If you are interested in learning about Trotskyism, then this is the page for you. Here, you can discover for yourself what Trotsky wrote and did during his life and how supporters of Trotskyism are continuing this work today.
Trotskyism and Marxism have been under a truly massive attack by the whole of the Western bourgeois media, by the monstrous Stalinist lie machine, by soggy liberal academics, posturing Anarchist muddleheads and by the Stalinophobic and Stalinophilic far left. It has been smothered by a mountain of downright lies, half-truths, distortions and the selective use of facts. Academics have made their careers by writing a lot of drivel about Marxism and Trotskyism. So forget all the rubbish you have been taught in your schools and universities about Marxism (and some of us work in these institutions, for our sins, so we know what goes on). Open your eyes, and minds, and learn!
Overview of Trotskyism -- a short summary of Trotskyism.
What is the Fourth International? -- an introduction to the international organisation which Trotsky established in 1938.
1) The Transitional Programme, the founding document of the Fourth International (1938).
2) Results and Prospects and The Permanent Revolution (two works written in 1905 and 1932)
3) History of the Russian Revolution
4) My Life (Trotsky's autobiography)
5) The Class Nature of the Soviet State
6) Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism
9) Fascism (pamphlet)
Trotskyism -- ideas and practices of Leon Trotsky
Bourgeoisie -- the employing class, factory owners, bankers, the bosses.
Stalinist -- supporter of Joseph Stalin, his ideas and practices.
liberals -- adherents of a branch of bourgeois ideology, which rejects conservative, narrow-minded prejudices, but defends bourgeois democracy
Bourgeois Democracy -- parliamentary democracy, democracy for those with the money to finance massive election campaigns, democracy for the employers and its corrupted, co-opted agents in the workers' movement. While the working class has formal democracy (the right to vote) it is in practice excluded from real decision-making by lack of money, resources, skills, quality education, access to the mass-media, political consciousness and by the fraught conditions of its existence. The monied capitalist oligarchy has all these resources in abundance. Bourgeois democracy is only tolerated as long as the capitalists are able to have their own way through the skilful manipulation of the educational curriculum and the mass-media, television in particular. When this is threatened, it is suspended and dictatorship is imposed. This most often happens in the poorer countries of the so-called "Third World" where class contradictons are at their sharpest: when the poor revolt against poverty and oppression, they are ruthlessly suppressed by the local bourgeoisie, with the tacit support of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries. A similar problem existed in the Stalinist "Second World", which has generally occupied an intermediate economic position between the First and the Third World. In the richer countries of the First World, the superprofits sucked out of the poor countries are used to cushion the working class (the "labour aristocracy") in these countries from the the kind of desperate poverty that is experienced in the Third World. This allows sufficient scope for concessions to the working class so that a state of generalised revolt is rarely reached. The class contradictions are usually not sharp enough to threaten the social and political hegemony of the capitalist elite. Bourgeois democracy is thus a luxury that is generally affordable, on an extended basis, only in the richer countries. But even here, there is no democracy, whatsoever, in any institutions where there is any real power: the military, the police, the judiciary, the civil service, the media and the education system. And there is no democracy, at all, in the workplace in relation to what is produced and how it is distributed. Bourgeois democracy is thus the masked dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: it amounts to the right to choose one’s own executioner.
Anarchists -- supporters of a petit-bourgeois ideology that opposes Marxism, Lenininsm and Trotskyism. They reject the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Leninist party, and echo the anti-communist slanders of bourgeois ideology about the role of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. Anarchists, while engaging in much militant posturing and provocative actions against the capitalist state, lack class political independence. The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, for example, joined, and politically endorsed, the bourgeois Republican government in Catalonia.
Petit-bourgeois(ie) -- an intermediate layer between the big employers and the working class: small business people, professionals, the intelligentsia, the lower middle class. Ideologies which reflect this layer tend to attack both the big employers and the working class.
Stalinophobic left -- a part of the Western far left with a one-sided view of Stalinism, tending towards anti-communism.
Stalinophilic left -- a part of the far left with an unbalanced view of Stalinism, tending towards uncritical cheerleading of Stalinists.
Fourth International -- the international revolutionary socialist party set up by Trotsky in 1938 to take over from the collapse and betrayal of previous Internationals.
Imperialist -- the imperialist system emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The earlier establishment of colonial empires by the European powers facilitated the looting of resources and money from the colonies and the amassing of wealth and capital in what became known as the rich imperialist powers. The period of imperialism was characterised by the export of some of this capital back to these countries, not to benefit them, but to further exploit them through the extraction of massive superprofits, which further enriched the imperialist powers at the expense of the colonies. Today, although direct colonial rule has diminished, there is in its place a system of "semi-colonialism" or "neo-colonialism". The threat of bombing, economic sanctions and recolonistion by the imperialist powers ensures that the process of looting of resources continues.