism took a communist but anti-Stalinist line and advocated a "permanent revolution" as a contrast to Stalinism, which they saw as leading to an entrenched bureaucracy and creation of a new ruling class under the guise of Communist Party leadership.

Trotskyism eventually split further into different tendencies. One tendency was the Schachtmanites, or followers of Max Schachtman, whose hard anti-Soviet line led to support for Cold War policies, and while remaining on the left economically, to a softening of their revolutionary Marxism in favor of social democracy. The Schachtmanites are sometimes cited as intellectual fathers of neoconservatism. Going in the opposite direction were the followers of Sam Marcy, for whom worldwide opposition to so-called "U.S. imperialism" took priority over opposition to Stalinism; hence, Marcy's followers defended the Soviet Union's invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and declared support for any communist government regardless of ideology from the relatively moderate Yugoslavia to the hard-line cranks ruling Albania and North Korea. In the United States, Marcy's followers became the Workers World Party, who gained a great deal of recent attention due to their leadership role within A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). One of the most complicated of (former?) Trotskyists is Lyndon LaRouche, who went the same direction as the Schactmanites with a hard-line anti-Soviet foreign policy while taking his followers into the lunatic world of conspiracy theories and cult status. In the midst of all these deviations, the Socialist Workers Party kept its status as the "main" Trotskyist party, although they are decidedly irrelevant and mostly like to sell books and newspaper subscriptions.

In the U.K., they are often called "Trots" and are a permanent fixture at left-wing and labour events, distinguishing themselves by their abrasive tendentiousness.

Obligatory George Orwell reference

In Animal Farm, the role of Trotsky is given to Snowball.

See also

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support