Trotskyism

Trotskyism accepts the Leninist theory of the vanguard party and revolution but rejects the claim that socialism can be built in a single country. Revolution must be permanent and international, or an isolated workers' state, surrounded by capitalism and starved of development, will degenerate.

The theory of permanent revolution is its signature. Trotsky argued that in a backward country the bourgeois and socialist stages of revolution telescope into one continuous process, which must then spread to the advanced economies to survive — a direct challenge to Stalin's 'socialism in one country.' The dispute was not academic: it was the losing side of the power struggle after Lenin's death, and it ended in Trotsky's exile and assassination in 1940.

Its most enduring contribution is a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union itself. Trotsky characterized the USSR as a 'degenerated workers' state' in which a privileged bureaucratic caste had usurped political power from the working class while keeping nationalized property — neither socialism nor a return to capitalism, but a bureaucratic deformation to be corrected by a political revolution against the bureaucracy.

This produced a position revolutionary and anti-capitalist yet fiercely hostile to the states that most loudly claimed the socialist name. Its adherents have been organized in a series of small 'Internationals' and splinter parties, and while never holding power, Trotskyists have had an outsized presence in labour militancy, anti-Stalinist intellectual life, and (via ex-members) both the New Left and, curiously, early neoconservatism.

Critics note the tradition's chronic fragmentation into rival micro-parties, and question whether 'permanent revolution' was ever a workable strategy or mainly a retrospective explanation of defeat; orthodox communists simply regarded it as counter-revolutionary.

It is often reduced to a personality cult of its founder or a synonym for factional purism, which misses its real analytical value: it was the first sustained attempt to explain, in Marxist terms, why a revolution made in Marx's name produced a repressive state rather than the free association of producers he foretold.