Mindless militancy was for Trotskyists, like the ones who reigned at the Cowley plant, near Oxford.
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In April, 1940, Burnham helped to form a splinter party of disillusioned Trotskyists, then immediately quit.
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He was presented to Trotsky as Frank Jacson, a Canadian businessman bankrolling the French Trotskyists back in Paris — and of course by the summer of 1940 there was no way to verify this information with the French Trotskyists, who were on the run from the invading Germans.
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If you add together Le Pen, Mélenchon, the Trotskyists and the other loonies in the first round it was 45%.
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Trotsky's villa in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, was defended by fortress-like walls and guarded by young American Trotskyists.
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She met Mr. Kristol, at the time a committed leftist, at a meeting of Trotskyists in Brooklyn when she was 18.
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It's a place where social democrats and democratic socialists and Trotskyists and council communists and Chavistas and even the odd liberal can coexist.
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Walid spoke of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, with the personal hatred that Trotskyists once expressed for Stalin.
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Individual power struggles play out against wider political movements, such as the conflict between Russian Trotskyists and Stalinists, as well as the rise of National Socialism.
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The seven other candidates, including the ruling Socialist party's Benoit Hamon, two Trotskyists, three fringe nationalists and a former shepherd-turned-centrist lawmaker are lagging very far behind in opinion polls.
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On August 10th Tom Watson, Labour's deputy leader, alleged that the party was being infiltrated by Trotskyists from groups like the Socialist Party (whose website boasts of its members addressing Momentum events).
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So the agents of the Comintern and loyal comrades like the graduates of the International Lenin School learned to hunt down Trotskyists and anarchists, and to think only of the brave new world that was to follow all this misery.
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Much of this betokens what Atul Hatwal, a Labour commentator, calls the victory of the "Stalinists" (cynical but capable fixers like Seumas Milne, Mr Corbyn's Richelieu) over the "Trotskyists" (airy idealists like Jon Lansman, an ally of Labour's leader who advocates bottom-up control of the party).
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The neocons can return home to the Democratic Party (being a mutant strain of Trotskyists that went "right wing"), and the few Democrats still under the delusion that they are members of a party that gives a damn about labor can join up with the anti-globalists.
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Meanwhile, the Soviet authorities labeled the Trotskyists as "revisionists" and eventually expelled them from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, whereupon the Trotskyists founded their Fourth International.
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The issue of entryism remains a point of contention among Trotskyists to this day.
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At this time, they entered in contact with Trotskyists in the USSR and again joined Trotsky against Stalin, this time in secret. They then formed a bloc of opposition with the trotskyists along with some rightists. Ivan Smirnov, also a defendant at the first moscow trial, was one of the Trotskyists leaders. Pierre Broué and a number of historians assumed that the opposition was dissolved after the arrest of Smirnov and Ryutin.
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The French Turn was the name given to the entry between 1934 and 1936 of the French Trotskyists into the Section Française de l'International Ouvrière (SFIO, the contemporary name of the French Socialist Party). The French Turn was repeated by Trotskyists in other countries during the 1930s.
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Some Trotskyists following on from Tony Cliff deny that it is socialism, calling it state capitalism.Cliff, Tony (1948). "The Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism: A Critique". Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 8 February 2020. Other Trotskyists agree that these states could not be described as socialist,Mandel, Ernest (1979).
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In 1937, Stalin again unleashed what Trotskyists say was a political terror against their Left Opposition and many of the remaining Old Bolsheviks (those who had played key roles in the October Revolution in 1917) in the face of increased opposition, particularly in the army.Rogovin, Vadim, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror Mehring Books, 1998, p. 374. Also see the chapter 'Trotskyists in the camps': "A new, young generation of Trotskyists had grown up in the Soviet Union...lots of them go to their deaths crying 'Long live Trotsky!' " Until this research became available after the fall of the Soviet Union, little was known about the strength of the Trotskyists within the Soviet Union.
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International Publishers. p. 157 – via Marxists Internet Archive.Communist Workers Organisation (2000). "Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists: From Revolution to Social Democracy".
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As per an agreement between RWP and RCPI, the Trotskyists were given five seats in the RCPI Central Committee.
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The two American Trotskyists decided to fully support the Cuban Revolution and the leadership of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
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Orthodox Trotskyism is a branch of Trotskyism which aims to adhere more closely to the philosophy, methods and positions of Leon Trotsky and the early Fourth International, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx than other Trotskyists. The first Trotskyist international to describe itself as orthodox Trotskyist was the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Shortly after its formation in 1953, it wrote an open letter in which it described the tradition of the Fourth International as orthodox Trotskyism and called for orthodox Trotskyists to rally to the ICFI."A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World".
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Maintaining her links with Trotskyists in Paris (including Pierre Frank) she had a key role in linking British and French Trotskyists during and just after the Second World War. During the war she sheltered emigres from Europe in London. Later she ran her own business importing industrial diamonds which enabled her to help finance the Healy wing of the British Trotskyists. From Hamilton's arrival in England, she was a member of various Trotskyist groupings, including the early Militant Group, the (Workers' International League and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
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Some Trotskyists believed the anti-bureaucratic revolution would happen spontaneously, inevitably and naturally, others believed it needed to be organised—the aim being to establish a society owned and operated by the working class. According to the neo-Trotskyists, the communist party could not play its leading role because it did not represent the interests of the working class.
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Some Trotskyists believed the anti-bureaucratic revolution would happen spontaneously, inevitably and naturally, others believed it needed to be organised - the aim being to establish a society owned and operated by the working class. According to the neo-Trotskyists, the Communist Party could not play its leading role, because it did not represent the interests of the working class.
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When Dasgupta returned after his release from jail, the relations with the former RWP cadres deteriorated. Dasgupta had evolved into a Nehru supporter. In the Indo-China war of 1962 RCPI supported the Nehru government, a move the Trotskyists opposed. As a result of the dispute over the Indo-China war, the Trotskyists broke with RCPI in 1963.
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As a term and concept, state capitalism has been used by various socialists, including anarchists, Marxists, Leninists, left communists, Marxist–Leninists and Trotskyists.
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200 But this clearly, was a minority position. In line with continued defence of the Soviet Union by Trotskyists internationally as a "(degenerated) workers' state," Vietnamese Trotskyists muted their criticism of the Viet Minh regime. The slogan, adopted as Ngô Văn noted "despite the assassination of almost all their comrades in Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh's hired thugs," was "Defend the government of Ho Chi Minh against the attacks of imperialism."Văn, In the Crossfire, p. 199 As the Indochinese war intensified in the late 1940s, the French government began massive deportations of Vietnamese, including about three-quarters of the Trotskyists.
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It may have amused him to have at one stroke enraged liberals and fellow-travellers, Trotskyists, Stalinists and Stalinoids, not to mention conservative Babbitts.
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Some Trotskyists following on from Tony Cliff deny that it is socialism, calling it state capitalism.Cliff, Tony (1948). "The Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism: A Critique".
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All the while Etienne reported on the activity of Trotsky (codename OLD MAN), Sedov (codename SONNY), and the Trotskyists (codename POLECATS) to his NKVD handlers.
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In 1940, Origlass started working at Mort's Dock in Sydney's Balmain shipyards. He was elected as a shop steward with the Federated Ironworkers Association of Australia. Together with fellow Trotskyists Laurie Short and Jim McClelland, he battled with the CPA-dominated leadership of the union. After Hitler's invasion of the USSR in 1941, the CPA supported the Australian war effort, but the Trotskyists did not.
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The Socialist Workers League was a group of Israeli Trotskyists, founded in 2002 and dissolved in 2004. The SWL was built as a result of a split initiated by Trotskyists who were part of the Israeli Committee for One Democratic Republic of Palestine. The prominent member of the SWL was Yossi Schwartz, former member of the leadership of the Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), known as the international Spartacist tendency, the Trotskyist League (Canada). The Trotskyists, led by Schwartz, believed that only a program that struggles for a socialist Palestinian republic can unite the Palestinian Arab workers and peasants of the region.
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53 (Yearbook on International Communist Affairs series) Quiroga Santa Cruz had developed contacts with Trotskyists during his exile in Argentina, and invited Trotskyists to join his party. The PST was established, and legally recognized, as the Workers' Socialist Organization (Organización Socialista de los Trabajadores, OST) in 1980. The organization published El Chasqui (later renamed Chasqui Socialista).Alexander, Robert J. International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement.
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State Capitalism in Russia. London: Bookmarks pp. 333–353. . Retrieved 23 April 2020. Other Trotskyists agree that these states could not be described as socialist,Mandel, Ernest (1979).
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Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) leaving the party with the Trotskyists. The 1,000 or so Trotskyists who entered the Socialist Party in 1936 exited in the summer of 1937 with their ranks swelled by another 1,000.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 140. On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization—the Socialist Workers Party.
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Zborowski fled to the United States following the German invasion of France. The American Trotskyists David and Lilia Dallin assisted in his emigration and helped him obtain employment at a screw factory in Brooklyn. With money from an unknown source, he rented a fashionable Manhattan apartment in the Dallins' building and once again resumed his former occupation, spying on Trotskyists. His codenames TULIP and KANT appear in nearly two dozen Venona decrypts.
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The WIL was pro-war, while the RSL was more fractured; the leadership adopted Trotsky's Proletarian Military Policy, while the Left Fraction and the Center supported "revolutionary defeatism.". Polemics were exchanged and the CPGB attacked Trotskyists with the pamphlet "Clear Out Hitler's Agents".. The Trotskyists unified as the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1944. The Allied victory in the war left the CPGB in its strongest position, with two MPs elected in 1945.
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Some Trotskyists following on from Tony Cliff deny that it is socialism, calling it state capitalism.Cliff, Tony (1948). "The Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism: A Critique". In Cliff, Tony (1988) [1974].
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New York: Pathfinder Press. p. 96. . Some Trotskyists have emphasised Trotsky's revolutionary-democratic socialismTaaffe, Peter (1 March 2019). "New introduction to Trotsky's classic work, 'In Defence of Marxism'". Socialist World.
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Marxism in Southeast Asia; A Study of Four Countries. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1959. p. 142 The Trotskyists publicly blamed the French Communist Party for the break.Quinn-Judge, Sophie.
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After the split between Leon Trotsky and Stalin, Trotskyists have argued that Stalin transformed the Soviet Union into a bureaucratic and repressive one-party state and that all subsequent Communist states ultimately followed a similar path because they copied Stalinism. There are various terms used by Trotskyists to define such states, such as "degenerated workers' state" and "deformed workers' state", "state capitalist" or "bureaucratic collectivist". While Trotskyists are Leninists, there are other Marxists who reject Leninism entirely, arguing, for example, that the Leninist principle of democratic centralism was the source of the Soviet Union's slide away from communism. Maoists view the Soviet Union and most of its satellites as "state capitalist" as a result of destalinization and some of them also view modern China in this light.
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This paper was in turn terminated after about 18 months when the main section of the WPUS joined the Socialist Party of America en masse in 1936 and was replaced by a new publication Socialist Appeal by Trotskyists in the SPA. Albert Goldman edited the Chicago-based publication from 1935, he and other Trotskyists in Chicago had joined the SPA prior to the rest of the WPUS. In 1937, the newspaper was transferred to New York City.
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Within the new WSL disputes broke out immediately. Although there were many issues involved in the internal debates the Falklands War was paramount. Traditionally, Trotskyists defend countries oppressed by imperialism in any military conflict, calling this military support which is differentiated from political support. The reaction from some Trotskyists in Britain was to give such support to Argentina when war broke out, ignoring historical claims to the islands or the question of who began the war.
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Critics have argued that since the founders of neo-conservatism included ex-Trotskyists, Trotskyist traits continue to characterize neo-conservative ideologies and practices. During the Reagan administration, the charge was made that the foreign policy of the Reagan administration was being managed by ex Trotskyists. This claim was called a "myth" by , who was a neoconservative himself."A 1987 article in The New Republic described these developments as a Trotskyist takeover of the Reagan administration", wrote .
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It has an affiliated youth organisation, called Revolution , and a book store in Stockholm called Radikal . As part of the League for the Fifth International they consider themselves to be orthodox Trotskyists.
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Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 8 February 2020. Other Trotskyists agree that these states could not be described as socialist,Mandel, Ernest (1979). "Why The Soviet Bureaucracy is not a New Ruling Class".
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The same ill health meant until 1944 he played little part in the activities of the French Trotskyists although he was reported to have given educational classes to David Korner's Union Communiste.
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Marxism in Southeast Asia; A Study of Four Countries. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1959. p. 134 This kind of cooperation between Trotskyists and Comintern-linked communists was a phenomenon unique to Vietnam.
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The "deep entry" tactic was developed as a way for Trotskyists to respond to the Cold War. In countries with mass social democratic or communist parties, it was as difficult to be accepted into these parties as it was to build separate Trotskyist parties. Therefore, Trotskyists were advised to join the mass party. In Europe, that was the approach used, for example, by The Club and later Socialist Action in the Labour Party, and by Fourth Internationalists inside the Communist Parties.
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2 (March 30, 1935), pg. 4. In 1936, an influx of Trotskyist members into the adult tilted the YPSL's ideological direction to the left, with National Secretary Ernest Erber particularly supportive of the new radical trend. Several hundred members of the Trotskyist Spartacus Youth League joined the YPSL as part of a mass entry into the Socialist Party known among the Trotskyists as the "French Turn." The Trotskyists were expelled en masse in 1937, but many young activists exited the YPSL with them during the acrimonious split.
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The Fourth International (FI) is a revolutionary socialist international organization consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, also known as Trotskyists, whose declared goal is the overthrowing of global capitalism and the establishment of world socialism via international revolution. The Fourth International was established in France in 1938, as Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Third International or Comintern as effectively puppets of Stalinism and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power. Thus, Trotskyists founded their own competing Fourth International.The Transitional Program.
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In 1929, he was appointed as the assistant to Artur Artuzov, head of the Foreign Department. In May 1935, Genrikh Yagoda, chief of the secret police, replaced Artuzov with Slutsky. During Slutsky's tenure, the Foreign Department was principally engaged in tracking down and eliminating the opponents of Stalin's regime, essentially emigre White Russians and Trotskyists. Major operations included the kidnapping of General Evgenii Miller, the burglary of the Trotsky archive in Paris, the assassination of Ignace Reiss, and the liquidation of numerous Trotskyists and anti-Stalinists in Spain during the Civil War.
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Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the Young People's Socialist League leaving the party with the Trotskyists. Secretary of Local New York Jack Altman declared that the Trotskyists "were expelled for attempting to undermine the Socialist Party, for loyalty and allegiance to an opponent organization, the Bureau of the Fourth International, and for refusing to abide by the decisions and discipline of the National convention, the National Executive Committee, and the City Central Committee of the party, and for no other reason".New York Socialists Expel Trotsky Heads, The Socialist Call, vol.
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In 1935 the Trotskyists were expelled from the Bureau, as they had collectively embarked on entryism into the major labour parties (which was contrary to the ambitions of IBRYO and the London Bureau to build a new international).
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Stalinists purged Trotskyists. Religious sects, like the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo, and resistance groups formed their own militias. Under the terms of the Accord between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 6 March 1946: :1.
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He was again arrested in 1965, under the Defense of India Rules.The Militant. Arrest Indian Trotskyists In December 1965 the Fourth International Congress elected Pal, along with other jailed Trotskyist leaders as member of its 'honorary presidium'.The Militant.
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Proletarian Revolution. 65. Retrieved 4 November 2019. Anti-authoritarian communists and socialists such as anarchists, other democratic and libertarian socialists as well as revolutionary syndicalists and left communistsCommunist Workers Organisation (2000). "Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists: From Revolution to Social Democracy".
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Chen eventually became the voice of the Trotskyists in China, attempting to regain support and influence within the party, but failed. Chen continued to oppose measures like "New Democracy" and the "Bloc of Four Classes" advocated by Mao Zedong.
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Bureaucratic collectivism is a theory of class society. It is used by some Trotskyists to describe the nature of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and other similar states in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere (such as North Korea).
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In the early of summer 1945, Hòa Hảo leaders opened talks with the heads of other southern nationalist groups in the south, including the Cao Đài and the Trotskyists, to fight for and defend an independent Vietnam when the war ended.
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Fourth International. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 11 November 2019. Some Trotskyists such as the Committee for a Workers' International have at times included African, Asian and Middle Eastern socialist states when they have had a nationalized economy as deformed workers' states.
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Today these debates continue regarding what some Trotskyists consider the deformed workers' states of the Republic of Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Lao People's Democratic Republic and the People's Republic of China.
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Working-class Internationalism & Organisation This was organised on a democratic centralist basis, with component parties required to fight for policies adopted by the body as a whole. By declaring themselves the Fourth International, the "World Party of Socialist Revolution", the Trotskyists were publicly asserting their continuity with the Comintern, and with its predecessors. Their recognition of the importance of these earlier Internationals was coupled with a belief that they eventually degenerated. Although the Socialist International and Comintern were still in existence, the Trotskyists did not believe those organisations were capable of supporting revolutionary socialism and internationalism.
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This gave leadership to the Trotskyists through the various unions they led within the Central Labor Council. As mentioned below, through organizing the first area-wide contract for any union outside of rail, the Trotskyists established locals of their party wherever there were Teamster locals, from South Dakota to Iowa to Colorado. The party was later driven out of that local by prosecutions under the Smith Act and a trusteeship imposed by Tobin in the early 1940s. More importantly, the strike launched the career of Farrell Dobbs, who played a significant role in the organization of over-the-road drivers throughout the Midwest.
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Shachtman took up a series of positions as a journalist, which allowed him the time and resources to bring the American Trotskyists into contact with their co- thinkers. The CLA often gave him responsibility for contact and correspondence with Trotskyists in other countries. While holidaying in Europe during 1930, he became the first American to visit Trotsky in exile, on an island called Prinkipo in Russian, one of the Princes' Islands near Istanbul, Turkey. He attended the first European conference of the International Left Opposition in April 1930 and represented the CLA on the International Bureau of the ILO.
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In the 1930s the League included far left elements, such as Trotskyists and Communists; the chairman in its last years, Ted Willis, worked with and later became secretary of the YCL.Graham Stevenson The organisation accepted members from the ages of 16 to 25.
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The letter, clearly an NKVD fabrication, was no doubt meant to explain Klement's disappearance and to denounce Trotsky at the same time. However, Klement's headless corpse washed ashore in August 1938 and was identified, from a scar on the one hand, by two Trotskyists.
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The Union of Armenian Social Democrats was founded in 1902. It split into a Bolshevik and Menshevik faction. The Bolshevik faction became the Communist Party of Armenia in 1920. Many of its leaders were accused of being Trotskyists or Dashnakist and executed in 1937.
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Many members of the Workers Party of the United States, in turn, decided to join the Socialist Party of America in 1936 to propagate their views inside that party. The Socialist Party had developed a left wing and the party had declared itself open to other tendencies. As members of the Socialist Party the Trotskyists continued to exist as an independent tendency and continued publishing their own newspaper, Socialist Appeal. However, soon differences developed between the rest of the party and the "Socialist Appeal tendency", as the Trotskyists were known, and they split to form their own group, the Socialist Workers Party, soon thereafter.
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The United Left () was an alliance of several leftist opposition groupings in the German Democratic Republic. Among them were Christian Socialists, Trotskyists, adherents of the Titoistic system of self-management and some Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) members, who were critical of their party's policy.
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Seattle, Washington, USA: Red Letter Press, 2010. Pp. 4. Its title is the name of the concept of permanent revolution advocated by Trotsky and Trotskyists in opposition to the concept of socialism in one country as advocated by Joseph Stalin and Stalinists.Leon Trotsky, Luma Nichol (introduction).
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Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; pg. 112. This suggestion was dismissed as "poppycock" by SP Executive Secretary Clarence Senior, but the seed of the idea of joint action had been planted.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 112.
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Because of orthodox Marxists' desire to eliminate the political elitism they see in capitalism, Marxists, Leninists and Trotskyists believe in direct democracy implemented through a system of communes (which are sometimes called soviets). This system ultimately manifests itself as council democracy and begins with workplace democracy.
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Trotskyists differ on the extent to which this is true today, but even the most orthodox tend to recognise in the late twentieth century a new development in the revolts of the rural poor, the self-organising struggles of the landless; and many other struggles which in some ways reflect the militant united organised struggles of the working class; and which to various degrees do not bear the marks of class divisions typical of the heroic peasant struggles of previous epochs. However, orthodox Trotskyists today still argue that the town- and city-based working-class struggle is central to the task of a successful socialist revolution, linked to these struggles of the rural poor. They argue that the working class learns of necessity to conduct a collective struggle, for instance in trade unions, arising from its social conditions in the factories and workplaces; and that the collective consciousness it achieves as a result is an essential ingredient of the socialist reconstruction of society.Many would put, for instance, the Committee for a Workers' International in this category of orthodox Trotskyists.
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The fashion ever since has been to describe the Thompson et al. New Left as "the first New Left" and the Anderson et al. group, which by 1968 had embraced Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists, as the second. Thompson subsequently allied himself with the annual Socialist Register publication.
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The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is a political party that formed after a 1995 ideological rupture with Workers World Party over the issue of their support of the Fidel Castro government in Cuba, The SEP are composed of Trotskyists and are affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site.
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The election of the latter three was, however, invalidated. Moreover, the election was preceded by a controversy within the La Lutte alliance regarding the candidature of Duong Bach Mai, a Communist Party leader. He was labelled 'reformist' by Trotskyists, but defended by Ta Thu Thau.Trager, Frank N (ed.).
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And we realize that the hand of Fascism is behind every > attempt to demoralize our home front, to undermine the authority of the > Republic. Therefore it is essential that we wipe out Trotskyism with a firm > hand, for Trotskyism is no longer a political option for the working class > but an instrument of the counter-revolution. Trotskyism must be rooted out > of the proletarian ranks of our Party as one roots out poisonous weeds. The > Trotskyists must be rooted out and disposed of like wild beasts, for > otherwise every time our men wish to go on the offensive we will not be able > to do so due to lawlessness caused by the Trotskyists in the rear.
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In 1953, the SWP's national committee issued an Open Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the WorldSWP, "Open Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World", Militant, November 16, 1953. and organised the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). This was a public faction which initially included, in addition to the SWP, Gerry Healy's British section The Club, the Internationalist Communist Party in France (then led by Lambert who had expelled Bleibtreu and his grouping), Nahuel Moreno's party in Argentina and the Austrian and Chinese sections of the FI. The sections of the ICFI withdrew from the International Secretariat, which suspended their voting rights. Both sides claimed they constituted a majority of the former International.
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The organization was deeply factionalized, with the Militant faction split into right ("Altmanite"), center ("Clarity") and left ("Appeal") factions, in addition to the radical pacifists led by Thomas. A special convention was planned for the last week of March 1937 to set the party's future policy, initially intended as an unprecedented "secret" gathering.Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 127. Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Jack Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists and Trotsky's own decision to move towards a break with the party.
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Flag of the Struggle Group.Book review: Revolutionaries They Could Not Break, by Ngo Van Trotskyism in Vietnam was represented by those who, in left opposition to the Indochinese Communist Party (PCI) of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), identified with the call by Leon Trotsky to re-found "vanguard parties of proletariat" on principles of "proletarian internationalism" and of "permanent revolution". Active in the 1930s in organising the Saigon waterfront, industry and transport, Trotskyists presented a significant challenge to the Moscow-aligned party in Cochinchina. Following the September 1945 Saigon uprising against the restoration of the French, Vietnamese Trotskyists were systematically hunted down and eliminated by both the French Sûreté and the Communist-front Viet Minh.
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Historian Constance Myers notes that while "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable", it was only later when "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface".Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 123. The Trotskyists retained a common orientation with the radicalized Socialist Party in their opposition to the European war, their preference for industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Organizations over the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor, a commitment to trade union activism, the defense of the Soviet Union as the first workers' state while at the same time maintaining an antipathy toward the Stalin regime and in their general aims in the 1936 election.Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 124.
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It also did ban factional newspapers, a move directly targeting The Socialist Appeal; and formally established The Socialist Call as the party's national organ. Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists and Trotsky's own decision to move towards a break with the party.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 133. Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the Thomas group, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split.
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Some Trotskyists such as the Committee for a Workers' International have at times included African, Asian and Middle Eastern constitutional socialist states when they have had a nationalized economy as deformed workers' states.Grant, Ted (1978). "The Colonial Revolution and the Deformed Workers' States". The Unbroken Thread. Retrieved 21 June 2020.
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Murray Dowson (1915 – before 2002) was a Canadian Trotskyist politician. Dowson was born in Toronto, Ontario. In the mid-1930s, Murray joined the Workers' Party of Canada while a student at York Memorial Collegiate. He later joined B. J. Field's League for a Revolutionary Workers Party before rejoining the Trotskyists.
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Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky were close both ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and some call Trotsky its "co-leader".Lenin and Trotsky were "co-leaders" of the 1917 Russian Revolution. "Revolutionary in Name Only".
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Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in an Age of Globalization. Routledge. p. 202. . Those third camp revolutionary-democratic Trotskyists and socialists supported a socialist political revolution that would establish or re-establish socialist democracy in deformed or degenerated workers' states."Deformed Workers' States". In Defence of Marxism.
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The relevant articles were later collected in Trotsky's books 1905 and in "Permanent Revolution", which also contains his essay "Results and Prospects." Some Trotskyists have argued that the state of the Third World shows that capitalism offers no way forward for underdeveloped countries, thus again proving the central tenet of the theory.
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Most Trotskyists defend the economic achievements of the planned economy in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, despite the "misleadership" of the Soviet bureaucracy and what they claim to be the loss of democracy.Trotsky, Leon, Revolution Betrayed, pp5 – 32 Pathfinder (1971) Trotskyists claim that in 1928 inner party democracy and indeed soviet democracy, which was at the foundation of Bolshevism,"One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all working and exploited people generally" Lenin, 'How to organise competition', Collected Works, Volume 26, p. 409 had been destroyed within the various Communist Parties. Anyone who disagreed with the party line was labeled a Trotskyist and even a fascist.
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Many revolutionary socialists argue that the Russian Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin follows the revolutionary socialist model of a revolutionary movement guided by a vanguard party. By contrast, the October Revolution is portrayed as a coup d'état or putsch along the lines of Blanquism. Revolutionary socialists, particularly Trotskyists, argue that the Bolsheviks only seized power as the expression of the mass of workers and peasants, whose desires are brought into being by an organised force—the revolutionary party. Marxists such as Trotskyists argue that Lenin did not advocate seizing of power until he felt that the majority of the population, represented in the soviets, demanded revolutionary change and no longer supported the reformist government of Alexander Kerensky established in the earlier revolution of February 1917.
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When the SWP moved away from Trotskyism in the early 1980s, a faction fight broke out in the RWL between supporters of the SWP and supporters of a Trotskyist position over the issue of Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and the nature of the Cuban Revolution. While the Trotskyists argued that Cuba was a deformed workers' state, the supporters of the SWP argued that Cuban Revolution was a full worker's revolution and that the Cuban state was a genuine worker's state. The Trotskyists were expelled beginning in the early 1980s and formed what became Gauche Socialiste in Quebec and Socialist Challenge in English Canada. In the late 1980s the RWL left the FI and in 1990 it changed its name to the Communist League.
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Dunne's fate would change by the 1940s, however. Red baiting in the newspapers in 1934 could be deflected, but with American society in the grips of the Second Red Scare, the Socialist Workers Party would find their offices raided and leading officials, including Dunne, accused of sedition under the anti-communist Smith Act. This was seen by Trotskyists as an anti-communist conspiracy between the FBI and Teamsters national leadership, represented by Daniel J. Tobin, who sought to eliminate the leadership of the radical Minneapolis local. Dunne and the other SWP leadership were found guilty, and in 1943 he was imprisoned for sixteen months in the Sandstone federal prison along with other leading American Trotskyists such as James P. Cannon.
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On the one hand, the Austrian, Chinese and New Zealand sections met at a congress with the SWP and voted to take part in the reunification congress. On the other hand, Pierre Lambert's PCI and Gerry Healy's SLL called a "International Conference of Trotskyists" to continue the work of the ICFI under their own leadership.
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Saor Éire ( or , meaning Free Ireland), also known as the Saor Éire Action Group, was an armed Irish republican organisation composed of Trotskyists and ex-IRA members. It took its name from a similar organisation of the 1930s.Liz Walsh: The Final Beat, Gardaí Killed in the Line of Duty (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin. 2001).
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Pierre Broué and a number of historians concluded the bloc and the opposition ceased to exist by early 1933, because many of its leaders were arrested. However, some documents found after Broué's search showed that the Underground Opposition stayed active even in prison, in fact, the prisons became the centers of activities of the trotskyists.
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The 1,000 or so Trotskyists who had entered the Socialist Party in 1936 exited in the summer of 1937 with their ranks swelled by another 1,000. Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 140. On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization—the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
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The latter "simply disappeared after their return to Vietnam, presumably through capitulation to the Viet Minh Stalinists or liquidation by either the Stalinists or the French." By 1951-52 there were only about 70 Vietnamese ostensible Trotskyists left in France. La Lutte and League supporters combined in the Bolshevik-Leninist Group of Vietnam (BLGV).
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The list included Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev ;July 29: Classified letter from the Politburo On terrorist actions of Trotsky-Zinoviev group. The letter stepped up the propaganda campaign against "Trotskyists". ;August 19 - August 24: Trial of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center". Among the sixteen sentenced to death were Zinoviev, Kamenev, Ter- Vaganyan, and Smirnov.
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The Communist government accused 'Trotskyists' of being agents of Franco, pp. 160–163, xx-xxiii. About the fighting in Barcelona between rivals on the republican side, "discrepancies" in the Communist press included "pure fabrication" and "quite deliberate lying", pp. 164–165 in Chapter XI (nota bene: a later edition moved two chapters to an appendix).
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585–7; 1963 ed. 571–573. Trotskyists sometimes claim that this ban was intended to be temporary, but there is no language in the discussion at the 10th Party Congress suggesting such.Protokoly (1933) ed. 523–548. The Group of Democratic Centralism was a group in the Soviet Communist Party who advocated different concepts of party democracy.
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He turned vehemently against Santamaria. In The Age on 7 April 1984, he likened Santamaria's treatment of trade-union opponents to Stalin's treatment of Trotskyists; this assertion was clearly libellous, but Santamaria refused to press charges. The previous year (Quadrant, October 1983), Knopfelmacher had directed some of his most sarcastic prose against Santamaria's supporters among conservative Catholic activists.
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Trotsky's Fourth International was established in France in 1938, when Trotskyists argued that the Comintern or Third International had become irretrievably "lost to Stalinism" and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power."The Transitional Program". Retrieved November 5, 2008. In contemporary English language usage, an advocate of Trotsky's ideas is often called a "Trotskyist".
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The Marxist Workers League was the name of two splinter groups from the Revolutionary Workers League in the 1930s. The first group split in early 1936 and "after a sensational existence of both its members for 19 days" rejoined the Trotskyists."Footnote for Historians" by Max Shachtman in New International, Vol. 4 No. 12, December 1938, pp. 377–379.
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The Internationalist Workers Party (Parti ouvrier internationaliste, POI) was a French Trotskyist party established in 1936 after the exclusion of militant Trotskyists from the French Section of the Workers' International in 1935 and dissolved in 1939 when most of the militants had rejoined the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party. It was an official section of the Fourth International.
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Although they would later abandon Trotskyism, in their International Workers Day issue (no. 3) of their new periodical the group proclaimed: "We are THE Trotskyists. We stand 100% with all the principled positions of Leon Trotsky, the most revolutionary communist since Lenin". The nascent group appears to have organized as the Workers World Party by February 1960.
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The current president of SOPA is Lybon Masaba. In the 2004 elections, SOPA received 0.1% of the vote. The party is affiliated with the International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International. Although party members include socialists of different stripes, some of its most influential members are Trotskyists, and they comprise the Azanian Section of the reproclaimed Fourth International.
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In the area of ULEN refineries, hundreds of noncommunists were executed. In the village of Feneos, OPLA turned a nearby monastery into a concentration camp and killing ground for those they deemed "reactionaries". It is believed that hundreds were killed. In addition, several Trotskyists had to leave the country in fear for their lives (Cornelius Castoriadis fled to France).
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The decision was motivated by the need to clear the border regions of unreliable people. All together 69,283 people were transferred. ;May 20: Politburo accepts Yagoda's proposal on Trotskyists. ;June 19: Yagoda and the Prosecutor General of the USSR, Andrey Vyshinsky, sent to the Politburo a list of 82 members of a "contra-revolutionary Trotskyist organization".
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His cousin, actress María Mercader, became the second wife of Italian film director Vittorio De Sica. Mercader's contacts with and befriending of Trotskyists began during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell's biographer Gordon Bowkerrandomhouse.co.nz-authors Gordon Bowker biography in Random House website relates how English communist David Crook, ostensibly a volunteer for the Republican side, was sent to Albacete.
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Miller testified that he was introduced to Lucy Booker, a courier between Miller and Soble in 1945. Reports on the Trotskyists were typed in Booker's residence. Soble informed Miller in 1945 that he was being transferred to another controller, and it was then that he was introduced to Soblen. Miller's story is confirmed by numerous decrypted Venona documents.
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Shortly thereafter, AMG was joined by small group of Trotskyists, adherents of the Fourth International. AMG had an orientation towards activism and intervened in house occupations, strikes and other forms of protest. At the same time, considerable effort was put into theoretical discussions, in an attempt to reconcile the different positions of the three constituent tendencies.
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The POUM Trotskyists were outlawed and denounced by the Soviet-aligned Communists as an instrument of the fascists. In the May Days of 1937, many thousands of anarchist and communist Republican soldiers fought for control of strategic points in Barcelona. FAI during the Spanish Social Revolution. The pre-war Falange was a small party of some 30,000–40,000 members.
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The Communist League of America published more than a dozen books and pamphlets by Leon Trotsky during its six years of existence. Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern initially conceived of their task as that of reforming rather than replacing the Communist Party.Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; pg. 32.
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1 (November 15, 1928), pg. 1. The paper was aimed directly at members of the Communist Party, whom the expelled Trotskyists considered a vanguard organization that would be most interested in their ideas.Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism, pp. 65-66. Those choosing to remain regular to the Workers (Communist) Party of America saw matters through different eyes.
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An International Secretariat was established, with many of the day's leading Trotskyists and most countries in which Trotskyists were active represented.M. S., "Foreword", Founding Conference of the Fourth International] Among the resolutions adopted by the conference was the Transitional Programme.Socialist Workers Party, The Founding Conference of the Fourth International The Transitional Programme was the central programmatic statement of the congress, summarising its strategic and tactical conceptions for the revolutionary period that it saw opening up as a result of the war which Trotsky had been predicting for some years. It is not, however, the definitive programme of the Fourth International as is often suggested but instead contains a summation of the conjunctural understanding of the movement at that date and a series of transitional policies designed to develop the struggle for workers' power.
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An earlier publication called The Militant was launched in November 1928 by James P. Cannon and other American Trotskyists gathered together in the Communist League of America (CLA). It declared its goal to be a fight "in the interest of the working people" against the capitalist system, imperialist wars, and the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, which according to the Trotskyists had betrayed and corrupted the October Revolution. The original Militant terminated in 1934 at the time of the merger of the Cannon-led CLA with the American Workers Party headed by A. J. Muste to form the Workers Party of the United States (WPUS). The paper was succeeded by a similar broadsheet that served as the official organ of the WPUS called the New Militant, edited by Cannon.
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There was no action to expel the Trotskyist Appeal faction, but pressure continued to build along these lines, egged on by the Communist Party's increasingly vehement denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism. The convention passed a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the activities of the factions at the local level. It also banned factional newspapers, establishing a national organ instead. Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the Trotskyists' expulsion from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists, and Trotsky's own decision to move toward a break with the party.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 133.
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With the conciliation of the charismatic and independent revolutionary figure of Nguyen An Ninh, the collaboration was revived in October 1934. The editorial line agreed between the Party group and the Trotskyists entente was "struggle oriented against the colonial power and its constitutionalist allies, support of the demands of workers and peasants without regard to which of the two groups they were affiliated with, diffusion of classic Marxist thought, [and] rejection of all attacks against the USSR and against either current."Hémery, Révolutionaires vietnamiens, p. 63. The editorial board consisted of Nguyen An Ninh, Le Van Thu, Tran Van Thach (left-wing nationalists), Nguyen Van Tao, Duong Bach Mai, Nguyen Van Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Luu (Communist Party), and Ta Thu Thau, Ho Huu Tuong, Phan Van Huu, Phan Van Chang and Huynh Van Phuong (Trotskyists).
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The West Bengal-based Trotskyists who had left ICS in 2003 regrouped in 2008 to form Radical Socialist. This organisation brings out a Bengali journal Radical, and has a website www.radicalsocialist.in. Its members are active in forest rights struggles, trade union struggles, women's movements, and student-youth work. Prajapati, Shah, and a few other Gujarat members are also associated with Radical Socialist.
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70, Pathfinder, (1973). However, the Left Opposition continued to work in secret within the Soviet Union.Serge, Victor, From Lenin to Stalin, p70 ff, Pathfinder, (1973) Trotsky was eventually exiled to Turkey and moved from there to France, Norway and finally to Mexico.Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, p381, Pelican (1966) After 1928, the various Communist Parties throughout the world expelled Trotskyists from their ranks.
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These discussions failed."Footnote for Historians" by Max Shachtman in New International, Vol.4 No.12, December 1938, pp.377-379, Later that year, in the lead-up to the founding of the Socialist Workers Party, and while Salemme and Joerger were still with the Trotskyists around James Cannon, a debate arose in American Trotskyism on the nature of the Soviet Union.
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Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the Thomas group, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split. At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had concluded that the Trotskyists had joined the Socialist Party not to make it stronger, but to capture it for their own purposes.
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In 1937, Ture Nerman and his friend August Spångberg, traveled to Spain where General Francisco Franco's National faction had taken power and a civil war was ravaging the country. They went through Nazi Germany and managed to get to Barcelona. The civil war was a chaos. At times the Stalinists were fighting the Trotskyists, and at other times the Anarchists were fighting everyone.
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As part of this Pollitt returned to the leadership. The situation within British Trotskyism was more complex. There were two competing groups; the Revolutionary Socialist League (official representatives of the Fourth International, formed from a merger of various groups derived from the Communist League) and the Workers' International League. Trotskyists debated about whether the Soviet Union, despite Stalin, was worth defending.
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Mendelevich, pp. 138-139 The FORJA supported neutrality and saw it as an opportunity to get rid of what it considered British meddling with the Argentine economy. Some Trotskyists promoted the fight against the Third Reich as an early step of an international class struggle. The army and some nationalists supported industrialization and promoted neutrality as a way to oppose the United Kingdom.
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Souvarine was involved in a variety of organizations and journals (f.e. «Est-Ouest» and «Le Contrat social») of the anti-Stalinist left in France, publishing frequently on the Soviet Union, Stalin and Stalinism. Souvarine also criticised Lenin. His criticisms of Stalinism were important sources for some less orthodox Trotskyists, such as C. L. R. James, who translated his Stalin biography into English.
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Despite being a fanatical fighter against Trotskyists through his career, soon he was accused of being Trotskyist himself and was arrested on February 26, 1938.. Postyshev story on 25:00. His arrest came after he was denounced by Lev Mekhlis who feared that Postyshev's repression might affect him. He was shot at Kuibyshev on February 26, 1939.Magocsi (1996), p 570.
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Vasily Aksyonov was born to Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia Ginzburg in Kazan, USSR on August 20, 1932. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, Pavel Aksyonov, had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both parents "were prominent communists." In 1937, however, both were arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists.
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London: C. Hurst, 1985. p. 7 In May 1937 the Communist Party launched a new newspaper of its own, L'Avant Garde ('The Vanguard'), in which the Trotskyists were attacked. The split in La Lutte was finalized on June 14, 1937, when the Communist Party refused to support a motion of Ta Thu Thau against the Popular Front government.Trager, Frank N (ed.).
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The Convention for a Progressive Alternative (, CAP) was a French left-wing political party founded in 1994. It was founded by reformist Communists (Charles Fiterman, Jean-Pierre Brard), Socialists, Trotskyists and others. The party supported Green candidate Dominique Voynet in the 1995 presidential election. Fiterman associated CAP to the discussions regarding the Plural Left coalition with the PS, PCF and the Greens.
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According to historian Constance Ashton Myers, the Revolutionary Policy Committee was spearheaded by a "Lovestoneite infiltrator," Irving Brown.Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; pp. 109-110. Chairman of the group was J.B. Matthews, a former Methodist missionary who would later become chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities headed by Martin Dies, Jr.
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Following the October Revolution, the Communist International (also known as the Third International) was founded. This International became widely identified with communism, but also defined itself in terms of revolutionary socialism. However, in 1938 Trotskyists formed the Fourth International because they thought that the Third International turned to Marxism–Leninism—this latter International became identified with revolutionary socialism. Luxemburgism is another revolutionary socialist tradition.
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Following the Second World War, Trotskyism was wracked by increasing internal divisions over analysis and strategy. This was combined with an industrial impotence that was widely recognised. Additionally, the success of Soviet- aligned parties in Europe and Asia led to the persecution of Trotskyite intellectuals such as the infamous purge of Vietnamese Trotskyists. The war had also strained social democratic parties in the West.
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At the end of the Second World War he returned to France where his current campaigned for the reunification of the French Trotskyists. He joined the leadership of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCI). At the 1948 World Congress he joined the international leadership team that included Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo. He was important in maintaining the PCI in the 1950s and into the 1960s.
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He was generally well received, and he set out to purge the Latvian Communist Party of Trotskyists, Bukharinites, and possible foreign agents. In July 1940, a Latvian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. It was, unsurprisingly, granted admission to the USSR. As a result of this success, he was named Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, and taken into greater confidence by Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, and Vyacheslav Molotov.
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Their political evolution would lead them away from Trotskyism.State-capitalism and World Revolution by Johnson-Forest, Socialist Workers Party, 1950. Another is that of Tony Cliff, associated with the International Socialist Tendency and the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), dating back to the late 1940s. Unlike Johnson-Forest, Cliff formulated a theory of state capitalism that would enable his group to remain Trotskyists, albeit heterodox ones.
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The most prominent members of the Movement in its early years tended to be German émigrés - a mix of former Trotskyists and social democrats such as Max Laufer, Ulrich Jacobs and Fritz Besser. There were also South Africans living in exile such as Pierre Watter, Richard McArthur and Stanley Trevor. The mathematicians Martin Davis, Jacob T. Schwartz and Harold S. Shapiro were also members.
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Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism, pg. 71. Other meetings were disrupted in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 36. In response to the physical tactics of the regular Communist Party Trotskyists formed a "Workers Defense Guard" equipped with clubs and wooden axe handles and maintained security at subsequent public meetings in Minneapolis (a hotbed of the organization) and New York.
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At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had come to the conclusion that the Trotskyists had joined the Socialist Party not to make it stronger, but to capture the organization for their own purposes.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 138. On June 24–25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratcheted up the rhetoric against American Labor Party and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks; and to reestablish their newspaper, The Socialist Appeal.Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 139. This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2, with 18 abstentions; and ordering 70 more to be brought up on charges.
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Cliff's views have been criticised by more orthodox Trotskyists as an abandonment of Trotsky's theory in all but name in favour of the stagist theory, countering that Cliff was more cautious than Trotsky about the potential of the working class in underdeveloped countries to seize power. Cliff saw such revolutions as a detour or deflection on the road to socialist revolution rather than a necessary preliminary to it.
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Trotsky did not believe in the true socialism in a single country especially in a backward country and pledged himself to Luxemburgism, trying to represent himself and even Lenin as the left followers of Luxemburgism. He supported democracy and free competition of parties in his book The Revolution Betrayed.[J. Dawsey Trotsky’s Struggle against Stalin //US national WWII museum. 09.2018Chavez, Maduro and their followers present themselves as Trotskyists.
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In 1937 he joined the Dewey Commission as a technical assistant. He and Eisner traveled to Mexico with the commission staff. Chaired by the philosopher John Dewey, the commission aimed to provide Leon Trotsky with a fair hearing of the charges made against him in the Soviet show trials of 1936. While they opposed Stalinism, he and Eisner, like most members of the commission, were not themselves Trotskyists.
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She married a fellow student, Moses J. Konikow (pronounced KO-ni-koff), in Zurich in 1891."Socialists Would Separate: Dr. Antoinette Konikow of Boston has Left Her Doctor Husband," New York Times, August 16, 1908, pg. 8. While in Switzerland, Konikow joined the Emancipation of Labor group headed by Georgii Plekhanov.Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941 Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; pg. 34.
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Two small international networks based on her political thought characterize themselves as Luxemburgists, namely the Communist Democracy (Luxemburgist) founded in 2005 and the International Luxemburgist Network founded in 2008. Feminists and Trotskyists as well as leftists in Germany especially show interest in Luxemburg's ideas. Distinguished modern Marxist thinkers such as Ernest Mandel, who has even been characterised as Luxemburgist, have seen Luxemburg's thought as a corrective to revolutionary theory.Achacar, Gilbert.
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Socialist Party (Marxist) was a Trotskyist political party in India. It was formed in 1954 by the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Party, who broke away in protest against the merger of the Socialist Party and the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party into the Praja Socialist Party. The new party was not affiliated to any of the Trotskyist Fourth Internationals. In 1958 the Socialist Party (Marxist) merged into the Revolutionary Workers Party.
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Fried's instructions were to eliminate the social-democratic and anarcho-syndicalist elements, and prevent the Trotskyists from gaining influence. He was to resolve rivalry, eliminate unsound elements and install men loyal to Moscow at the head of the party. Fried, a charming and persuasive man, achieved these goals within a few years. He removed Henri Barbé and Pierre Célor and advanced Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, Benoît Frachon and André Marty.
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Retrieved 17 March 2012. Proponents present decentralized and participatory economic planning as an alternative to market socialism for a post-capitalist society. Decentralized planning has been a feature of anarchist and other socialist economics. Variations of decentralized planning such as economic democracy, industrial democracy and participatory economics have been promoted by various political groups, most notably anarchists, democratic socialists, guild socialists, libertarian Marxists, libertarian socialists, revolutionary syndicalists and Trotskyists.
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After 1940, dissident Trotskyists developed more theoretically sophisticated accounts of state capitalism. One influential formulation has been that of the Johnson–Forest Tendency of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya who formulated her theory in the early 1940s on the basis of a study of the first three Five Year Plans alongside readings of Marx's early humanist writings.Dunayevskaya, Raya (1941). "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society".
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By the end of 1932 this group joined a conspiratorial bloc with Leon Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and some rightists and trotskyists secretly operating inside the Soviet Union. Trotsky defined it as a tool to fight Stalinst repression in the USSR. Historian Pierre Broué said the bloc was dissolved after certain members were arrested and Zinoviev and Kamenev joined the party again. There was no evidence in Trotsky's letters of terrorist activity.
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New York: Palgrave, 2002; pg. 71. Hallgren charged that the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky had "become an instrument of the Trotskyists for political intervention against the Soviet Union."Quoted in "An Open Letter to American Liberals," Soviet Russia Today, March 1937, pp. 14-15. Hallgren's January 27, 1937, letter of resignation was later published as a 1-cent pamphlet by the Communist Party's International Publishers.
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Myers, The Prophets Army, pp. 51-52. Many of those coming from the Communist Party were often difficult for the centralized organization to manage, retrospectively regarded by Cannon as "dilettantish petty-bourgeois minded people who couldn't stand any kind of discipline" who "wanted, or rather thought they wanted to become Trotskyists."Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism, pg. 93. Cannon later recalled: > Many of the newcomers made a fetish of democracy.
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Once the February 1917 Russian revolution had broken out, Trotsky admitted the importance of a Bolshevik organisation and joined the Bolsheviks in July 1917. Despite the fact that many like Stalin saw Trotsky's role in the October 1917 Russian revolution as central, Trotsky wrote that without Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, the October revolution of 1917 would not have taken place. As a result, since 1917 Trotskyism as a political theory is fully committed to a Leninist style of democratic centralist party organisation, which Trotskyists argue must not be confused with the party organisation as it later developed under Stalin. Trotsky had previously suggested that Lenin's method of organisation would lead to a dictatorship, but it is important to emphasise that after 1917 orthodox Trotskyists argue that the loss of democracy in the Soviet Union was caused by the failure of the revolution to spread internationally and the consequent wars, isolation, and imperialist intervention, not the Bolshevik style of organisation.
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Early in 1934, some French Trotskyists of the Communist League conceived of the idea of entering the French Socialist Party (the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière or SFIO) in order to recruit members for the Trotskyists, or so some critics have charged. The group retained its identity as a factional organization inside the SFIO and built a base among the party's youth section, continuing their activity until popular front action between the SFIO and the mainline Communist Party of France made their position untenable. This tactic of "entering" the larger social democratic parties of each country, endorsed by Trotsky himself, became known as the "French Turn" and was replicated by various Trotskyist parties around the world. In 1934, the Communist League of America merged with the American Workers Party led by A. J. Muste, forming the Workers Party of the United States. Throughout 1935, the Workers Party was deeply divided over the "entryism" tactic called for by the "French Turn" and a bitter debate swept the organization.
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Leon Trotsky exhorting Red Army soldiers in the Polish–Soviet War As the Left Opposition to Stalin within the Soviet party and government, Leon Trotsky and Trotskyists argued that Marxist–Leninist ideology contradicted Marxism and Leninism in theory, therefore Stalin's ideology was not useful for the implementation of socialism in Russia.Trotsky, Leon (1937) [1990]. Stalinskaya shkola fal'sifikatsiy . pp. 7–8. Moreover, Trotskyists within the party identified their anti-Stalinist communist ideology as Bolshevik–Leninism and supported the permanent revolution to differentiate themselves from Stalin's justification and implementation of socialism in one country. Mao Zedong with Anna Louise Strong, the American journalist who reported and explained the Chinese Communist Revolution to the West After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union claimed to be the sole heir and successor to Stalin concerning the correct interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and ideological leader of world communism.
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The POR led forces that sought to keep the assembly independent of Torres. After Torres' overthrow, Lora and other POR leaders went into exile. In 1988 Lora's POR founded the Liaison Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International together with other Latin American trotskyists. The wing of the POR led by González Moscoso, which remained the official affiliate of the Trotskyist Fourth International, turned to the idea of armed insurrection against the government.
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Those arrested during the Great Purges of the late 1930s were either "first category arrests", i.e. listed for execution, or "second category arrests", listed for imprisonment and exile.Document 31 January 1938, Pb 57/48 - Politburo decision to increase quotas for 1st and 2nd category arrests, Bukovsky archives online. Some of those in the 1st category were tortured to secure confessions that they were secret Trotskyists, agents of foreign powers and so on.
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These voices > belong to people who themselves are intoxicated with this counter- > revolutionary ideology. The Trotskyists have long been transformed into the > agents of Fascism, into the agents of the German Gestapo. We saw this on the > ground during the May putsch in Catalonia; we saw this clearly in the > disturbances that occurred in various other places. And everybody will > realize this when the trial opens against the P.O.U.M. leaders who were > caught spying.
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In the early 1930s, Trotsky and his supporters believed that Stalin's influence over the Third International could still be fought from within and slowly rolled back. They organised themselves into the International Left Opposition in 1930, which was intended to be a group of anti-Stalinist dissenters within the Third International. Stalin's supporters, who dominated the International, would no longer tolerate dissent. All Trotskyists, and those suspected of being influenced by Trotskyism, were expelled.
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The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, is a Trotskyist international. In 1963, following a ten-year schism, the majorities of the two public factions of the Fourth International, the International Secretariat and the International Committee, reunited, electing a United Secretariat of the Fourth International. In 2003, the United Secretariat was replaced by an Executive Bureau and an International Committee, although some other Trotskyists still refer to the organisation as the USFI or USec.
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In 1932 he was hosted by the fascist regime in the Kingdom of Italy during a trip to Denmark. By the end of that same year Trotsky had joined a conspiratorial political bloc with the anti-Stalin opposition inside the USSR. There was no evidence of an alliance with Nazi Germany or Japan, as the Soviet Union claimed. The members of the bloc were zinovievites, rightists and trotskyists who "capitulated" to Stalin.
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Similarly, several Trotskyists have emphasised Leon Trotsky's revolutionary-democratic socialism. Some such as Hal Draper spoke of "revolutionary-democratic socialism". Those third camp revolutionary-democratic socialists advocated a socialist political revolution that would establish or re-establish socialist democracy in deformed or degenerated workers' states. Draper also compared social democracy and Stalinism as two forms of socialism from above, contraposed to his own socialism from below as being the purer, more Marxist version of socialism.
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A general strike applauded the socialists' victory while Marceau Pivert cried "Tout est possible!" ("Everything is possible!"), but Pivert would later split and create the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP), with historian Daniel Guérin also being a member of the latter. Trotsky advised the GBL to break with the SFIO, leading to a confused departure by the Trotskyists from the SFIO in early 1936, which drew only about six hundred people from the party.
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62-65 and invasion of Finland. This dispute is recorded in Cannon's book The Struggle for the Proletarian Party and in Trotsky's In Defense of Marxism. Nonetheless, Stalinists sought to punish both Cannon and Trotsky for their political opposition to the Stalinist-controlled Third International. Trotsky was killed by one of Stalin's NKVD agents and the CPUSA supported the US government's prosecution of Cannon and other American Trotskyists under the Smith Act.
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The Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party the following year, and set up the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the youth wing of the Socialists, the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) joined them.Alexander, p. 792-793. Shachtman and others were expelled from the SWP in 1940 over their position on the Soviet Union and set up the Workers Party. Within months many members of the new party, including Burnham, had left.
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He was elected to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1963 and served as an editor of Intercontinental Press. When the PCI was dissolved into the new Communist League in 1968, he was a part of the leadership and continued in it until his death. He was the author of a history of Trotskyism entitled The Long March of the Trotskyists and Histoire de l'Internationale communiste (1919–1943), ed. La Breche, 1979.
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More abstractly, nationalism is "power-hunger tempered by self-deception".George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, orwell.ru. For Orwell, the nationalist is more likely than not dominated by irrational negative impulses: > There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the > U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When > one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by > nationalism becomes a good deal clearer.
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Public opposition to British colonial rule continued to grow. Among the elite there was irritation at the colour-bar practised by the leading clubs. Sir Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke, the Civil Defence Commissioner complained that the British commander of Ceylon, Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton called him a 'black bastard'. The CNC agreed to accept the Communists, who had been expelled by the Trotskyists in the Sama Samaja Party but who now supported the war effort.
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The Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party the following year, and set up the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the youth wing of the Socialists, the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) joined them.Alexander, p. 792-793. Shachtman and others were expelled from the SWP in 1940 over their position on the Soviet Union and set up the Workers Party. Within months many members of the new party, including Burnham, had left.
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Arne Swabeck (1890–1986) was an American Communist leader. Swabeck was born in Denmark and emigrated to the United States where he became one of the founding members of the Communist Party. In the late 1920s he was expelled from the party as a Trotskyist and worked together with James P. Cannon and other American Trotskyists to create the Socialist Workers Party. Swabeck visited Leon Trotsky in his exile in Turkey in 1933.
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The Communist Party members and the remaining Trotskyists around Ta Thu Thau divided in their response to the new Popular Front government in France, which had the support of the French Communist Party and the blessing of Moscow.Alexander, Robert J. International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. p. 964 Ta Thu Thau argued that the leftward shift in the French national Assembly had brought little.
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In late October 1985, the Workers Revolutionary Party expelled Gerry Healy. Other expulsions, including those of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, soon followed. Initially, Healy was accused of "non-communist relations"."Trotskyists split over purged chief", The Observer, 27 October 1985 Shortly afterwards, a Newsline front page open letter by Aileen Jennings, Healy's former secretary, asserted that the real reason for the expulsion was that Healy had sexually assaulted at least 26 female members.
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3 The RWL originally thought of itself as an "opposition" within the official Trotskyist movement, in the same manner as Trotskyism originally conceived of itself as the "Left Opposition" within the Comintern. They focused, in their early years, to recruiting within the Trotskyist ranks, and may have created the "Marxist Policy Committee" within the Trotskyists' Socialist Appeal Association for that purpose.Max Shachtman, "Footnote for Historians," New International, Vol. 4, No. 12, December 1938.
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The POR played a supportive role in the creation of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), a new federation of labor unions, in 1952. However, when members of the POR began to criticize the moderation of the MNR-led government in October 1952, the MNR removed key POR leaders from the COB and FSTMB. As the MNR's power grew at the cost of the POR, in-fighting increased among the Trotskyists. In 1954, the POR split into two factions.
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His experiences during his Moscow stay, in the anxious atmosphere at the beginning of the "purges" and the trials of the Bolshevik leaders who opposed Joseph Stalin, made him keep a critical distance from the Soviet Union, without actually abandoning his Communist convictions. He was excluded from the Communist Party for his "slanderous" remarks. In 1937, he married a young militant Communist, Lucette Beauvallet. During the German occupation, he cooperated with the French Trotskyists (the Internationalist Workers Party).
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This group's successes were many, gaining power and control inside many workers' unions against Stalinism. Finally, the group of youth workers and the old veterans Trotskyists joined and created Συνδικαλιστικη Παραταξη – Εργατικη Πρωτοπορια (Syndicalist Union – Workers' Vanguard) in 1964. That was the legal title of the organization, due to the law 509 that prosecuted for high treason any organization that fought openly against the regime. The real, but illegal title, was ΕΔΕ – Επαναστατικη Διεθνιστικη Ενωση (Revolutionary Internationalist Union).
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Its leader, Andrés Nin, had once been a close ally of Leon Trotsky. Nin had just been forced out of the Catalan government, a result of Communist influence which had grown in Spain since the first Russian supply ships had arrived in October 1936. In July 1936 the POUM paper La Batalla condemned the Moscow Show Trials - the Spanish Communists were complaining about the anarchists and 'Trotskyists'. In September general Alexander Orlov of the NKVD arrived in Madrid.
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Gerhard Engel: The International Communists of Germany, in: Ralf Hoffrogge / Norman LaPorte (eds.): Weimar Communism as Mass Movement 1918-1933, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 25-44. The official organ of the IKD was a newspaper, Der Kommunist. The same name was later used by German Trotskyists who, fleeing Germany after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, established an exile organization in Paris. Arthur Goldstein was involved in this incarnation of the International Communists of Germany.
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Leon Trotsky Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik–Leninist. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.
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"Trotskyists at Vorkuta: An Eyewitness Report", International Socialist Review, Summer 1963. He had agents go through historical documents and photos in order to attempt to erase Trotsky's memory from the history books.Propaganda in the Propaganda State, PBS According to the historian Mario Kessler, Stalin's supporters turned to anti-semitism to whip up sentiment against Trotsky (as Trotsky was a Jew).Mario Kessler, "Leon Trotsky's Position on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and the Perspectives of the Jewish Question", New Interventions, Vol.
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Rodolphe Prager, "The Fourth International during the Second World War" , Revolutionary History, Vol. 1 No. 3, Autumn 1988. Contact was steady, if irregular, between the SWP and the British Trotskyists, with the result that the Americans exerted what influence they had to encourage the Workers' International League into the International through a fusion with the Revolutionary Socialist League, a union that had been requested by the Emergency Conference."Resolution On The Unification of the British Section", International Bulletin, Nos.
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The Spanish Left in its Own Words At the 7th National Convention of the Communist Party USA in 1930, Oehler controversially demanded that the Trotskyists be permitted to rejoin the party, abruptly ending his career with the official party. He then joined James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern in the Communist League of America, the nation's first Trotskyist group.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 116. He was soon elected to the group's governing National Committee.
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Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; pg. 32. News of the ouster of Glotzer and Swabeck was front-page news in the second issue of The Militant, the first American Trotskyist newspaper. Glotzer was a delegate to the founding convention of the Communist League of America (Opposition) (CLA) in May 1929 and was elected as one of five members of the governing National Council of the fledgling organization.
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This was soon reported to Stalin and used against Bukharin as proof of his factionalism. Zinoviev and Kamenev remained politically inactive until October 1932, when they were expelled from the Communist Party for failure to inform on oppositionist party members during the Ryutin Affair. Then they joined a conspiratorial bloc with Trotsky against Stalin, together with some trotskyists who had "capitulated" to Stalin and rightists. Trotsky defined the bloc as a tool to fight stalinist repression.
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Trotskyists considered Popular Fronts a "strike breaking conspiracy" and considered them an impediment to successful resistance to fascism. When Stalin consolidated his power in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, Trotsky was forced into exile, eventually residing in Mexico. He maintained active in organising the Left Opposition internationally, which worked within the Comintern to gain new members. Some leaders of the Communist Parties sided with Trotsky, such as James P. Cannon in the United States.
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Through discussion, the Indian and Ceylonese trotskyists established a preliminary Committee for the Formation of the Bolshevik - Leninist Party of India. The discussions for this took place through underground meetings in Kandy in December 1940 and March 1941 and set the stage for a sole Trotskyist party for India. This was later amended to include Burma and Ceylon. The meeting in 1940 and 41 were attended by the jailed LSSP leaders aided by some guards of the Bogambara Prison.
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There was indeed a secret bloc of oppositions against Stalin. Trotskyists and rightist communists were its main members. It originated because the various open opposition groups that had tried to oppose Stalin in the Communist Party had failed, and their former members barely had any power. The former leader of the Left Opposition Leon Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev held low ranks in the party, and the rights were sidelined.
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Pierre Frank (24 October 1905, Paris – 18 April 1984, Paris) was a French Trotskyist leader. He served on the secretariat of the Fourth International from 1948 to 1979. Educated as a chemical engineer, Frank was one of the first French Trotskyists, working with surrealist Pierre Naville and the syndicalist Alfred Rosmer. In 1930, he joined Trotsky on the island of Prinkipo to work as a member of the secretariat that prepared the first conference of the International Left Opposition.
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Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 133. Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the Thomas group, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split. At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had come to the conclusion that the Trotskyists had joined the Socialist Party not to make it stronger, but to capture the organization for their own purposes.Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 138.
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He broke with the official Trotskyist movement to lead the Groupe Spartakus 1935–1937, then re-joining the Parti Socialiste Révolutionnaire (PSR), of which he was the Secretary, 1937–1938. He broke with the official Trotskyists again in 1938, editing Contre le Courant 1938–1945. Later, he was involved in the Tendance Marxiste Révolutionnaire (TMR) 1964–1978. He was closely allied to Dutch socialist Henk Sneevliet and to the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) in Spain.
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In 2012, Trotskyists, who said that the General Secretary of the CTC demanded that "the Cuban workers to work harder and more productively", admitted that the CTC has organized newly self-employed people.Samuel Farber, Who do Cuba's unions defend?, Socialist Worker, May 15, 2012. In November 2017, the US Government prohibited financial transactions, specifically "gifts" from those in United States to the secretaries and first secretaries of the Confederation of Labor of Cuba (CTC) and its component unions.
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Early in 1933, Shachtman and Glotzer traveled to Europe. While in Britain, the pair were able to meet with Reg Groves and other members of the recently formed Communist League with whom Shachtman had corresponded. When Trotsky's household moved to France in July 1933, Shachtman accompanied them on their journey from Turkey. The Trotskyists expanded their role in the U.S. labor movement through their leadership of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike, which broadened into a citywide general strike.
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He then engaged the main French Masonic obedience on the paths of greater openness to the world. Man of strong convictions, willingly polemicist rebel at heart, he took a firm line, and did not accept compromises. He had meanwhile returned to political activity, but less intensely. Member of the Socialist Party in 1957, he created the brotherly Study Circle and Socialist Action, led by former Trotskyists, and serves as a bridge between the Grand Orient and the SFIO.
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Through the BLPI, the Ceylonese trotskyists attained their formal membership in the Fourth International. The Ceylonese Samasamajists who went to India participated actively along with the BLPI in the struggle for independence that commenced in August 1942 in India. It was generally realised that the impending open revolt against imperialism in India was going to be decisive for the future not only of India but of Ceylon as well. Their property and assets back home were confiscated.
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An excerpt from the Open Letter explains the split as follows: > To sum up: The lines of cleavage between Pablo's revisionism and orthodox > Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or > organizationally. The Pablo faction has demonstrated that it will not permit > democratic decisions truly reflecting majority opinion to be reached. They > demand complete submission to their criminal policy. They are determined to > drive all orthodox Trotskyists out of the Fourth International or to muzzle > and handcuff them.
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In uniting the large majority of Trotskyists in one organisation, the Fourth International created a tradition which has since been claimed by many Trotskyist organisations. Echoing Marx's Communist Manifesto, the Transitional Programme ended with the declaration "Workers men and women of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!". It declared demands to be placed on capitalists, opposition to the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and support for workers' action against fascism.
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Fagan, Gus; Biographical Introduction to Christian Rakovsky; chapter Opposition and Exile Almost all Trotskyists who were still within the Soviet Union's borders were executed in the Great Purges of 1936–1938, although Rakovsky survived until the Medvedev Forest massacre of September 1941, where he was shot dead along with 156 other prisoners on Stalin's orders, less than three months into the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Also among the Medvedev Forest victims was Trotsky's sister/Kamenev's first wife, Olga Kameneva.
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Trotsky considered himself to be a "Bolshevik-Leninist," arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party. He viewed himself as an advocate of orthodox Marxism. His politics differed in some respects from those of Stalin or Mao Zedong, most importantly in his rejection of the theory of Socialism in One Country and his declaring of the need for an international "permanent revolution." Numerous Fourth Internationalist groups around the world continue to describe themselves as Trotskyists and see themselves as standing in this tradition.
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At the beginning of the war, the UEC became the UELC (Union des étudiants et lycéens communistes, Union of Communist Students and Lycéens - lycéens being high school students). The Congrès des lycéens anti-fascistes (Congress of Antifascist Lycéens) merged into it. Dissolved after the Liberation, the UEC was re-created during the Fourth Republic, in 1956. Ten years later, "leftist" elements were excluded: those included Trotskyists who rejected Stalinism, such as Alain Krivine, future leader of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League, and Maoists.
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Although party leader Jim Cannon later hinted that the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party had been a contrived tactic aimed at stealing "confused young Left Socialists" for his own organization,"If we had stood aside, the Stalinists would have gobbled up the Socialist Left Wing and it would have been used as another club against us, as in Spain," he later recalled. James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism. New York: Pioneer Press, 1944; pp. 195-196.
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Hugo Urbahns (1890, Lieth - 1946, Stockholm) was a German revolutionary socialist. He was involved in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the 1920s. He was jailed for his role in the Hamburg Uprising of 1923, and spent time on hunger strike. Frank, Pierre The Long March of the Trotskyists: A History of the Fourth International Chapter 3 He was expelled from the KPD in the late 1920s, and became a leader of the Leninbund, a left split from the KPD.
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The Moscow Trials led to the execution of many of the defendants. They are generally seen as part of Stalin's Great Purge, an attempt to rid the party of current or prior oppositionists, especially but not exclusively Trotskyists, and any leading Bolshevik cadre from the time of the Russian Revolution or earlier, who might even potentially become a figurehead for the growing discontent in the Soviet populace resulting from Stalin's mismanagement of the economy.Rogovin, Vadim Z. 1998. 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror.
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After Tito took leadership over the KPJ, Gorkić was posthumously expelled from the party. His wife Betti Glan, director of the Park of Culture in Moscow, was soon arrested as well; she was released in 1954 and rehabilitated in 1955 Устная история Глан Бетти Николаевна. During the Great Purge, a large number of communists from Yugoslavia resided in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of them were arrested and executed without any trial under accusation that they were either spies or Trotskyists.
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In Paris, Krivitsky began to write articles and made contact with Lev Sedov, Trotsky's son, and the Trotskyists. There, he also met undercover Soviet spy Mark Zborowski, known as "Etienne," whom Sedov had sent to protect him. Sedov died mysteriously in February 1938, but Krivitsky eluded attempts to kill or kidnap him in France, including flight to Hyères. (1985) As a result of Krivitsky's debriefing, the British were able to arrest John King, a cypher clerk in the Foreign Office.
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"Chile Under Pinochet- Recovering the truth". University of Pennsylvania Press. When MIR was founded on 12 October 1965 at the locals of an anarchist union in Santiago, less than 100 participated, and all the above ideological tendencies were represented. Revolutionary socialists (by Miguel Enríquez and B. Van Schowen), former communists (represented by the Maoist Cares), Trotskyists (by Dr. Enrique Sepúlveda and Marco Antonio Enríquez, Miguel Enríquez's brother), left- libertarians or social anarchists (by Marcello Ferrada de Noli), and anarcho- sindicalists (by Clotario Blest).
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The order created a new extrajudicial organ: NKVD dvoyka consisting of two people: a representative of the NKVD and a representative of the Procurator-General. It also created a new process for sentencing: "album sentencing". The sentencing was done by correspondence using lists of accused bound for easy of handling into special "albums" (hence the name). ;August 15: NKVD operative order 00486 On repression of the family members of traitors, Trotskyists, and other citizens sentenced by the Military Collegium and the Special Commission.
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For the Trotskyists, Kirov's murder was the Stalinist equivalent of the Reichstag fire, deliberately started by the Nazis to justify the arrest of German Communists. The Trotskyist-Menshevik view became the dominant one among western historians, popularised in Robert Conquest's influential books. In The Great Terror, Conquest already undermined the official Soviet story of conspiracy and treason. Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin's inner circle, as the key to the mechanism of terror.
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Page 23. as it lost adherents to the Labour Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Trotskyists. Some members of the ILP who had chosen to remain within the Labour Party were instrumental in creating the Socialist League, while the majority of Scottish members left to form the Scottish Socialist PartyBen Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s, pp.100–101 and members in Northern Ireland left en masse to form the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland.
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Rob Sewell's postscript to History of British Trotskyism Wall's job as a mail-order company buyer eventually took him away from Liverpool to Market Harborough, and then to Bingley in Bradford. It also took him abroad, and he established political contacts on his foreign travels in Sri Lanka,Michael Crick The March of Militant, Faber 1986, p. 167 Hong Kong, South Korea and the United States. His assistance to Trotskyists in Sri Lanka in 1979 was still remembered in tributes sent in memoriam.
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Ian Adams, in his Ideology and Politics in Britain Today, defines the British far-left as primarily those political organisations which are "committed to revolutionary Marxism.". He names specifically "orthodox communists, those influenced by the New Left Marxism of the 1960s, followers of Trotsky, of Mao Tse-tung, of Fidel Castro, and even Enver Hoxha.". He states that although the British far-left is "highly complex", the main division is between the orthodox communists (i.e. - Marxist-Leninists, sometimes called "Stalinists") and Trotskyists.
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Shachtman's working relationship with Abern was strengthened in 1929 and 1930. They invited Albert Glotzer, already an old friend and political colleague of Shachtman from their days as leaders of the Communist youth organization, to work with them. Shachtman's journalistic and linguistic skills allowed him to become a successful popularizer and translator of Trotsky's work and to help found and run the Trotskyists' publishing house, Pioneer Press. He was known for the liberal use of humor and sarcasm in his polemical speeches.
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While in Mexico, Miller spent six weeks living in the Trotsky household. When he returned to New York, Miller delivered a written report to the KGB. Miller confessed his covert activities to the FBI in 1954 and appeared as a witness in Robert Soblen's espionage trial in 1961. He testified that his 1944 Mexican assignment included investigating reports of a budding alliance between Trotskyists, anarchists, and other radical groups in contact with French writer Victor Serge, who was living in exile.
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In 1933 and 1934, Suslov directed a commission charged with purging the party in the Ural and Chernigov provinces. The purge was organised by Lazar Kaganovich, then Chairman of the Soviet Control Commission. Author Yuri Druzhnikov contends that Suslov was involved with setting up several show trials, and contributed to the Party by expelling all members deviating from the Party line, meaning Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and other left-wing deviationists. On the orders of Joseph Stalin, Suslov purged the city of Rostov in 1938.
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Two delegates from the Clarity caucus were in attendance. James Burnham vigorously attacked the Labour and Socialist International, the international organization of left-wing parties to which the Socialist Party belonged and tension rose along these lines among the Trotskyists. United action between the Clarity and Appeal groups was not forthcoming and an emergency meeting of Vincent Dunne and Cannon was held in New York with leaders of the various factions including Thomas, Jack Altman and Gus Tyler of Clarity.
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According to Trotskyist Brian Pearce, "during the entire period up to the fall of France the British Communist Party functioned as a propaganda agency for Hitler." B. Farnborough, "Marxists in the Second World War," Labour Review, Vol. 4 No. 1, April–May 1959, pp. 25–28 However, as Trotskyism continued to attack the Soviet Union, aid European social-democracy and support striking militants, the CPGB considered necessary to put up an intense fight to resist the so-called 'Trotskyists agents'.
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Meanwhile, in the LSSP a number of members had become influenced by the ideas of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. Individual party members, notably Philip Gunawardena, had encountered Trotskyist groups earlier during stays in Britain and the USA. The Trotskyists within the LSSP came together and formed a secret faction known as the "T" (after Trotsky) group. The group's original members were Philip Gunawardena, N. M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, Robert Gunawardena and Vernon Gunasekera, the Party Secretary.
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Mitterrand obtained 44.8% in the runoff. The PCF won 22.5% and 73 seats. In May 1968 widespread student riots and strikes broke out in France. The PCF initially supported the general strike but opposed the revolutionary student movement, which was dominated by Trotskyists, Maoists and anarchists, and the so-called "new social movements" (including environmentalists, gay movements, prisoners' movement). Georges Marchais, in L'Humanité on May 3, virulently denounced the leaders of the movement in an article entitled "False revolutionaries who must be exposed".
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Believing that a deficiency in political theory was being filled by the entryist infiltration of the party by the Trotskyists (such as the Militant group), Galloway thought the problem was better resolved by communist thinking from members of the CPGB.Morley, p.74-75 (He was later opposed to the expulsion of members of Militant.) In response, Denis Healey, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, tried and failed to remove Galloway from the list of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates. Healey lost his motion by 13 votes to five.
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Trotsky, L.D. (1938) The Revolution Betrayed. During the 1920s and the 1930s, Stalin fought and defeated the political influence of Trotsky and the Trotskyists in Russia, by means of slander, antisemitism, and censorship, expulsions, exile (internal and external), and imprisonment. The anti–Trotsky campaign culminated in the executions (official and unofficial) of the Moscow Trials (1936–1938), which were part of the Great Purge of Old Bolsheviks who had led the Revolution).Rogovin, Vadim Z. Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR.
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As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose what he termed the degenerated workers' state in the Soviet Union. On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent, and died the next day in a hospital. His murder is considered a political assassination. Almost all of the Trotskyists within the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) were executed in the Great Purges of 1937–1938, effectively removing all of Trotsky's internal influence in the Soviet Union.
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Most of the demands on capitalists remain unfulfilled. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred, but through a social revolution leading to the restoration of capitalism, rather than the political revolution proposed by the Trotskyists. Many Trotskyist groups have been active in anti-fascist campaigns, but the Fourth International has never played a major role in the toppling of a regime. Those groups which follow traditions that left the Fourth International in its early years argue that, despite initially correct positions, it had little impact.
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The Socialist Workers Party was founded on December 31, 1937, by Trotskyists following the expulsion of the "Socialist Appeal faction" from the Socialist Party of America. The SWP's newspaper continued to be known as Socialist Appeal until 1941 when it was renamed The Militant. This publication has continued without interruption into the decade of the 2010s. In the summer of 2005, The Militant became a bilingual newspaper, published in both English and Spanish (El Militante), and with lead articles and editorials appearing in both languages.
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An active trade unionist, Oehler joined the Communist Party USA in its early days,Joseph Hansen, Organisational Methods and Political Principles: A Study of Clique Politics in a Revolutionary Party and by 1927 was a district organizer for the party in Kansas.Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia; Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; pg. 116. He was also known for his ability to organize workers, both in the southern textile mills and the mines of Colorado.
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Active in the American Communist Party youth organization, she was expelled at age 18 and thrown down a flight of stairs when she suggested that her local comrades should find out Trotsky's response to his expulsion from the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. By the following year she found a group of independent Trotskyists in Boston, led by Antoinette Buchholz Konikow, an advocate of birth control and legal abortion.Women Building Chicago (2001), p. 239. In the 1930s, she adopted her mother's maiden name Dunayevskaya.
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In 1946, Vietnam had its first National Assembly election (won by the Viet Minh in central and northern VietnamNeale, Jonathan The American War, pp. 23–24; ), which drafted the first constitution, but the situation was still precarious: the French tried to regain power by force; some Cochinchinese politicians formed a seceding government the Republic of Cochinchina (Cộng hòa Nam Kỳ) while the non-Communist and Communist forces were engaging each other in sporadic battle. Stalinists purged Trotskyists. Religious sects and resistance groups formed their own militias.
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Instead they argued that "unconscious Trotskyists" would come to power in colonized countries as well as within the Stalinist bureaucracies. It was no longer necessary to build a mass Trotskyist party. Anyone who opposed these conceptions was silenced or expelled, breaking with the basic Leninist principle of inner- party democracy. In 1963 the SWP and the smaller Austrian, Canadian, Chinese and New Zealand sections of the ICFI agreed to reunite with the ISFI at the World Congress, to form the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
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In the early 1960s, most American Trotskyists were organized in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as part of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Tim Wohlforth was a youth leader in that party and was opposed to the course of the organization, which was heading toward reunification with the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI). With others, including James Robertson, he formed the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the SWP. It developed links with the Socialist Labour League in Britain, led by Gerry Healy.
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Smilga was arrested on the night of 1–2 January 1935, in the wake of Kirov's assassination, and sentenced to five years imprisonment. He was held for months in an isolator in Verkhneuralsk. At the first of three Moscow show trials, in August 1936, the lead defendant Grigory Zinoviev named Smilga as having been implicated in the 'Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre'. It later emerged in Trotsky's letters that Zinoviev and trotskyists had indeed formed a secret alliance, but there was no evidence of terrorist activity in them.
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This activity was soon reported to Joseph Stalin and used against Bukharin as proof of his factionalism. Zinoviev and Kamenev remained politically inactive until October 1932, when they were expelled from the Communist Party, after receiving an oppositionist group's appeal but not informing the party on their activities during the Ryutin Affair. Then they joined a conspiratorial bloc with Trotsky against Stalin, together with some trotskyists who had "capitulated" to Stalin and rightists. Trotsky defined the bloc as a tool to fight stalinist repression.
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She returned to Basel where she met her future husband Paul Thalmann, who also had been born in Basel and had spent the past four years studying in Moscow, where he grew disillusioned and returned to Switzerland to work with dissident groups. As a result of their criticism of Stalin's policies, both were thrown out of the Party in 1929 and became involved with the Communist Party Opposition. In 1932 Clara Thalmann became editor of Arbeiter-Zeitung in Schaffhausen, working closely with Trotskyists and Left-Communists.
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While within the WP, the views of the Johnson–Forest Tendency underwent considerable development. By the end of the Second World War, they had definitively rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state. Instead, they classified it as state capitalist, a political evolution shared by other Trotskyists of their generation, most notably Tony Cliff. Unlike Cliff, the Johnson–Forest Tendency was focusing increasingly on the liberation movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James's thought in his 1939 discussions with Trotsky.
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This continued to exist, at least in some form, until as late as 1974.Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam, pp. 50-54 By the early 1980s the history of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement, which in the 1930s may been the most important expression of left opposition in Asia (possibly greater in its scope than in China and in advance of its emergence in IndiaAlexander, International Trotskyism 1929-1985), had been "all but forgotten by the Trotskyists themselves." Robert Alexander suggests two reasons for this.
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It was reduced to sympathiser status. While critical of the Sandinistas, Moreno's group sent a Simon Bolivar Brigade to Nicaragua to aid the Civil War, with the aim of building a revolutionary party there. This brigade was opposed by the reunified Fourth International because it operated outside the discipline of the FSLN; the only other Trotskyists to participate were Pierre Lamberts' Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International. Forty non-Nicaraguan members of the Brigade were expelled from the country by the FSLN.
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The report of Yezhov was devoted to Purging the NKVD. The long report by Stalin was named Deficiencies in the party work and measures for liquidation of Trotskyists and other turncoats (О недостатках партийной работы и мерах ликвидации троцкистских и иных двурушников). He stated that the liquidation of the enemies should be the priority for all the Party members, and proposed changing from "the old methods, the methods of discussions to the new methods of uprooting and liquidation". In total 73 people addressed the Plenum.
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He carried out these responsibilities until 1927. In that year, he was expelled from the PCE for allegedly supporting the ideas of the Left Opposition, which was under the charge of Leon Trotsky. From then he would be a driving force of the reorganization of the Spanish Trotskyists, with the foundation of the Communist Left of Spain in 1930. He ran the party's journal, Comunismo, from 1931 to 1934, when it was suspended by the government after their defeat in the October Revolution of 1934.
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A Diego Rivera mural (Man, Controller of the Universe) depicts Trotsky with Marx and Engels as a true champion of the workers' struggle. Associates and followers of Leon Trotsky were organized in the Left Opposition within the Communist parties before they were purged in the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. Trotskyists differ from most other ideological manifestations on the "anti-Stalinist left" in that they, like Marxist–Leninists, also claim to be Leninists. Subsequently, his followers formed the Fourth International in opposition to the Stalinist Third International.
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The liberals were a group who were having contact with Trotsky at the time. One remark by Trotsky shows they were extremely important allies: “Even in a modest way, they have given us more than anyone on a ‘practical’ line, to be sure, and not politically.” Other letters do not explain what the "liberals" had given to the trotskyists, nor who any of their members were. Broué suggests they were moderate bureaucrats who were leaded by Sergei Kirov, because of his alleged moderate position against Stalin.
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In recognition of their relative strength in organising Saigon's factories and waterfront, for four years in the mid-1930s the local party maintained a unique pact with the Trotskyists, publishing a common paper, La Lutte (The Struggle), and presenting joint "Workers" lists for Saigon municipal and colonial-council elections.Bousquet, Gisèle L. Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. pp. 34-35Alexander, Robert J. International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement.
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Memorial plaques providing the numbers and honoring those who gave their lives can be found in the second floor rotunda of the NAC building on the CCNY campus. In its heyday of the 1930s through the 1950s, CCNY became known for its political radicalism. It was said that the old CCNY cafeteria in the basement of Shepard Hall, particularly in alcove 1, was the only place in the world where a fair debate between Trotskyists and Stalinists could take place."Arguing the World" – PBS documentary, 1997.
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William Wainwright's pamphlet Clear out Trotsky's Agents warned: You must train yourself to round up these other more cunning enemies ... they are called Trotskyists'. "Resolution of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.", May 1925; Black, Stalinism in Britain, pg. 190. which aimed to increase productivity, and supported the National Government that was led by Winston Churchill (Conservative) and Clement Attlee (Labour). At the same time, given the influence of Rajani Palme Dutt in the Party, the issue of Indian independence and the independence of colonies was emphasised.
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Revolutionary Integrationism has its origins in the fight against slavery by Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists before the Civil War, and in the "New Negro" movement in the 1900s-1910s around the Crisis journal's 1919 articles by NAACP field marshal Walter White and other of his writings, Carrie Clifford, Alfred Kreymborg, and especially, the black Communist poet Claude McKay, Max Eastman's and Crystal Eastman's Liberator, as well as A. Philip Randolph's and Chandler Owen's Messenger. In the 1930s through 1960s, the RI doctrine was developed in the main by Trotskyists-Max Shachtman, Oliver Cox, Daniel Guérin, Richard S. Fraser, James Robertson, as well as by non-Trotskyists such as James Baldwin. These activists argued that the struggle for equality by blacks in the United States was the main current in black history, and that equality could only be accomplished via a socialist revolution by the entire working class. They disagreed with the opinion of socialist thinkers like Leon Trotsky and C. L. R. James in the 1930s, and with George Breitman and the majority of the Socialist Workers Party (US) in the late 1950s.
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The Parity Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International was an international regrouping of Trotskyists in 1981, claiming at the time to represent the majority of Trotskyists in the world. It was formed from three elements: The OCRFI (Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International) which was centred on the Pierre Lambert-led Internationalist Communist Organisation in France; the Bolshevik Faction, which came out of the reunified Fourth International or United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec) and was centred on Nahuel Moreno; and the PST of Argentina, and the LTT (Lenin-Trotsky Tendency), which also came from the USec and was led by long-term Lambertist secret entryists in the USec, such as Daniel Gluckstein ("Seldjouk") and others who came from the Revolutionary Communist League or Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire (LCR), French USec affiliate. Some LTT leaders, such as John Strawson in the International Marxist Group (IMG) in Britain did not join the Parity Committee. The LTT later fused its forces with the Lambertists internationally and the Parity Committee was to see most of the Bolshevik Faction supporters leave it in a split between Lambert and Moreno.
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Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America Norman Thomas and his radical pacifist co-thinkers and their young Marxist allies of the Militant faction sought to build a mass political movement by transforming the Socialist Party into what they called an "all-inclusive party". Not only would an appeal be made to the radical intellectuals and trade unionists who were the historic core of the organization, but an effort would be made to work closely with the Communist Party in joint actions and to infuse the Socialist Party with the leading personnel of small radical oppositional organizations, including in particular the anti-Stalinist communist groupings headed by Jay Lovestone (the so-called "Lovestoneites") and James P. Cannon (the so-called "Trotskyists"). To be sure, an impressive array of left-wing intellectuals came into the Socialist orbit as a result of this venture, including (from the Lovestoneites) Bertram D. Wolfe,Wolfe co-authored a book with Norman Thomas in 1938, Keep America Out of War. Herbert Zam and Benjamin Gitlow as well as (from the Trotskyists) Max Shachtman, James Burnham, Martin Abern and Hal Draper.
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The subsequent history of orthodox Trotskyism is essentially that of the ICFI. Its largest section, the American Socialist Workers Party, left to join the "Pabloites" in 1963, eventually breaking with Trotskyism altogether in the 1980s, although a section remained loyal to the ICFI and are today the Socialist Equality Party."The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party—Part 7". The orthodox Trotskyists suffered another split in 1973 between the Socialist Labour League (SLL) of Gerry Healy and the Internationalist Communist Organisation (OCI) of Pierre Lambert.
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With the annihilation of the POUM, Stalin deprived the fugitive Leon Trotsky of a possible Spanish haven. Orlov used the same methods of terror, duplicity and deception that were employed in the Great Purge (1936–38). As a result of the May 3–8 events in Barcelona, the Trotskyists and the Anarchists became, in Ibárruri's mind, the "Fascist enemy within." > When we point out the need of opposing Trotskyism we discover a very strange > phenomenon, that voices are raised in its defense in the ranks of certain > organizations and among certain circles in certain parties.
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There was also a substantial Trotskyist movement in China which included the founding father of the Chinese communist movement, Chen Duxiu, amongst its number. Wherever Stalinists gained power, they made it a priority to hunt down Trotskyists and treated them as the worst of enemies. The Fourth International suffered repression and disruption through the Second World War. Isolated from each other and faced with political developments quite unlike those anticipated by Trotsky, some Trotskyist organizations decided that the Soviet Union no longer could be called a degenerated workers' state and withdrew from the Fourth International.
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As the Cold War intensified, the ISFI's 1951 World Congress adopted theses by Michel Pablo that anticipated an international civil war. Pablo's followers considered that the Communist Parties, insofar as they were placed under pressure by the real workers' movement, could escape Stalin's manipulations and follow a revolutionary orientation. The 1951 Congress argued that Trotskyists should start to conduct systematic work inside those Communist Parties which were followed by the majority of the working class. However, the ISFI's view that the Soviet leadership was counter-revolutionary remained unchanged.
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"Resolution forming the International Committee", SWP Internal Bulletin; Michel Pablo, Pierre Frank and Ernest Germain, "Letter from the Bureau of the IS to the leaderships of all sections", November 15, 1953, Education for Socialists Bulletin. Sri Lanka's Lanka Sama Samaja Party, then the country's leading workers' party, took a middle position during this dispute. It continued to participate in the ISFI but argued for a joint congress, for reunification with the ICFI."David North addresses Sri Lankan Trotskyists on the 50th anniversary of the ICFI", World Socialist Web Site, November 21, 2003.
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The June 1963 Reunification Congress,Farrell Dobbs & Joseph Hansen, "Reunification of the Fourth International", International Socialist Review, Fall 1963; Livio Maitan, "Per una storia della Quarta Internazionale", Rome, 2002. the seventh, in Rome represented a large majority of the world's Trotskyists in its ranks. Among ICFI and ISFI groups, only the PCI and the SLL refused to attend; the supporters of Posadas had left in 1962. The congress elected a new leadership team including Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank, Livio Maitan and Joseph Hansen, who moved to Paris to co-edit World Outlook with Pierre Frank.
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Committee for a Workers' International/Socialist Party Scotland. Retrieved 23 April 2020. "[Leon Trotsky] also touches on many other vital issues for Marxists: on the absolute necessity for democratic control and management of the future workers' state as well as the necessary instrument to create that state: a mass party of the working class. Indeed, if there was one central theme of the book it is this: what kind of party is necessary to replace capitalism with a worldwide democratic socialist revolution?" and Trotskyists such as Hal Draper described it as such.
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The shop steward movement worried many right-wingers, who believed that socialists were fomenting a Bolshevik revolution in Britain. A Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was founded, but it attracted only existing left-wing militants, with the British Socialist Party and Workers Socialist Federation joining many Socialist Labour Party activists in it. The CPGB soon became known for its loyalty to the line of the Comintern, and proposed the motion to expel Leon Trotsky from the international. Under the leadership of Harry Pollitt, it finally gained its first MP, and began to expel Trotskyists.
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Elected to the executive of the Young Communist League in 1926, Wicks attended the International Lenin School in Moscow and the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern. He began working with the Balham Group of Trotskyists, and was expelled from the CPGB in 1932. He became a founding member of the Communist League and met Trotsky in Copenhagen but disagreed with Trotsky's advice to join the Independent Labour Party. The Communist League split with the tendency opposed to joining the ILP continuing as the Marxist League, which later worked within the Labour Party.
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After a few weeks in the south, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed control of the Red Army. A year later, Smilga and Tukhachevsky were defeated during the Battle of Warsaw, but Trotsky refused this opportunity to pay Smilga back, which earned him Smilga's friendship and then supported during the intra-Party battles of the 1920s.Isai Abramovich's memoirs re: the Smilga episode. Abramovich (1900–1985), a friend of Smilga's, was one of the few Trotskyists who survived the Great Purges and returned from Stalin's camps in the late 1950s.
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In these types of entryism, activists engage in a long-term perspective in which they work within an organisation for decades in the hope of gaining influence and a degree of power and perhaps even control of the larger organisation. In entryism sui generis ("of a special type"), Trotskyists, for example, do not openly argue for the building of a Trotskyist party. "Deep entryism" refers to the long duration. The tactic is closely identified with Michel Pablo and Gerry Healy, who were leaders of the Fourth International in the late 1940s and the 1950s.
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Street painting in Kensington Market Businesses such as Manifestudio, a photo gallery and eco-politics community space run by GlobalAware Independent Media, help create an environment friendly to radical politics. Trotskyists are sometimes seen handing out pamphlets at the corner of Baldwin and Kensington. Over the past two decades, several alternative bookstores have flourished in Kensington Market, including Who's Emma, the Anarchist Free Space, and Uprising Books. One of Canada's most famous independent bookstores, This Ain't the Rosedale Library, also moved to Kensington from Church and Wellesley in 2008.
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He was excluded from the Politburo in October 1984, and publicly disagreed with decisions taken at the 25th Party Congress of February 1985. His opposition was tolerated until October 1987, when he was excluded from the Party altogether - after he had expressed his wish to run for French Presidency on his own platform. Thus, Juquin ran in the 1988 presidential election with backing from the Unified Socialist Party (PSU) and the Revolutionary Communist League, grouping some former PCF members, trotskyists, various Greens, and independent left-wingers. Juquin only managed to obtain 2.08% of the vote.
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The Workers' Revolutionary Party (, PRT) was a Trotskyist political party in Mexico. It was originally founded in 1976 by the merger of two Trotskyist groups: the International Communist League, associated with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and the Mexican Morenists. In 1977, the Marxist Workers' League, associated with the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International, joined the party. In the following years, other small groups of Trotskyists also joined the PRT, but the group associated with Moreno left in 1979 to form the Socialist Workers' Party.
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In 1941, Žarko joined the Red Army to fight the invading Germans. Some of Tito's critics argue that his survival indicates he must have denounced his comrades as Trotskyists. He was asked for information on a number of his fellow Yugoslav communists, but according to his own statements and published documents, he never denounced anyone, usually saying he did not know them. In one case he was asked about the Croatian communist leader Horvatin, but wrote ambiguously, saying that he did not know whether he was a Trotskyist.
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Although Bill Dunne's brothers, Vincent, Miles, and Grant, were active in the American Trotskyist movement, participating in the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, Bill Dunne was never part of that dissident communist movement.For more on the other three Dunne brothers, see Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; passim. In 1934 he went so far as to author a polemic pamphlet for the Communist Party against his brothers and their comrades entitled Permanent Counter-Revolution: The Role of the Trotzkyites in the Minneapolis Strikes.
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This commission heard evidence for a week before rendering a verdict clearing Trotsky of charges of espionage and sabotage levied against him in the ongoing Moscow Trials. The transcript produced by Glotzer was later published in book form by the American Trotskyist movement. In the United States the Trotskyists emerged from the Socialist party as the Socialist Workers Party. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the beginning of the Second World War, Shachtman, Abern, and others condemned the USSR's alliance with Nazi Germany and their cooperative invasion of Poland.
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This alliance between Socialists and Communists paved the way for the victory of the Popular Front during the 1936 election, leading Léon Blum to become Prime minister. Opposed to the alliance with bourgeois parties, the Trotskyists divided themselves, about 600 of them leaving the SFIO. This new alliance between the two rival Marxist parties (the reformist SFIO and the revolutionary PCF) was an important experience mainly at the level of the party leaders. The base was already used to work together, from Social-Democrats to anarchists, against the rise of fascism.
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The Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded on May 14, 1939.Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography, 2002, p. 441. The genesis of the CCF was a disagreement among communists, socialists, leftists, and centrists in the United States over the value of forming a popular front and the need for violence, revolution, and dictatorship in establishing a more just society. Many American far left-wing intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s were Trotskyists who believed in democracy and were opposed to the totalitarianism advocated by Joseph Stalin and Stalinism.
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However, while the people celebrated their victory in the north, the Việt Minh faced various problems in the south, which was politically more diverse than the north. The Việt Minh had been unable to establish the same degree of control in the south as in the north. There were serious divisions in the independence movement in the south, where the Việt Minh, Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo, other nationalist groups and the Trotskyists competed for control. On August 25, the communists established a Provisional Executive Committee with Tran Van Giau at its head.
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It also shares many of the political positions of other Trotskyist groups, a tradition rooted in Marxism and Leninism (see for example Tony Cliff, Marxism at the Millennium.Tony Cliff: Marxism at the Millennium, Bookmarks, 2000. (accessed 2008-05-29)) In common with other Trotskyists the SWP defends the body of ideas codified by the first four Congresses of the Communist International and the founding Congress of the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky in 1938. Its supporters often refer to their beliefs as 'socialism from below', a term which has been attributed to Hal Draper.
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After the election of a Popular Front government in Spain in 1936 a fascist military revolt led to the Spanish Civil War. The crisis in Spain brought down the Popular Front government in France under Léon Blum. Ultimately the Popular Fronts were not able to prevent the spread of fascism or the aggressive plans of the fascist powers. Trotskyists considered Popular Fronts a "strike breaking conspiracy", an impediment to successful resistance to fascism due to their inclusion of pro-capitalist parties which demanded policies of opposition to strikes and workers’ actions against the capitalist class.
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Similarly, he had made > contact with the Trotskyists, and had considered joining their movement, but > he had also taken steps to infiltrate and sabotage their Fourth > International…Faligot & Kauffer, p. 102. Tito made these comments to Hua Guofeng on his only visit to China, in 1977 after Kang was dead, and certainly had his own agenda in doing so, but as Faligot and Kauffer remark, "in any case, Tito certainly got the measure of Kang's psychology: a multifaceted game of mirrors was certainly his style, even in the 1930s."Faligot & Kauffer, p. 102.
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A PRC rally in Rome, 2007 Castello, Venice The majority of the party following the October 2004 congress was led by Fausto Bertinotti (59.2%) and viewed the PRC as the representative of the anti-globalization movement in Italy. Other factions strongly opposed Bertinotti's innovations. These included the hard-line traditionalist Being Communists (26.2%) which was composed of former followers of Armando Cossutta as well as the Trotskyists of Critical Left, Communist Project and HammerSickle (14.6% together). Communist Project, which opposed the party's participation in the Prodi II Cabinet, unfolded shortly after the 2006 general election.
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Another group of Trotskyists, based at York University, outvoted the Laxer leadership at what would be the Waffle's final conference at the end of 1974. This group became the inheritor of what was left of the Waffle and relaunched themselves as the Independent Socialists in early 1975, and then one year later renamed the organization the International Socialists (Canada). Other key participants, grouped around Leo Panitch, formed an Ottawa-based group called the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action. In some ways, the Waffle resembled the NDP Socialist Caucus and the New Politics Initiative (NPI).
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He began a lifetime involvement with revolutionary politics in the late 1930s in Greece. Drawn into the "Spartacus" faction, he represented Greek Trotskyists at the founding conference of the Fourth International in Paris in 1938. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Pablo graduated from the National Technical University of Athens and continued his studies in urban planning at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was to spend much of the following decades. During the 1936 military dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, Pablo was arrested and exiled in the Aegean island of Folegandros.
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To gain influence, win members and avoid becoming small sectarian cliques just talking to each other, the Trotskyists should — where possible — join, or in Trotskyist terminology enter, the mass communist or social democratic (labour) parties. This was known as entrism sui generis or long-term entry. It was understood by all that the FI would retain its political identity, and its own press. It was believed at the time that the international "centre" should be able to impose democratic centralist discipline by directly intervening in the politics of local parties.
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Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1994; pg. 292. In January 1937, Hallgren made headlines by publicly resigning as a member of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, an organization of leading intellectuals which took testimony to test the veracity of political charges made against Leon Trotsky as part of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union. Hallgren charged that the committee had "become an instrument of the Trotskyists for political intervention against the Soviet Union."Quoted in "An Open Letter to American Liberals," Soviet Russia Today, March 1937, pp. 14-15.
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None of these was successful. In May 1936 the majority of the New York branch voted to rejoin the Trotskyists, but a minority stayed with Field in a reduced organization. According to one report, from a hostile source, when two members of the New York local F. L Demby and S. Stanley submitted a statement favoring dissociation from the LRWP during a meeting of the New York local Field had the door locked and he and his supporters physically attacked them. In any event a reported eight out of the groups twelve members left.
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Malamuth's translation of Leon Trotsky's book on Joseph Stalin received heavy criticism from Trotskyist Alan Woods in the 2010s While Stalinist communist parties called Malamuth a Trotskyist, Trotskyists considered him an Anti- Communist–and still do to this day. Case in point – In 2016, Wellred Books published a new translation of Trotsky's biography Stalin by Alan Woods. For this new translation, Woods consulted not only Harvard University library archives (which holds Trotsky's papers for the book) but also French and Russian translations. It contains 100,000 words more than the 1940 translation.
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However, the Labour left managed to remove him in 1972. In 1977, Bill Rodgers established the Campaign for Labour Victory (CLV), an organization that was somewhat a successor to the CDS. By 1981, the former CDS members had felt that the Labour party had gone too far to the left and claimed that Trotskyists had taken over the party, removing its responsibility to the party membership. As a result, the "Gang of Four" of Labour moderates issued the Limehouse Declaration, stating that they were leaving the Labour Party to establish the Social Democratic Party.
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However, SWRD Bandaranaike and his Sinhala Maha Sabha backed the newly formed United National Party (UNP), which was thus able to form a government under DS Senanayake. Goonewardene's return led to her founding and becoming one of the major backers of the world's first socialist women's organisation, United Women's Front or ‘Eksath Kantha Peramuna’.The party did, however, collapse shortly after its conception alongside the Soviet-backed Communist Party withdrawing support of it as part of its non-co-operation policy with Trotskyists. The Ceylonese Independence Ceremony, 1948.
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Jacobson came from an East European Jewish immigrant family in New York City. The family was politically leftist and he was politically active at a very young age, first joining the Communist Party's Young Communist League, but soon leaving that group for the Young People's Socialist League of the Socialist Party, where he became a Trotskyist and met his wife Phyllis Jacobson. Drafted into military service during World War II, he saw combat in Europe and participated in the liberation of Paris. While in Europe, he participated in contact between European and American Trotskyists.
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Gauche Socialiste is a Trotskyist faction within Quebec Solidaire (formerly the Parti de la Democratie Socialiste (PDS) in Quebec, Canada). It was formed in 1983 by Trotskyists who left or were expelled from the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire when the group turned away from Trotskyism in the early 1980s. Gauche Socialiste members had previously been in the Organisation Combat Socialiste, which existed from 1980 to 1982, and were briefly part of the Mouvement socialiste, which was founded in 1981. Gauche Socialiste is the Quebec section of the reunified Fourth International.
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The Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party (Parti socialiste ouvrier et paysan, PSOP) was an ephemeral socialist organisation in France, formed on June 8, 1938 by Marceau Pivert. Its youth wing was the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Youth (Jeunesses Socialistes Ouvrières et Paysannes - JSOP). It developed out of a left-wing faction that was expelled from the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), and named itself Gauche Révolutionnaire ("Revolutionary Left"). Alongside moderate Marxists, the party grouped Trotskyists (as an outcome of the French Turn) and Luxemburgists (such as René Lefeuvre).
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As secretary of the Kharkiv Oblast and city Party committees, Postyshev organized the purge of Trotskyists and Ukrainian national-communists as well as industrialization and collectivization campaigns in the region. In July 1930 he was promoted to the office of secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) in Moscow and put in charge of propaganda and organization. Postyshev speaks at House of the Unions Sep 05 1931 In January 1933 Postyshev was once again sent to Ukraine as Stalin's personal representative, along with thousands of political appointees from Russia.
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The Party, particularly in the south, was rivalled by other nationalist and left-wing groupings. These included the Trotskyists. In November 1931 dissidents emerging from within the Party formed the October Left Opposition (Ta Doi Lap Thang Moui) around the clandestine journal Thang Muoi (October). These included Hồ Hữu Tường and Phan Văn Hùm who, protesting a leadership of "Moscow trainees," in July 1930 in Paris had formed an Indochinese Group within the Communist League (Lien Minh Cong San Doan), the French section of the International Left Opposition.
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Hungary became a socialist state under the authoritarian leadership of Mátyás Rákosi. Video: Hungary in Flames CEU.hu producer: CBS (1958) – Fonds 306, Audiovisual Materials Relating to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, OSA Archivum, Budapest, Hungary ID number: HU OSA 306–0–1:40 Under Rákosi's government, the Security Police (ÁVH) began a series of purges, first within the Communist Party to end opposition to Rákosi's policies. The victims were labeled as "Titoists", "western agents", or "Trotskyists" for as insignificant a crime as spending time in the West to participate in the Spanish Civil War.
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Amaratunga crystallised his theories in 'Ideas for Constitutional Reform', based on a seminar series the CLD conducted between 1987 and 1989. Typically, for one who believed in free speech, he included papers by politicians and social commentators representing the whole range of the political spectrum, from the old Trotskyists to modern libertarians. Apart from his interest in politics, Amaratunga was keenly interested in the arts. In the Liberal Review, which he edited along with Rajiva Wijesinha for a decade, there were regular columns on the arts and several reviews that he wrote himself.
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Amadeo Bordiga wrote about his view of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society. In contrast to those produced by the Trotskyists, Bordiga's writings on the capitalist nature of the Soviet economy also focused on the agrarian sector. Being the engineer that he was, Bordiga displayed a kind of theoretical rigidity which was both exasperating and effective in allowing him to see things differently. He wanted to show how capitalist social relations existed in the kolkhoz and in the sovkhoz, one a cooperative farm and the other the straight wage-labor state farm.
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Robertson's long- held view that the "interpenetrated peoples" of Israel/Palestine have equal rights to national self-determination is also far closer to the stance taken toward the foundation of Israel by Shachtman's WP than that of Cannon's SWP. On some issues, Robertson's SL retroactively criticized the tactics of parties in Trotsky's Fourth International from the left. For example, Trotskyists of Trotsky's day sometimes gave "critical support" to labor or socialist parties running in electoral blocs with bourgeois or petit-bourgeois parties. The SL condemns this as capitulation to Popular Front politics.
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Soref was an early member (1963) of the Conservative Monday Club, served a term as National Vice-Chairman, and was for some considerable time a very active Chairman of their Africa and Rhodesia study groups and policy committees. He was several times a member of the Club's Executive Council, including 1970–1975. In July 1972, Soref had discussions, on behalf of the Monday Club, with the Home Office, on the 1500 Trotskyists camping in Essex, which included groups from North America. They were, he said, being given instruction in urban guerrilla warfare.
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Although party leader Jim Cannon later hinted that the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party had been a contrived tactic aimed at stealing "confused young Left Socialists" for his own organization,"If we had stood aside, the Stalinists would have gobbled up the Socialist Left Wing and it would have been used as another club against us, as in Spain," he later recalled. James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism. New York: Pioneer Press, 1944; pp. 195–196. it seems that at its inception, the entryist tactic was made in good faith.
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The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky was a pseudo-judicial process set up by American Trotskyists as a front organization following the first of the Moscow Trials. It had no powers of subpoena, nor official imprimatur from any government. It was composed of historians, sociologists, journalists, authors, and other notable figures, including Edmund Wilson, Suzanne La Follette, Louis Hacker, Norman Thomas, John Dos Passos, Reinhold Niebuhr, George Novack, Franz Boas, John Chamberlain and Sidney Hook. John Dewey, then seventy-eight years old, agreed to head its Commission of Inquiry.
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The years from 1929 to 1939 comprised a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles as Joseph Stalin established near total control over Soviet society, wielding virtually unrestrained power. Following Lenin's death Stalin wrestled to gain control of the Soviet Union with rival factions in the Politburo, especially Leon Trotsky's. By 1928, with the Trotskyists either exiled or rendered powerless, Stalin was ready to put a radical programme of industrialisation into action.I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Oxford University Press, 1949, pp. 294–344.
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In a deformed workers' state, the working class has never held political power like it did in Russia shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. These states are considered deformed because their political and economic structures have been imposed from the top (or from outside) and because revolutionary working class organizations are crushed. Like a degenerated workers' state, a deformed workers' state cannot be said to be a state that is transitioning to socialism. Most Trotskyists cite examples of deformed workers' states today as including Cuba, the People's Republic of China, North Korea and Vietnam.
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The group went through a number of splits, both of organized factions and individuals. A small Marxist Workers League left early in 1936 and quickly rejoined the Trotskyists. Joseph Zack then renounced Marxism completely, and founded a new group called the One Big Union Club. The majority of the group apparently renounced Trotskyism at its third Plenum in October–November 1938. However this caused a spit between Oehler, who believed that Trotsky had degenerated from Marxism in 1934, and Stamm who felt that Trotsky had degenerated in 1928.
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To the Comintern, a decisive and final revolutionary upheaval was afoot and all its sections had to prepare for the immediate advent of world revolution. As part of this theory, because the Comintern felt that conditions were strong enough, it demanded that its political positions within the workers’ movement be consolidated and that all "reactionary" elements be purged. Accordingly, attacks and expulsions were launched against social democrats and moderate socialists within labour unions where the local CP had majority support, as well as Trotskyists and united front proponents. The All-Union Communist Party also encouraged armed rebellion in China, Germany, and elsewhere.
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One notable development in this period was that Communists organized the unemployed into a political force, despite their distance from the means of production. Another distinguishing feature of this policy was that Communists fought against their rivals on the left as vehemently as their opponents on the right of the political spectrum, with special viciousness directed at real or imaginary followers of Leon Trotsky. Social Democrats were targeted by Communist polemics, in which they were dubbed "social fascists." Trotskyists have blamed Stalin's line for the rise of Nazism because it precluded unity between the German communists with the German Social Democrats.
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In November 1938, two months after the founding congress of the Fourth International, seven members of the Spanish Workers' Party of Marxist Unification on trial in Barcelona declared their support for a "fighting Fifth International"."During the trial Poum defendants stressed that, while they 'admired Trotsky,' they regarded his Fourth International as too academic and favored a fighting Fifth International." Foreign News: Trotskyists Liquidated Time Magazine, November 7, 1938 The Argentine Trotskyist called for a Fifth International when he broke from Trotskyism in 1941. Another call for a Fifth International was made by Lyndon LaRouche after leaving the Spartacist League in 1965.
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The Communist party alleged that the anarchist "putsch" was motivated by their resentment of the centralized military command sought by the Communists and their allies in Lluís Companys's Catalan government and their desire to seize political power. The anarchists and Trotskyists saw the events as an attempt by the Communist Party (in close contact with the Stalinist NKVD) to rule over all revolutionary activity and blamed the Communists for authoritarianism. They contrasted the Communists' police state to the egalitarian conditions that obtained prior to the May 1937 events. Ibárruri, Díaz and the rest of the PCE set out to destroy the Trotskyites.
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"The Marxist Roots of Stalinism", 1975; reprinted in Is God Happy? Selected Essays (2013) NY: Basic Books. The way Trotskyists organise to promote their beliefs has been criticised often by ex-members of their organisations. Dennis Tourish, a former member of the CWI, asserts that these organisations typically value doctrinal orthodoxy over critical reflection, have illusions in the absolute correctness of their own party's analysis, a fear of dissent, the demonising of dissenters and critical opinion, overworking of members, a sectarian attitude to the rest of the left and the concentration of power among a small group of leaders.
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The current incarnation of the Fourth International does not operate as a cohesive entity in the manner of its predecessors. The Fourth International suffered a major split in 1940 and an even more significant schism in 1953. A partial reunification of the schismatic factions occurred in 1963, but the organization never recovered sufficiently, and it failed to re-emerge as a single transnational grouping. The response of Trotskyists to such a situation has been in the form of forming multiple Internationals across the world, with some divided over which particular organization represents the true legacy and political continuity of the historical Fourth International.
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Trotskyists regard themselves as working in opposition to both capitalism and Stalinism. Trotsky advocated proletarian revolution as set out in his theory of "permanent revolution", and believed that a workers' state would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world unless socialist revolutions quickly took hold in other countries as well. This theory was advanced in opposition to the view held by the Stalinists that "socialism in one country" could be built in the Soviet Union alone.Leon Trotsky, In Defence of October Furthermore, Trotsky and his supporters harshly criticized the increasingly totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalin's rule.
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Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (2003), p. 419. When Lovestone returned to the United States, he and his ally Benjamin Gitlow were purged despite holding the leadership of the party. Ostensibly, this was not due to Lovestone's insubordination in challenging a decision by Stalin, but for his support for American exceptionalism, the thesis that socialism could be achieved peacefully in the United States. Lovestone and Gitlow formed their own group called the Communist Party (Opposition), a section of the pro- Bukharin International Communist Opposition (CO), which was initially larger than the Trotskyists, but it failed to survive past 1941.
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Silinsky characterizes the black-green alliance between Black Lives Matter and the Council on American–Islamic Relations as an example of Islamo-leftism. According to Robert S. Wistrich, "[a] poisonous anti-Jewish legacy can be found in Marx, Fourier, and Proudhon, extending through the orthodox Communists and "non- conformist" Trotskyists to the Islamo-Leftist hybrids of today who [are allied with] the Islamist anti-Semites of Hamas". Alvin Hirsch Rosenfeld describes Islamo Leftism as "the hope, entertained by a revolutionary fringe, of seeing Islam become the spearhead of a new insurrection, engaged in a 'Holy War against global capitalism".
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In the late 1930s, Grigulevich was sent to Spain to monitor the activities of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM, the militia with which George Orwell served), during the course of the civil war in that country. Grigulevich worked under NKVD general Alexander Orlov, using the code names MAKS and FELIPE, and organized so-called "mobile groups" that killed, among other actual and suspected Trotskyists, POUM leader Andrés Nin. In this mission Grigulevich apparently collaborated with the assassin Vittorio Vidali, known in Spain as "Comandante Carlos Contreras."Thomas Hugh, The Spanish Civil War, revised edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1997) .
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All Trotskyists, and those suspected of being influenced by Trotskyism, were expelled.Joseph Stalin, "Industrialisation of the country and the right deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.)", Works, Vol.11, pp. 255-302. Trotsky claimed that the Third Period policies of the Comintern had contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, and that its turn to a popular front policy (aiming to unite all ostensibly anti-fascist forces) sowed illusions in reformism and pacifism and "clear[ed] the road for a fascist overturn". By 1935 he claimed that the Comintern had fallen irredeemably into the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
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Rakovsky was one of the last leading Trotskyists to break with Trotsky and surrender to Stalin. Alarmed by Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany and under intense pressure from Stalin, he announced his submission to the Party through a telegram he sent Izvestia (February 23, 1934). While Rakovsky was allowed to return to Moscow, Trotsky declared the dissociation statement to be "purely formal".Trotsky, in Fagan, Opposition and Exile Rakovsky formally "admitted his mistakes" in April 1934 (his letter to the Pravda, titled There Should Be No Mercy, depicted Trotsky and his supporters as "agents of the German Gestapo").
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Duncan Hallas, a founding member of the IS, predecessor of the SWP, wrote: "The founders of the group saw themselves as mainstream Trotskyists, differing on important questions from the dominant group in the International, but belonging to the same basic tendency."Duncan Hallas: Introduction to Origins of the International Socialists, Pluto Press, 1971. (accessed 2008-05-29) Here "the group" refers to the Socialist Review Group, forerunner of the SWP and "the International" to the Fourth International, the main Trotskyist grouping. The SWP describes itself as a "revolutionary socialist party" and considers itself to stand in the tradition of Leon Trotsky.
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This is seen as ironic because one of Cliff's concerns when first developing his idea of state capitalism was to differentiate his ideas from the idea of bureaucratic collectivism associated with Shachtman (see for example The Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism: A Critique (1948)).Tony Cliff: The theory of bureaucratic collectivism: A critique (1948) (accessed 2008-05-29) However, the formula also echoes the Fourth International's 1948 manifesto, Neither Wall Street nor the Kremlin. Cliff's version of the theory of state capitalism can be differentiated from those associated with other dissident Trotskyists and Marxists, such as C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya.
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Crosland, Anthony, The Future of Socialism, p4 and note 2 The Marxists within the Labour Party differed in their attitude to the Communists. Some were uncritical and some were expelled as "fellow travellers", while in the 1930s others were Trotskyists and sympathisers working inside the Labour Party, especially in its youth wing where they were influential. In the general election of 1929 the Labour Party won 288 seats out of 615 and formed another minority government. The depression of that period brought high unemployment and Prime Minister MacDonald sought to make cuts in order to balance the budget.
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After Sedov's death, Trotsky initiated an investigation of Etienne and entrusted the matter to Rudolf Klement, his one-time aide and organizer of Trotsky's Fourth International. Before Klement could complete the investigation, an NKVD agent named Ale Taubman lured him to an apartment on the Left Bank and murdered him with the help of two other agents, the "Turk" and Alexander Korotkov. They cut off Klement's head and legs and stuffed the body parts in a trunk and threw it into the Seine. Several days later, the Trotskyists received a typewritten letter from Klement, accusing Trotsky of collaboration with Adolf Hitler.
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Etienne now became the leader of the beheaded Trotskyist organization in Paris and continued to edit the Bulletin of the Opposition, along with Lilia Estrin Dallin (codename NEIGHBOR). He used his skills to play upon the vanities of the remaining Trotskyists and create internal divisions within the faction, especially isolating Victor Serge. In 1939, the defector Alexander Orlov sent Trotsky an unsigned letter warning him that an NKVD agent named "Mark", fitting the description of Zborowski, had infiltrated the Paris organization. Much to her later regret, Dallin convinced Trotsky that the letter was NKVD disinformation meant to create fear within the Trotskyist faction.
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A. J. Muste became disgusted as well and left the radical political movement to return to his roots in the church. The Trotskyists' stay inside the Socialist Party lasted only about a year from mid-1936 until mid-1937. Admissions were made on an individual basis, rather than en masse. Chicago attorney and devoted Trotskyist Albert Goldman, who entered the SP about a year earlier than his comrades, launched a factionally-oriented newspaper called The Socialist Appeal, while Cannon headed west to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to launch a western paper oriented to the trade union movement called Labor Action.
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Day- to-day operations of the organized Trotskyist faction in the Socialist Party during 1936-37 were handled by Shachtman and James Burnham in New York, while Cannon made what he later deemed as "futile attempts to participate in correspondence in the work of the New York center."James P. Cannon, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1943; pg. 54. As the factional situation in the Socialist Party intensified early in 1937, the decision was made by the hostile New York party organization to expel the Trotskyists, which took place late in the spring of 1937.
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Ernest Mandel comments that the group "was chiefly identified with a thorough-going preparation of anti-militarist and anti- imperialist work that earned them repression and persecution at the hands of the French imperialist government." When the Second World War broke out, Frank was sent to Great Britain in order to continue legally publishing the movement's documents. He issued a publication called International Press Correspondence (Inprecor) but, as an illegal resident, was briefly interned in a British internment camp. Apart from the help of Betty Hamilton, the British Trotskyists were not in sympathy with his views.
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After the war, he became a leader of the Belgian Trotskyists and the youngest member of the Fourth International secretariat, alongside Michel Pablo and others. He gained respect as a prolific journalist with a clear and lively style, as an orthodox Marxist theoretician, and as a talented debater. He wrote for numerous media outlets in the 1940s and 1950s including Het Parool, Le Peuple, l'Observateur and Agence France-Presse. At the height of the Cold War, he publicly defended the merits of Marxism in debates with the social democrat and future Dutch premier Joop den Uyl.
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In the days following the fighting in Barcelona, various Communist newspapers engaged in a massive propaganda campaign against the anarchists and the POUM. Pravda and the American communist Daily Worker claimed that Trotskyists and Fascists were behind the uprising. The Spanish Communist party newspapers also viciously attacked the POUM, denouncing members as traitors and fascists. The Communists, supported by the centrist faction of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) under Indalecio Prieto now called for the POUM to be dissolved, but PM Largo Caballero resisted this move, and the Communists, along with their allies in the PSOE, then left the government in protest.
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"Hallgren, "Why I Resigned from the Trotsky Defense Committee," pg. 11. It was only among the Nazis, fascists, and reactionaries, as well as a handful of socialist adherents of the Second International and the Trotskyists who contended that the USSR was not progressing towards socialism, Hallgren wrote to Morrow. "The outcry against the Moscow trials first came from the Trotskyites," Hallgren charged. Given the weight of the public evidence, Hallgren concluded: > "...I shall remain convinced that the present liberal movement to win > justice for him is nothing more than a Trotskyite maneuver against the > Soviet Union and against socialism.
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He often wrote for L'Humanité, Les Cahiers du bolchevisme and La Vie ouvrière, advancing the need for a united front of exploited workers, and for workers to understand the broader issues when often they were focused on immediate goals such as better wages and improved working conditions. In the early 1930s the PCF was in disarray. Eugen Fried was assigned by Comintern to eliminate the social-democratic and anarcho-syndicalist elements, and prevent the Trotskyists from gaining influence. He was to resolve rivalry, eliminate unsound elements and install men loyal to Moscow at the head of the party.
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At the federal election later that year he contested Darling and in 1932 ran for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly seat of King. Despite being president of the Friends of the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1933, he lost favour with the Communist Party and was expelled in 1934, joining the Sydney Trotskyists, a local branch of the Workers' Party of Australia. He became secretary of the Workers' Party in 1935 and edited the organisations journal, the Militant. He fell out with his new party in 1937 and led the League for Revolutionary Democracy (Independent Communist League), a rival group.
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Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, New York: 1997, Grove Press, p. 567. Though much opposition to Guevara's methods has come from the political right, critical evaluation has also come from groups such as anarchists, Trotskyists, and civil libertarians, who consider Guevara an anti-working-class Stalinist, whose legacy was the creation of a more bureaucratic, authoritarian regime.Ernesto "Che" Guevara, 1928–1967 at LibCom Detractors have also theorized that in much of Latin America, Che-inspired revolutions had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism for many years.Guevara has been heavily idolized by people in the music industry.
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Even among the Communists, there was much division. On one hand, the communist PCE and PSUC followed the official doctrine of the Soviet Union, as well as being supporters of handling war and revolution separately, as well as the defense of the Second Spanish Republic's. The PCE was the major communist party in the country, while the PSUC was the main communist organization in Catalonia. At the other extreme, the anti-authoritarian POUM (similar to Trotskyists), radically opposed Stalin and were supporters of making the revolution while the war was raging (on this they coincided with the anarchists).
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However, others (both Stalin's contemporaries and later) do not confuse "Bolshevism" and "Stalinism" proper, considering them to be multidirectional (revolutionary and thermidorian) phenomena.See various works by Trotsky, Martemyan Ryutin (Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship), Fyodor Raskolnikov (An Open Letter to Stalin), Boris Kagarlitsky, Alexander Tarasov The expression "Bolshevism", as well as "communism" later, has become established in Western historiography in the sense of a certain set of features of Soviet power in a certain political period. At present, the very name "Bolsheviks" is actively used by various groups of Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists.
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During the Spanish Civil War, NKVD agents, acting in conjunction with the Communist Party of Spain, exercised substantial control over the Republican government, using Soviet military aid to help further Soviet influence. The NKVD established numerous secret prisons around the capital Madrid, which were used to detain, torture, and kill hundreds of the NKVD's enemies, at first focusing on Spanish Nationalists and Spanish Catholics, while from late 1938 increasingly anarchists and Trotskyists were the objects of persecution. In 1937 Andrés Nin, the secretary of the Trotskyist POUM and his colleagues were tortured and killed in an NKVD prison in Barcelona.
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However, Vallentine resigned from the party before taking her seat, due to allegations of a takeover by Trotskyists affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party. The NDP's vote collapsed to 1.1 percent at the 1987 election – a double dissolution. Robert Wood was elected as a senator for New South Wales, but after less than a year in office was disqualified by the Court of Disputed Returns and replaced by Irina Dunn. However, Dunn was expelled from the party after less than a month in office, and like Vallentine served out the rest of her term as an independent.
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The book details the secret activities of foreign volunteers, especially from the United Kingdom and the rest of Western Europe, who worked covertly to assist the African National Congress during apartheid. Ronnie Kasrils a South African young communist, met with George Bridges, London Secretary of the Young Communist League in l967 and began the process of reviving the ANC presence in South Africa through propaganda. These volunteers were mostly young communists, socialists and Trotskyists. The book reveals work done by volunteers, such as the transport of anti-apartheid leaflets and cassettes from London to counter the South African government's own overseas propaganda machine.
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From 1947, Bookchin collaborated with a fellow lapsed Trotskyist, the German expatriate Josef Weber, in New York in the Movement for a Democracy of Content, a group of 20 or so post-Trotskyists who collectively edited the periodical Contemporary Issues – A Magazine for a Democracy of Content. Contemporary Issues embraced utopianism. The periodical provided a forum for the belief that previous attempts to create utopia had foundered on the necessity of toil and drudgery; but now modern technology had obviated the need for human toil, a liberatory development. To achieve this "post-scarcity" society, Bookchin developed a theory of ecological decentralism.
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He used "Bonapartism" to refer to a situation in which counter-revolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and use selective reforms to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. Marx argued that in the process, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class. More generally, "Bonapartism" may be used to describe the replacement of civilian leadership by military leadership within revolutionary movements or governments. Many modern-day Trotskyists and other leftists use the phrase "left Bonapartist" to describe those, such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who controlled 20th-century bureaucratic socialist regimes.
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Important to the strike's victory was the strike daily The Organizer; although Farrell Dobbs was listed on its masthead as the editor, Shachtman wrote much of it and organized its production.Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion, New York: Monad Press, 1972, pp. 149–150 The Trotskyists' role in Minneapolis brought them closer to A. J. Muste's American Workers Party, which had played a similar role in the Toledo general strike that same year. In 1934, after the CLA merged with the AWP to form the U.S. Workers Party, Shachtman began editing the party's new theoretical journal, New International.
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After the Trotskyists were expelled from the SP in 1937, Shachtman became a leader of their new organization, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Shachtman gave the report on the political situation at the SWP's 1938 convention. The SWP included socialists like James Burnham who had come from A. J. Muste's party rather than from the Trotskyist tradition. At the SWP's founding congress, Burnham proposed that the USSR was no longer a degenerated workers' state: Shachtman spoke for the majority view that it remained a workers' state, and considered it important enough to hold a vote by roll call on the resolution.
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In the early 1940s, Shachtman further developed the idea, already used by Trotskyists in the 1930s, of a "Third Camp," an independent revolutionary force, made up of the world working class, movements resisting fascism and colonial peoples in rebellion, that would side neither with the Axis nor the Allies. Beginning in 1943, he predicted that the Soviet army would impose Stalinism in Eastern Europe, and added democratic resistance to Stalinism to his conception of the Third Camp. By 1948, Shachtman regarded capitalism and Stalinism to be equal impediments to socialism. Shachtman's Workers Party became active in union struggles.
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With power in its hands, the proletariat would then continue this revolution permanently, transforming it from a national bourgeois revolution to a socialist international revolution. Another shared characteristic between Trotskyists is a variety of theoretical justifications for their negative appraisal of the post-Lenin Soviet Union after Trotsky was expelled by a majority vote from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and subsequently from the Soviet Union. As a consequence, Trotsky defined the Soviet Union under Stalin as a planned economy ruled over by a bureaucratic caste. Trotsky advocated overthrowing the government of the Soviet Union after he was expelled from it.
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Eugenio Fernández Granell (28 November 1912 – 24 October 2001), recognised as the last Spanish Surrealist, was an artist, professor, musician and writer. As a political activist in the early 20th century, Granell was characterised by his outspoken support of Democratic Socialism and opposition to Totalitarianism. Eugenio joined the Trotskyists during his military service and eventually became a prominent member of POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista / Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification) in 1935. Following the Civil War, Granell fled to France where he was interned in concentration camps however after having escaped, Eugenio then sought exile in the Americas.
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As such, the LRP viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a defeat for the workers not because the workers lost control of the state, as many Trotskyists believe, but because of the increased rate of exploitation and destruction of social welfare programs that accompanied the collapse. The group is based in New York City with a branch in Chicago. It also organizes a group of international co-thinkers called the Communist Organisation for a Fourth International. They publish a journal called Proletarian Revolution, formerly Socialist Voice, to which the late Sy Landy and Walter Daum have been notable contributors.
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Another reason why Zhang did not ally with Wang was that Wang boasted that it was under his order that five senior CPC leaders (Yu Xiusong, Huang Chao, Li Te and two others—all opponents of Wang) had been arrested, and now worked for warlord Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang under the direction of the CPC. All five were tortured and executed in a prison under the control of Sheng Shicai, having been labeled as Trotskyists. However, Sheng Shicai was acting under direction from the CPC under Wang Ming. After that incident, Zhang despised Wang and would never consider supporting him.
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From 1946 he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu–Montal Tendency, so called from their pseudonyms Pierre Chaulieu (Castoriadis) and Claude Montal (Lefort). They published On the Regime and Against the Defence of the USSR, a critique of both the Soviet Union and its Trotskyist supporters. They suggested that the USSR was dominated by a social layer of bureaucrats, and that it consisted of a new kind of society as aggressive as Western European societies. By 1948, having tried to persuade other Trotskyists of their viewpoint, they broke away with about a dozen others and founded the libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie.
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Grabar supervised another New York exhibition, this time of icon art, in 1931 and painted a string of official "socialist realism epics" but it was the 1933 Portrait of Svetlana that gave him an enormous and unwanted exposure at home and abroad. Grabar himself rated this portrait, painted in one day, among its best. The public identified its title subject as none other than Stalin's daughter (born in 1926, she could not have been Grabar's subject; the legend persisted into the 1960s). Either this dangerous publicity, or his earlier association with Natalia Sedova and other trotskyists compelled Grabar to retire to relative obscurity.
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Trotskyists argue that there must be a permanent revolution in Third World countries in which a bourgeoisie revolution will inevitably lead to a worker's revolution with an international scope. This can be seen in the October Revolution before the movement was stopped by Stalin, a proponent of socialism in one country. Because of this threat, the bourgeoisie in Third World countries will willingly subjugate themselves to national and capitalist interests in order to prevent a proletarian uprising. Internationalists would respond that capitalism has proved itself incapable of resolving the competing claims of different nationalisms and that the working class (of all countries) is oppressed by capitalism, not by other workers.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, the International Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, which had been expelled from the Communist International, accused the leadership of the Comintern and Soviet Union of revising the internationalist principles of Marxism and Leninism in favor of the aspirations of an elite bureaucratic caste which had come to power in the Soviet Union.Leon Trotsky. The Third International After Lenin, The Militant, 1929. Accessed 14 March 2010 The Trotskyists saw the nascent Stalinist bureaucracy as a roadblock on the proletariat's path to world socialist revolution and to the shifting policies of the Comintern, they counterposed the Marxist theory of permanent revolution.
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In the early 1980s, there were two Trotskyist organisations affirming support to the USFI, its official section Communist League, successor to the Socialist Workers Party, and the Bolshevik-Leninist Group. The BLG was formed by former CL members, along with some Trotskyists recruited in Britain or the US who had returned to India. Participation in the Bombay textile strike drew the groups closer, and also subjected them to public scrutiny regarding why two distinct groups existed. In 1982, the CL held a Conference in Santipur, West Bengal, which saw it revive from the crisis that had been caused by the split and individual exits between 1975 and 1979.
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The New Left did not seek to recruit industrial workers en masse, but instead concentrated on a social activist approach to organization, convinced that they could be the source for a better kind of social revolution. This view has been criticized by several Marxists, especially Trotskyists, who characterized this approach as "substitutionism" which they described as a misguided and non-Marxist belief that other groups in society could "substitute" for and "replace" the revolutionary agency of the working class. Many early feminists and advocates of women's rights were considered a part of the Left by their contemporaries. Feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft was influenced by the radical libertarian socialist thinker Thomas Paine.
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Ernest Mandel, Trotskyists and the Resistance in World War Two Despite this, many parts of the world, including Latin America, Europe and Asia, continue to have large Trotskyist groupings who are attracted to its anti-Stalinist positions and its defense of proletarian internationalism. Several of these groups carry the label "Fourth Internationalist" either in their organization's name, important political position documents, or both. In line with Trotskyist theory and thought, the Fourth International tended to view the Comintern as a degenerated workers' state. However, although it regarded its own ideas as more advanced and thus superior to those of the Third International, it did not actively push for the Comintern's destruction.
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The Party subordinates all forms of Party organization to > these interests. From this it follows that one form of organization is > suitable for legal existence of the Party, and another for the conditions of > underground, illegal existence... The secret apparatus, under Peters, carried out surveillance, exposed infiltrators, protected sensitive party records from seizure, and disrupted rival communist and leftist movements such as the Trotskyists. Another of his duties included maintaining contact with the Ware group in Washington D.C., and he took over direct supervision of that group in 1935. The head of the CPUSA, Earl Browder, instructed Peters to co-operate with Soviet intelligence.
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"More on the Suppression of Kronstadt" by Leon Trotsky Years later, anarchist Emma Goldman and others criticised Trotsky's actions as Commissar for War for his role in the suppression of the rebellion, and argued that he ordered unjustified incarcerations and executions of political opponents such as anarchists, although Trotsky did not participate in the actual suppression."Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt" by Leon Trotsky Some Trotskyists, most notably Abbie Bakan, have argued that the claim that the Kronstadt rebels were "counterrevolutionary" has been supported by evidence of White Army and French government support for the Kronstadt sailors' March rebellion.Abbie Bakan. "Kronstadt – A Tragic Necessity" , marxisme.
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Two delegates from the Clarity caucus were in attendance. James Burnham vigorously attacked the Labour and Socialist International, the international organization of left- wing parties to which the Socialist Party belonged and tension rose along these lines among the Trotskyists. United action between the Clarity and Appeal groups was not forthcoming and an emergency meeting of Vincent Dunne and Cannon was held in New York with leaders of the various factions including Thomas, Jack Altman and Gus Tyler of Clarity. At this meeting, Thomas pledged that the upcoming convention would make no effort to terminate the newspapers of the various factions.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 131.
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Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 138. On June 24–25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratchet up the rhetoric against the American Labor Party and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia (a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks) and to reestablish their newspaper, The Socialist Appeal.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 139. This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2 (with 18 abstentions) and ordering 70 more to be brought up on charges.
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After completing his studies in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, his father actively joined the trade union struggle, became an active Trotskyist trade unionist, editor of the Northwest Organizer and The Industrial Organizer and wrote articles for other trade union publications. When he was 3 years old, his father was arrested and was subject to the Smith Act, which was aimed at fighting the Trotskyists in the United States. Hudson received primary and secondary education in a private school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. After his graduation, he entered the University of Chicago into two specialties—the main was Germanic philology as an additional history was chosen.
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It declared itself to be an external faction of the Communist Party until—as the Trotskyists saw it—Stalin's policies in Germany helped Adolf Hitler take power. At that point, they started working towards the founding of a new international, the Fourth International (FI). In the United States, the principal impact of the Third Period was to end the Communist Party's efforts to organize within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) through the TUEL and to turn its efforts into organizing dual unions through the Trade Union Unity League. Foster went along with this change, even though it contradicted the policies he had fought for previously.
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This was the last transport to arrive at the camp; its status was changed to that of a concentration camp for political prisoners, under the direct control of the Romanian Minister of the Interior, Dumitru I. Popescu. In practice, Vapniarka was a concentration camp for Jewish prisoners, since no other political suspects were held there—the only other inmates were several Ukrainian convicts. Of the 1,179 Jews in the camp, 107 were women, who were housed in two huts surrounded by a triple-apron barbed-wire fence. Among the Jewish prisoners were 130 members of the Romanian Communist Party, 200 Social Democrats, as well as Trotskyists and Zionists.
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Tim Peters, Der Antifaschismus der PDS aus antiextremistischer Sicht, VS-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2006, S. 60 The International Communist League spoke to the crowd. Them noting that "for the first time in 60 years, Trotskyists addressed a mass audience in a workers state. Participants and those listening on radio and TV heard two counterposed programs: that of the Stalinist SED, and that of the Trotskyist ICL". PDS chairman Gregor Gysi took this opportunity to call for a Verfassungsschutz ("Constitution Protection") for the GDR, and questioned whether the Amt für Nationale Sicherheit (Department of National Security, the successor of the Stasi) should be reorganized or phased out.
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Later, this struggle grew into clashes, similar to those that Joseph Stalin led with Trotskyists and Bukharinists. In 1932, under mentorship of Nikolai Bukharin, Gorkić was named general secretary of the KPJ under the pseudonym Sommer. Gorkić returned to Yugoslavia several times, but when he was elected as general secretary of the KPJ, he was forbidden from entering Yugoslavia for safety reasons. From 1932 he led Central Committee of the KPJ in exile, in Vienna, Paris, and Moscow. In November 1932 in the text published in the official gazette of the KPJ, Gorkić criticised leaders of communists from Dalmatia because they did not join Ustaše during the Velebit uprising.
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In 1964, the LSSP joined the bourgeois government of Sri Lanka, which the ICFI and USFI condemned as betraying Trotskyist principles. The ICFI and USFI no longer considered the LSSP a Trotskyist party at that point, and encouraged Sri Lankan Trotskyists to leave that party. Some time later a new organization, the Revolutionary Communist League was formed out of the left wing which split from the LSSP to form the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary). In 1966, a "third world conference" of the ICFI occurred in England. Delegates were present from the SLL, Lambert's PCI and Loukas Karliaftis’s Greek organisation, which had joined the IC in 1964.
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The League finally voted to dissolve into the SFIO in August 1934, where they formed the Bolshevik-Leninist Group (Groupe Bolchevik-Leniniste, GBL). At the Mulhouse party congress of June 1935, the Trotskyists led a campaign to prevent the united front from expanding into a popular front which would include the liberal Radical Party. The Popular Front strategy was adopted in the 1936 French legislative election and the coalition gained a majority, with SFIO obtaining for the first time more votes and seats than the Radical Party. Léon Blum became France's first Socialist prime minister in 1936 while the PCF supported without participation his government.
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They criticised the government for not going further to take over the commanding heights of the economy. Bevan demanded that the "main streams of economic activity are brought under public direction" with economic planning, and criticised the Labour Party's implementation of nationalisation for not empowering the workers in the nationalised industries with democratic control over their operation.Bevan, Aneurin, In Place of Fear p50, p126-128, MacGibbon and Kee, second edition (1961) In the post war period, many Trotskyists expected at first the pattern of financial instability and recession to return. Instead the capitalist world, now led by the United States, embarked on a prolonged boom which lasted until 1973.
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Around 2000, the word started being used in its English usage by some global justice movement (sometimes identified with antiglobalization) activists (Marches Européennes contre le chômage la précarité et les exclusions - European Marches against unemployment, precarity and social exclusion), and also in EU official reports on social welfare. But it was in the strikes of young part-timers at McDonald's and Pizza Hut in winter 2000, that the first political union network emerged in Europe explicitly devoted to fighting precarity: Stop Précarité, with links to AC!, CGT, SUD, CNT, Trotskyists and other elements of the French radical left.Abdel Mabrouki, Génération précaire, Le Cherche Midi, 2004.
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Pablo continued with the European International Secretariat of the Fourth International, operating from Amsterdam and Paris. The entryist tactic he proposed could not be implemented in many countries and succeeded only to some extent in countries where a large social-democratic party could be 'entered'. None of the various Trotskyist splinter groups gained large numbers of new members in the early Cold War years, whether 'independent party-builders' or 'entryists'. After the invasion of Hungary in 1956, many intellectuals split from the communist parties, and there was further political fragmentation resulting from the Sino-Soviet split, but the Trotskyists gained almost no new adherents from them.
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The Socialist Organiser Alliance grew from the broad- left Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory. By 1983 the paper had become identified with Matgamna's supporters, leading to a split with Labour left politicians (such as Ken Livingstone) over the GLC's policy of increasing rates to offset cuts in central government grants to local councils. The group organised its student work through the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS), forming Socialist Students in NOLS (SSiN) to campaign within the National Union of Students. Throughout the 1980s the group had reassessed its politics and reappraised the Third Camp tradition of heterodox and dissident Trotskyists including Max Shachtman and Hal Draper.
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The party structures were seen as compromised due to infiltration by agents of the Polish military intelligence. Some of the party leaders, falsely accused of being such agents, were subsequently executed in the Soviet Union. In 1935 and 1936, the KPP undertook a formation of a unified worker and peasant front in Poland and was then subjected to further persecutions by the Comintern, which also arbitrarily accused the Polish communists of harboring Trotskyists elements in their ranks. The apogee of the Moscow-held prosecutions, aimed at eradicating the various "deviations" and ending usually in death sentences, took place in 1937–38, with the last executions carried out in 1940.
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It refused, for example, to engage in armed struggle, differently from other left wing organizations that decided to follow that path. The clandestine operations and the political disputes regarding the strategies to resist the military regime led to many important leaders leaving the party, while many others died in the hands of the military regime. To the end of the dictatorship, while the Communist Party in Brazil was involved in several internal clashes, the Worker's Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) was founded. Its creation was the project of a series of left wing groups independent from the PCB (Trotskyists, communist dissidents, ex-guerrillas, sectors of the Catholic Left, independent unionists and intellectuals).
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They believed that because of the pressures of the Cold War the masses had forced the Soviet Union and the other Degenerated workers' states to become more revolutionary. In concert with Pablo aligned Trotskyists in other countries, this group felt that it would be best under the circumstances focus on recruiting among Communists and fellow travelers, in lieu of formal entrismAlexander pp.837-8 The formal split began in early 1953 when Zaslow presented a document, "Report and Tasks", to the New York Local outlining his ideas. This set off a spirited debate within the party, even though a "truce" was attempted by the leaderships May Plenum.
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It was founded in 1968 by members of the Irish Workers' Group, which was mainly centred on Irish emigrants to Britain and was itself the result of a previous split in the Irish Communist Group between those, such as Brendan Clifford, who leaned towards Maoism and went on to form the Irish Communist Organisation (ICO), later the British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO), and those such as Peter Graham, Sean Matgamna (John O'Mahony) and Gery Lawless who were Trotskyists. The LWR was begun by members unhappy at the low level of activity of that organisation in Ireland and the fact that the IWG leaders were based in London.
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From its creation in 1918 it followed the political line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, supporting in general its initiatives. Its alignment with the CPSU in the Stalinist period earned it numerous criticisms by other parties of the political left. Throughout the 1920s it had several splits, being recognized the one of the frontists (1923), the one of the chispistas (pre-Trotskyists) (1925) and the penelonistas (supporters of Bukharin) in 1928, returning many paintings during the 8th PCA Congress that year. The PCA organized the sending of combatants to the International Brigades and other resources to the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.
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Though Philip Gunawardena, N.M. Perera, Edmund Samarakkody, and Colvin R. de Silva were detained in Ceylon, Leslie was in India, his properties in Ceylon seized. He settled in Calcutta and established networks with the local Trotskyist organisations, including that of the Uttar Pradesh Trotskyist group, as well as groups in Bombay and Madras. Through discussion, the Indian and Ceylonese Trotskyists led by Leslie established a preliminary committee for the formation of the Bolshevik–Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma (BLPI for short). The discussions for this took place through underground meetings in Kandy in December 1940 and March 1941 and set the stage for a sole Trotskyist party for India.
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In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was in the ascent and developed a policy of what is known as Stalinism; which the CPGB leadership upheld. Subsequently, internal divisions emerged, as the first official (endorsed by Leon Trotsky's International Left Opposition) British Trotskyist group, the Communist League, was founded in 1932. Some communists took part in the League against Imperialism, which primarily attacked the Franco-British empires. In the 30s, Communists and Trotskyists also worked within the Revolutionary Policy Committee and Guild of Youth inside the Independent Labour Party (ILP), in the Labour League of Youth, and within the Labour-affiliated Socialist League and Scottish Socialist Party.
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In neo-Trotskyist theory, such an alliance was rejected as being based either on a false strategy of popular fronts, or on political opportunism, said to be incompatible either with a permanent revolution or with the principle of independent working class political action. The state in Soviet-type societies was redefined by the neo-Trotskyists as being also state-monopoly capitalist. There was no difference between the West and the East in this regard. Consequently, some kind of anti-bureaucratic revolution was said to be required, but different Trotskyist groups quarreled about what form such a revolution would need to take, or could take.
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Like the Trotskyists, it saw the failure of the German Communist Party in the face of fascism as its historic failure and ceased to consider itself a fraction of the party from the date of its 1935 Congress held in Brussels. Isolated, the left fraction sought to discover allies within the milieu of groups to the left of the Trotskyist movement. Typically, these discussions came to nothing, but they were able to recruit from the disintegrating Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes (LCI) in Belgium, a group which had broken from Trotskyism. A loose liaison was also maintained with the council communist groups in the Netherlands and in particular with the GIK.
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They were refused full delegates' credentials and only admitted to the founding conference of the Youth International on the following day. They then joined Hugo Oehler's International Contact Commission for the Fourth (Communist) International and in 1939 were publishing Der Marxist in Antwerp. With the beginning of the war, they took the name Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD) and came to define Russia as state capitalist in agreement with Ante Ciliga's book The Russian Enigma. At this point, they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a degenerated workers' state).
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The closing stages of World War II marked a watershed in the history of left communism as was true for every other political tendency. Like the Trotskyists, left communists expected the war to end with at least the beginnings of a revolutionary wave of struggle similar to that which had marked the end of World War I. Therefore, strikes in Italy from 1942 onwards were of intense interest to them. Many left communists formerly in exile, in jail or simply inactive due to repression returned to active political activity in Italy. This had the result that new organisations identifying with left communism came into being and older ones dissolved themselves.
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That same year, Gregory Rabinowitz recruited him to do "opposition work," against rival political organizations. Miller's first year in the business was listening to a wiretap on Trotskyist leader, James Cannon's home. Later, he was to infiltrate the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and become an activist, while sending reports to the CPUSA and Soviet intelligence. The Trotskyists assigned him to the Sailors Union of the Pacific in 1941, and he became editor of the union's journal, in addition to writing on military affairs for the Fourth International, a Trotskyist journal, during World War II. Miller's position gave the Communists a spy in the upper ranks of a rival union.
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Under the leadership of Daniel Terra, it defined the struggle for "democratic liberties" as the primary task for the Brazilian left and became active inside the MDB, the party of the "allowed opposition," under Orestes Quércia, and had an important role in the reawakening of the student movement in 1976-1977. However, It came to believe that the "national issue" was more important than the "democratic issue" and in 1978 shifted its policies. It never abandoned the struggle against the dictatorship, but became increasingly aggressive against other leftist movements, particularly the Trotskyists, frequently seen as antinational and supportive of "petty-bourgeois issues" like feminism, environmentalism, and gay rights.
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In neo- Trotskyist theory, however, such an alliance was rejected as being based either on a false strategy of popular fronts, or on political opportunism, said to be incompatible either with a permanent revolution or with the principle of independent working class political action. The state in Soviet- type societies was redefined by the neo-Trotskyists as being also state- monopoly capitalist. There was no difference, in their view, between the West and the East in this regard. Consequently, some kind of anti-bureaucratic revolution was said to be required, but different Trotskyist groups quarreled about what form such a revolution would need to take, or could take.
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The Revolutionary Communist Party of China, which was founded in September 1948 by Chinese Trotskyists and led by Peng Shuzhi on the basis of the Communist League of China fled to Hong Kong after the Chinese Communist Party's takeover of China in 1949. The party has legally been active and has been publishing the October Review periodical in Hong Kong since 1974. New Trotskyist and anarchist trends emerged from a student movement that broke out at the Chu Hai College in 1969. The students were disillusioned with the Communist Party in the aftermath of events such as the Cultural Revolution and the Lin Bao Incident, which heavily discredited the CCP.
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La Lutte ('The Struggle') was a left-wing paper published (in French to get around print restrictions on Vietnamese) in Saigon, French-colonial Cochin- China (southern Vietnam), in the 1930s..Steinberg, David Joel. In Search of Southeast Asia; A Modern History. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971. p. 322 It was launched ahead of the April-May 1933 Saigon municipal council election as a joint organ of the Indochinese Communist Party (PCI) and a grouping of Trotskyists (which became known as Nhom Tranh Dau, the 'Struggle Group', after La Lutte) and others who agreed to run a joint "Workers' slate" of candidates for the polls.
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Historian Constance Myers has explained their thinking in this manner: > "Since Trotsky was right, one day he would be redeemed and recalled to the > Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern; subsequently the > party would reinstate his followers in their rightful, leadership roles. > Moreover, the comrades still in the party (in the Trotskyists' eyes) > remained comrades with different opinions." Max Shachtman made arrangements with a sympathetic New York printer he knew that was a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World to produce a newspaper in his small shop extending credit to the expelled dissidents.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 33.
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The main constituent element of the original coalition was Synaspismos, a democratic socialist party, but Syriza was founded with a goal of uniting left-wing and radical left groups and had included a broad array of groups and independent activists as well as ideologies, from social democrats and democratic socialists to Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists. Additionally, despite its secular ideology,Dabilis, Andy, "Syriza Wants State Break With Church", greekreporter.com, January 28, 2013 many members are Christians who are instead mainly opposed to the alleged privileges of the state-sponsored Orthodox Church of Greece. From 2013 the coalition became a unitary party, although it retained its name with the addition of United Social Front.
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Retrieved November 5, 2008. In the present day, there is no longer a single, centralized cohesive Fourth International. Throughout most of its existence and history, the Fourth International was hunted by agents of the NKVD, subjected to political repression by countries such as France and the United States, and rejected by supporters of the Soviet Union as "illegitimate pretenders". The Fourth International struggled to maintain contact under these conditions of crackdowns and repression during World War II due to the fact that subsequent proletarian uprisings were often under the influence of Soviet-aligned Stalinists and militant nationalist groups, leading to defeats for the Fourth International and the Trotskyists, who subsequently never managed to obtain meaningful influence.
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"The International Situation and Tasks in the Struggle against Imperialist War", Fourth International, November 1951. In line with this geopolitical perspective, Pablo argued that the only way the Trotskyists could avoid isolation was for various sections of the Fourth International to undertake long-term entryism in the mass Communist or Social Democratic parties.Michel Pablo, "World Trotskism Rearms", Fourth International, November 1951. This tactic was known as entrism sui generis, to distinguish it from the short-term entry tactic employed before World War II. For example, it meant that the project of building an open and independent Trotskyist party was shelved in France, because it was regarded as not politically feasible alongside entry into the French Communist Party.
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In a polemic, he described his main differences with the Trotskyists as being "on revolutionary defeatism, on support for left-bourgeois governments, on support for third capitalist parties".Hugo Oehler, The Ukraine question: A Reply to Trotsky's Polemic With the declaration of the Trotskyist Fourth International, Oehler concentrated on finding international contacts, which he grouped into the Provisional International Contact Commission for the New Communist (Fourth) International. However, World War II proved the start of a dramatic decline for the RWL, which appears to have been disbanded in the early 1950s, and Oehler faded into obscurity. In the 1970s, Oehler lived in Denver, Colorado, and was interviewed there by Prometheus Research Library archivist Carl Lichtenstein.
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In the meantime, he was organising a group of Communists among the students that opposed both British imperialism and the Trotskyists of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. After graduating from the University of Ceylon in 1943, Shanmugathasan joined the trade union movement, and became a full-time activist of the Ceylon Communist Party. He became the head of the Ceylon Trade Union Federation and led several strikes, including the general strike of 1947, the Hartal (general strike) of 1953, and a transport strike in 1955.On the Demise of Comrade Nagalingam Sanmugathasan – Comrade Shan: An Unrepentant Communist by the Central Organizing Committee, Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist), 1993 Shanmugathasan married with Parameswari, the widow wife of veteran Communist leader Hon.
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" In France, experiences shared with refugees from Spanish Civil War, anarchists and veterans of the POUM (The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), "permanently distanced" Văn from the politics of "so-called 'workers' parties."Văn, In the Crossfire, p. 2 The second reason, however, is precisely that which Ngô Văn underscored in his Thieng Tho article (and in his later memorials for fallen friends and comrades). It is what Robert Alexander recounts as "the passion, effort and attention paid by Trotskyists of virtually all countries and all factions to support of the Stalinist side during the long and cruel Vietnam War, which in one form or another went on for thirty years, from 1945 to 1975.
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However, by the mid 70s McGregor's politics had evolved to an anarchist position, under the influence of Socialisme ou Barbarie, Solidarity (UK) and the Brisbane Self Management Group. Of the established left, McGregor quickly dismissed the various Communist parties – both the Aarons/Sydney independent- of-the-Soviet Union grouping, the Melbourne Maoists, and the pro-Soviet Clancy/Socialist Party (the current Communist Party). Then there were the Trotskyists – all 37 varieties – and the Spartacists (International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)) who had the most coherent theoretical position – which appealed to his new-found interest in theory. But it was the grouping round Nick Origlass, Izzy Wyner and Hall GreenlandRed Hot, The life & Times of Nick Origlass.
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When it became clear that the 1932 grain deliveries were not going to meet the expectations of the government, the decreased agricultural output was first blamed on the kulaks, and later on agents and spies of foreign intelligence services, "nationalists", "Petlurovites", and from 1937 on, Trotskyists. According to a report from the head of the Supreme Court, by January 15, 1933 as many as 103,000 people (more than 14 thousand in the Ukrainian SSR) had been sentenced under the provisions of the August 7 decree. Of the 79,000 whose sentences were known to the Supreme Court, 4,880 had been sentenced to death, 26,086 to ten years of imprisonment, and 48,094 to other punishments.
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In September 1944, the Soviets invaded and occupied Romania and Bulgaria, removing them from the war and putting Soviet forces on the borders of Yugoslavia. The Chetniks were not unprepared for this, and throughout the war their propaganda strove to harness the pro-Russian and pan-Slavic sympathies of the majority of the Serb population. The distinction between the Russian people and their communist government was belaboured, as was the supposed difference between Yugoslav Partisans, who were allegedly Trotskyists, and the Soviets, who were Stalinists. On 10 September 1944, a Chetnik mission of approximately 150 men, led by Lieutenant Colonel Velimir Piletić, commander of northeastern Serbia, crossed the Danube into Romania and established contact with Soviet forces at Craiova.
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He was the chair of Labour Against the Euro before it ceased campaigning following the 2003 decision by Gordon Brown that the five economic tests for Britain to join the euro had not been met. During the debate in the House of Commons over the decision whether to have a referendum over the EU Treaty of Lisbon (5 March 2008), Davidson drew jeers from his Labour colleagues for branding New Labour supporters "Maoists and Trotskyists". Davidson was putting forward the case for disobeying the party line and voting for a referendum. During the 2009–10 Expenses Scandal, it emerged that Davidson claimed £87,699 in the four years to 2007, significantly below the maximum permitted.
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Increasingly Heffer began to use his position on the Labour Party NEC as the base of his political action. He began a specific campaign to nationalise the building construction industry in the National Construction Corporation, and raised the issue at the 1977 Labour Party conference and on the TUC-Labour Party Liaison Committee, where Callaghan vetoed any consideration of the idea by government. In intra-party matters, Heffer opposed taking action against the Militant tendency after a report by the party's national agent Reg Underhill raised concerns over its activities. Heffer's constituency of Walton was one of the strongest areas of Militant but Heffer believed that Trotskyists within the Labour Party could be countered by political arguments.
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Three Marxist oriented parties—the Ceylon Equal Society Party (Lanka Sama Samaja Party—LSSP), the Bolshevik-Leninist Party, and the Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL)--represented the Left proper. They grew out of the Youth League movement, the struggle to get funds for Sri Lankan ex-servicemen, volunteer work during the Malaria Epidemic and the anti-colonial struggle of the 1930s, which culminated in the call for full independence (eschewed by D.S. Senanayake and others of the elite). All three were divided on both ideological and personal grounds. The Soviet Union's expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Communist Party after Lenin's death in 1924 exacerbated these differences, dividing the Communists into Trotskyists and Stalinists.
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Juliet Stuart Poyntz (originally 'Points') (25 November 1886 - 1937) was an American suffragist, trade unionist and communist. As a student and university teacher, Poyntz espoused many radical causes and went on to become a co- founder of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Later she began working as an intelligence agent for the Soviet Union, travelling secretly to Moscow just as some of her comrades were being executed in Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, after which she resigned from the party. This is widely assumed to have led to her unexplained disappearance in New York City in June 1937 as the likely victim of an assassination squad, possibly because she had been associating with Trotskyists.
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Joan Comorera i Soler (or Juan Comorera y Soler; 5 September 1894 – 7 May 1958) was a left-wing Spanish politician from Catalonia who spent several years in Argentina before returning to Spain in 1931 at the start of the Second Spanish Republic. He was a Catalan nationalist, and was elected chairman of the Socialist Union of Catalonia in 1933. In 1936 he became Secretary General of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), in alliance with the Spanish Communist Party. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) he built up his party into a major political force during the struggles among the supporters of the Republic between Socialists, Stalinists, Trotskyists and Anarcho-syndicalists.
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Socialist Appeal was the name of a newspaper published by American Trotskyists from 1935 to 1941. It was started by supporters of the Trotskyist Workers Party of the United States in Chicago who had entered the Socialist Party of America in 1935 and was edited by Albert Goldman. In 1936, when the Workers Party formerly dissolved and entered en masse into the SPA and in August 1937 the publication moved to New York City and was re-launched as the organ of the "Left Wing Branches of the Socialist Party" but was effectively controlled by the unofficial Trotskyist faction within the SPA. The "Socialist Appeal tendency" split from the Socialist Party to form the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.
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Unfortunately the memoirs of "true" Trotskyists (as opposed to the ones falsely accused of Trotskyism during Soviet repressions), are close to none, because all these real political opponents were physically eliminated. Fortunately the policy of glasnost had led to the opening of numerous archives, which make it possible to better trace the evolution towards Stalinism. Rogovin writes that the treatise did not consider the debunking of various misconceptions, in order not to unnecessarily disrupt the harmony of the exposition of the second alternative mentioned above: to demonstrate that Stalinism was not the only logical possibility of the evolution of the principles of Bolshevism. With the above purpose in mind, the major focus of the treatise was necessarily Trotskyism and the Left Opposition movement within Bolshevism.
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Ferrero (1976), pp. 271-2 On the other hand, Alain Rouquié points out that in the negotiations brought to a close by colonels Perón and Mercante resulted in an agreement with the new Autonomous Butcher's Union of Berisso and Ensenada, in open opposition to the communist Workers' Federation of the Meat Industry.Rouquié The effect on the labor movement was remarkable and the group of unionists in favor of an alliance wit the military government grew, incorporating other socialists like José Domenech (railroad), David Diskin (commerce), Alcides Montiel (brewer), Lucio Bonilla (textile); revolutionary syndicalists from the Argentine Labor Union, such as Luis Gay and Modesto Orozo (both telephone); and even some communists like René Stordeur, Aurelio Hernandez (health)Matsushita, p. 279 and Trotskyists Ángel Perelman (metallurgy).
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In particular, Trotskyists often claimed and still claim that socialism in one country opposes both the basic tenets of Marxism and Lenin's particular beliefs that the final success of socialism in one country depends upon the revolution's degree of success in proletarian revolutions in the more advanced countries of Western Europe. At the Seventh Congress in March 1918, Lenin explained: > Regarded from the world-historical point of view, there would doubtlessly be > no hope of the ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain > alone, if there were no revolutionary movements in other countries. [...] I > repeat, our salvation from all these difficulties is an all Europe > revolution. [...] At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the > German revolution does not come, we are doomed.
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The 1951 Congress argued that the Soviet Union took over these countries because of the military and political results of World War II and instituted nationalized property relations only after its attempts at placating capitalism failed to protect those countries from the threat of incursion by the West. German student movement in 1968 Pablo began expelling large numbers of people who did not agree with his thesis and who did not want to dissolve their organizations within the Communist Parties. For instance, he expelled the majority of the French section and replaced its leadership. As a result, the opposition to Pablo eventually rose to the surface, with the Open Letter to Trotskyists of the World, by Socialist Workers Party leader James P. Cannon.
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Bolshevik–Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma Though Philip Gunawardena, N.M. Perera, Edmund Samarakkody, and Colvin R. de Silva were detained in Ceylon, Goonewardene and his wife Vivienne were able to escape to India, but Goonewardene's properties were seized. They settled in Calcutta and established networks with the local Trotskyist organisations, including that of the Uttar Pradesh Trotskyist group, as well as groups in Bombay and Madras. Through discussion, the Indian and Ceylonese Trotskyists led by Goonewardene established a preliminary committee for the formation of the Bolshevik–Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma (BLPI for short). The discussions for this took place through underground meetings in Kandy in December 1940 and March 1941 and set the stage for a sole Trotskyist party for India.
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The publication of Trotsky's autobiography My Life as reported in the Soviet Union in August 1929, with the editors of Projector titled the publication: "On the service of bourgeoisie" After Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotskyists within the Soviet Union began to waver. Between 1929 and 1932, most leading members of the Left Opposition surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes" and were reinstated in the Communist Party. One initial exception to this was Christian Rakovsky, who inspired Trotsky between 1929 and 1934 with his refusal to capitulate as state suppression of any remaining opposition to Stalin increased by the year. In late 1932, Rakovsky had failed with an attempt to flee the Soviet Union, and was exiled to Yakutia in March 1933.
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This was immediately opposed by the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, and by the SLL in Britain and the PCI in France, as well as many orthodox Trotskyists throughout the world. Those currents still valued the political lessons learned from the 1953 split. They saw the SWP's decision as an abandonment of the most basic principles of the Fourth International, and of Trotskyism, and as an attempt to ingratiate itself to the growing middle class protest movement in the United States. The RT, SLL and PCI argued that the anti-war movement in the US contained the same types of people the Pabloites had sought to attract during the mass exodus of people from the Stalinist Parties after the revelations of Stalin's atrocities in the 1950s.
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After leaving the Lovestoneites, Gitlow tried to form a "bloc" of the opposition Communist movements against Stalinism.Benjamin Gitlow I confess; the truth about American communism New York, E. P. Dutton 1939. To that end he addressed a letter on April 4 to the Lovestonites, the Trotskyist Communist League of America and Albert Weisbord's Communist League of Struggle outlining his plans for a conference to unite the Communist Opposition groups with the ultimate aim of reconstituting the Communist Party USA on a non- Stalinist basis. He was rebuffed by Weisbord's group, who would only unite with him on the basis of the program of the Left Opposition,Class Struggle Vol. 3 #6 but got a more sympathetic hearing from the Trotskyists.
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Crisis of Leadership is a term used by Trotskyists to describe the fundamental problem holding back the working class from political power in the epoch of imperialism. Trotsky argued that only Stalinists, centrists and reformists who hold the leadership of the class and its vanguard hold back the working class from political power when capitalism has reached the point that it is ready for socialism. This is shown in a quote from The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten.
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Ramadier also accepted the terms of the Marshall Plan and excluded the five Communist ministers (among whom the vice-Premier, Maurice Thorez, head of the PCF) during the May 1947 crisesan event which simultaneously occurred in Italy. This exclusion put an end to the Three-parties alliance between the PCF, the SFIO and the Christian- Democrat Popular Republican Movement (MRP), which had been initiated after Charles de Gaulle's resignation in 1946. Jules Moch (SFIO), Interior Minister of Robert Schuman's cabinet, re-organized in December 1947 the Groupe mobile de réserve (GMR) anti-riot police (created during Vichy), renamed Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), in order to crush the insurrectionary strikes started at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt by anarchists and Trotskyists.
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Ryutin's "Appeal" was even more inflammatory, arguing Stalin "must be removed by force" and urging its readers "to everywhere organize cells of the 'Union' to be joined under the banner of Leninism for the liquidation of the Stalin dictatorship". Ryutin gathered around him a group of like-minded friends who called themselves "The Union of Marxist-Leninists"; they began to distribute the "Appeal" to workers and to members of the opposition in the summer and early autumn of 1932. Nikolai Bukharin's former comrades, the "Red Professors" - Alexander Slepkov, Dmitri Maretsky, and Jan Sten - helped to distribute the manifestos. Sten gave copies to Lev Kamenev and to Grigory Zinoviev, while Slepkov provided the documents to a group of Trotskyists in Kharkov.
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In addition, he entered into a dispute with Nin and the ICE when they refused his suggestion to enter the youth organisation of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). The majority of the ICE then split with Trotsky, leaving a small remnant grouping which included Grandizo Munis. With the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Munis was a member of the tiny Seccion Bolshevik-Leninista. This organisation sought to influence the ranks of the larger Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and also worked closely with the more left-wing anarchists of the Durruti Column. The Trotskyists were among the very few to oppose the Popular Front government and openly took part in the May Days of 1937.
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Pablo and Ernest Mandel were instrumental in these years in winning the Fourth International to a position that asserted that the Eastern European states conquered by the Soviet Armed Forces in 1944-45 had by 1948 become what they described as deformed workers' states. In the uncertain aftermath of World War II, when the Trotskyists were numerically dwarfed by the mass communist parties and their hopes for a revolutionary breakthrough were dashed, Pablo also advanced a new tactic for the FI from about 1951 onwards. He argued that a Third World War, which was believed by many people to be imminent, would be characterised by revolutionary outbreaks during the actual war. Splits of revolutionary dissenters were likely to develop in the communist parties.
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On December 17, the Moscow daily Pravda publishds an editorial that reads: "The purge of Trotskyists and anarcho-syndicalists has already begun in Catalonia; it has been carried out with the same energy as in the Soviet Union." The Stalinists had already begun the liquidation of any anti-fascists, collectivizations and other revolutionary structures that did not submit to the directives of Moscow. On December 23, the Gijón War Committee was transformed by decree into the Interprovincial Council of Asturias and León, regulated by the Republican government authorities and more moderate in its policies, at the same time as it officially recognized the formation of the National Defense Committee. On January 8, 1937, the Popular Executive Committee of Valencia was dissolved.
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He would later leave the party to become a member of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). He is known to a broader public in Brazil as the second husband of Marta Smith de Vasconcelos Suplicy, former congresswoman and mayor of São Paulo through PT. Since 1986 he has been an aide to the National Secretariat of International Relations of PT, attending various international events on its behalf. He is linked to a group of former Trotskyists within PT known colloquially as the "Libelu" (named after their tendency, "Liberdade e Luta" or "Freedom and Fight"), which supports Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's wing. His brother, José Saul Wermus (best known as Jorge Altamira), is the main leader of Partido Obrero (Politica Obrera's successor).
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Many of the committee's members, like La Follette, Carlo Tresca and Dewey, were not Trotskyists, but consisted of anti-Stalinist socialists, progressives and liberals. She worked on the literary journal The Freeman both as a contributor and as assistant to the editor, Albert Jay Nock, and she later founded a revival of the magazine, called "The New Freeman" in 1932 which lasted only fifteen months. In the early 1950s, she served as a managing editor of yet another revival of Nock's journal, the libertarian periodical The Freeman, with John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt serving as executive editors. In that role, she came into periodic conflict with Hazlitt due to her "sometimes strident way of expressing herself" on behalf of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
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After the death of Lenin in 1924 the power of Stalin in Moscow appears to have become almost limitless. There were close links between the Communist Party leaderships in Moscow and Berlin, and Stalin seems to have become virtually a "de facto king-maker" for the German party, which in part was a reflection of the acute divisions within the German party itself. To the disappointment of some, it turned out that Stalin was not an admirer of Karl Korsch and the "ultra-left-wingers". Nevertheless, for the next few years, until the Communist Party of Germany finally split in 1928/29, the defining division within it was between pro-Stalinists and anti-Stalinists (generally identified by Stalin himself as Trotskyists).
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Anarcho- communists, classical, libertarian and orthodox Marxists as well as council and left communists are critical of Marxism–Leninism, particularly for what they see as its authoritarianism. Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg dismissed the Marxist–Leninist idea of a "vanguard", arguing that a revolution could not be brought about by command. She predicted that once the Bolsheviks had banned multi-party democracy and internal dissent, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would become the dictatorship of a faction, and then of an individual. Trotskyists believe that Marxism–Leninism leads to the establishment of a degenerated or deformed workers' state, where the capitalist elite have been replaced by an unaccountable bureaucratic elite and there is no true democracy or workers' control of industry.
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On the theoretical level, Bordiga developed an understanding of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society. Bordiga's writings on the capitalist nature of the Soviet economy in contrast to those produced by the Trotskyists also focused on the agrarian sector. In analyzing the agriculture in the Soviet Union, Bordiga sought to display the capitalist social relations that existed in the kolkhoz and sovkhoz, one a cooperative farm and the other a wage-labor state farm. In particular, he emphasized how much of the national agrarian produce came from small privately owned plots (writing in 1950) and predicted the rates at which the Soviet Union would start importing wheat after Imperial Russia had been such a large exporter from the 1880s to 1914.
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And he believed that it was worth while to conduct > exploratory talks, even though he felt they would likely lead to nothing. > The Old Guard felt that the Socialists' invitation to unaffiliated radicals > and the Party's acceptance of former Communists, Lovestoneites, and > Trotskyists was turning the party away from democratic socialism and to > Communism. Thomas, though he disagreed with the ideology of these anti- > Stalinist Communists, was willing to try to work with a party that included > them, if they were willing to accept party discipline and not try to take > over the Party. The Old Guard considered the Revolutionary Policy Committee, > a far-left group within the Socialist Party, a Communist and anarchist group > that had no place in a democratic socialist party.
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While the Trotskyist movement does not recognize any political revolution to have occurred against the deformed worker's states, it saw a strong possibility for that potential in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring of 1968, both crushed by Soviet invasion. Many trotskyists see Valery Sablin's mutinity in 1975 as an example of a true socialist attempt to provoke a political revolution. Sablin thought that Leninism had been betrayed by the Soviet government, and started a mutinity in hopes of inspiring the soviet people to overthrow the current leadership and install true socialism. Another uprising seen to have the possibility of sweeping in the political revolution was the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by the Communist Party of China.
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Unlike the movements that led to capitalist counter-revolution such Boris Yeltsin's 1991 coup in the USSR and Lech Wałęsa's Solidarność in Poland, these previous movements were not seen as having stated capitalist goals and were not seen as hostile to socialism. As such the Trotskyist movement opposed the 1956 invasion of Hungary, the 1969 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Tiananmen Square massacre as the crimes of Stalinist governments. While there is general agreement among Trotskyists on these questions regarding Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and China in events above, there is disagreement on questions regarding capitalist counter-revolution. Some Trotskyist groups cheered the fall of the Stalinist governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, even under the leadership of pro-capitalist forces.
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Some leftists, such as Tsang Shu-ki, saw a chance for Hong Kong to transform into a reformed capitalist mixed economy, a welfare state, and a democratic society, which would integrate into a democratic socialist China. In 1983, Tsang co-founded the Meeting Point, which became one of the first groups to welcome the transfer of Hong Kong to mainland China. Howewer, Trotskyists such as Leung Kwok-hung harshly criticised Tsang's reformist ideas, instead calling for an uprising against the capitalist-colonial regime in Hong Kong and the bureaucratic regime in mainland China under the banner of social democracy. Members of the April Fifth Action in Victoria Park in 2009, who came to commemorate the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre.
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Blood flowed like water as alleged Trotskyists and other politically suspect individuals were rounded up, "investigated" and disposed with a pistol shot in the base of the skull or a 10-year sentence in the Gulag. Around the world, the adherents of Stalin and Trotsky raged against one another. In Spain, the country in which the Lovestoneites invested most of their emotional energy as fervid supporters of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), 1937 marked a similar bloodbath, with the Communist Party of Spain achieving hegemony among the Republican forces and conducting bloody purges of their own at the behest of the Soviet secret police. Joint action between Communist oppositionists and the unflinching loyalists to Moscow was henceforth an abject impossibility.
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The first one is the coincidence of the goals in this respect of two major historical schools: of the official pro-Soviet school with the tradition of demonizing of Trotsky and Trotskyism and of the anti- Soviet, anti-Communist school, with its tradition of demonizing the whole Communist movement, for which purpose it was convenient to attribute the traits of Stalinism to Communism as a whole. The second reason is that with a few exceptions of émigrés, all Trotskyists were physically eliminated by Stalin so that there are virtually no memoirs, and nearly all documents of the Left Opposition were made inaccessible. Therefore the historical picture has become distorted in this area for both subjective and objective reasons. During Perestroika a large amount of memoirs of repressed people have become available.
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Mus was a supporter of French colonialism in Vietnam and Hồ Chí Minh believed there was no danger of Chinese troops staying in Vietnam (although this was the time when China invaded Tibet). The Vietnamese at the time were busy spreading anti-French propaganda as evidence of French atrocities in Vietnam emerged while Hồ Chí Minh showed no qualms about accepting Chinese aid after 1949. Hồ Chí Minh (right) with Võ Nguyên Giáp (left) in Hanoi, 1945 The Việt Minh then collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in 1945–1946, and ; also and of the Trotskyists. Trotskyism in Vietnam did not rival the Party outside of the major cities, but particularly in the South, in Saigon-Cochinchina, they had been a challenge.
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8:4 pg.260 In 1940, he met a woman selling Socialist Appeal at an Engineering Apprentices College where he was on day release and he joined the Trotskyist Workers International League in 1940Harris, N. "Duncan Hallas: Death of a Trotskyist" Ed. McIlroy, J. Revolutionary History Vol. 8:4 pg.261 and then its successor organisation the Revolutionary Communist Party while still a young worker during the Second World War. Conscripted into the First Lancashire Regiment in 1943, he served in France, Belgium and Germany and he was also involved in the mutiny in Egypt after the end of the war, earning him three months in military prison. When factional disputes broke out in The Club (the name adopted by British Trotskyists after entering the Labour Party) Hallas became a supporter of Tony Cliff's positions.
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They also transferred John Hawkesworth from Italy to Athens, as assistant to Scobie, who soon took the general command. Although the British were openly fighting against EAM in Athens, there were no such battles in the rest of the big cities. In certain cases, such as Volos, some RAF units even surrendered equipment to ELAS fighters.. It seems that ELAS preferred to avoid an armed confrontation with the British forces initially and later tried to reduce the conflict as much as possible, although poor communication between its many independent units around the country might also have played a role. This might explain the simultaneous struggle against the British, the large-scale ELAS operations against trotskyists, anarchists and other political dissidents in Athens, and the many contradictory decisions of EAM leaders.
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Around the time of Serge's arrival in France, Mark Zborowski "Etienne" was becoming a powerful person in the French Trotskyist movement, as a confidant of Leon Sedov. Zborowski, who turned out later to be a GPU agent, successfully used Serge's disagreements with other Trotskyists to spread distrust of Serge within the Trotskyist movement, which poisoned Trotsky's relations with Serge. However, their political break was based on differences over two topics: the role of the POUM in the Spanish revolution (which Serge defended) and the Bolsheviks' brutal repression of the 1921 revolt of the Kronstadt sailors (which Serge criticised). The Serge-Trotsky correspondence (including private letters and public polemics) fills a volume, and after Trotsky's death Serge collaborated with his widow, Natalia Sedova, on an authorized biography: "Life and Death of Leon Trotsky" (1947).
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Redemption, the first novel by author, historian and former Trotskyist Tariq Ali, is a roman à clef and apostate satire of the inability of Trotskyists to handle the downfall of the Eastern bloc. In it Ezra Einstein (a thinly disguised Ernest Mandel) calls a conference whose British sections are 'the Hoods' (the WRP), 'the Rockers' (SWP) and 'the Burrowers League' (Militant). Also invited are the 'Proletarian International Socialist Party of American Workers' (PISPAW) (SWP-US) and representatives from the 'New Life Journal' (New Left Review). It contains portraits of other well-known figures in the Trotskyist movement including Gerry Healy (Frank Hood), Tony Cliff (Jimmy Rock), Ted Grant (Jed Burroughs), Chris Harman (Nutty Shardman), Paul Foot (Alex Mango), Jack Barnes (Jim Noble), Michel Pablo ('Diablo') and Vanessa Redgrave (Laura Shaw).
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The organisation was founded as the Organisation of Labour Students (SOLS) in 1970/71, however it is a direct descendant of the Scottish Association of Labour Student Organisations (SALSO) which had existed since 1946. In the 1960s SALSO's UK equivalent, the National Association of Labour Student Organisations (NALSO), was taken over by Trotskyists and disaffiliated from the Labour Party. SALSO, however, successfully resisted any take-over attempts. SOLS remained famous for its hostility to Trotskyism and its members were key to recovering control of the National Organisation of Labour Students, NOLS, from the Militant tendency in 1975 and the following year SOLS members took the famous "icepick express" (a bus with an icepick - the weapon used to kill Leon Trotsky - attached to the front) to that year's NOLS conference at Lancaster University.
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The SWP maintains an opposition to what it terms "substitutionist strategies". This is the idea that social forces other than the proletariat, which is for Marxists the potentially social revolutionary class due to its 'radical chains', may substitute for the proletariat in the struggle for a socialist society (see above). This idea led the founder of the SWP, Tony Cliff, to reject the idea that the USSR was a degenerated workers' state, the position held by other Trotskyists and derived from Leon Trotsky's analysis in the 1930s. Cliff argued that in fact the USSR and Eastern Europe used a form of capitalism which he referred to as 'bureaucratic state capitalist', and that later so did other countries ruled by what he termed Stalinist parties, such as China, Vietnam and Cuba.
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Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, p 41 Stalin, denouncing White counter-revolutionaries, Trotskyists, wreckers, and others, particularly aimed his attention at the Communist old guard.Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, p466-7 The very improbability of the charges was cited as evidence, since more plausible charges could have been invented.Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, p490 These enemies were rounded up for the gulags, which propaganda proclaimed to be "corrective labor camps" to such an extent that even people who saw the starvation and slave labor believed the propaganda rather than their eyes.Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, p488 During World War II, entire nationalities, such as the Volga Germans, were branded traitors.
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Kang with Mao in Yan'an, 1945 When Kang Sheng arrived in the Party's redoubt at Yan'an in late November 1937 as part of Wang Ming's entourage, he may have already realized that Wang Ming was falling out of favor, but he initially supported Wang and the Comintern's efforts to guide the Chinese Communists back into line with Soviet policy, especially the need to align with the Kuomintang against the Japanese. Kang also brought Stalin's obsession with Trotskyism to play in helping Wang defeat the efforts of Zhou Enlai and Dong Biwu to bring Chen Duxiu - then the informal leader of Trotskyists in China - back into the Party.Byron & Pack, p. 142-3. After assessing the situation on the ground in Yan'an, however, in 1938 Kang decided to re-align himself with Mao Zedong.
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After Max Shachtman's minority split in 1940, served as editor of 'Fourth International' monthly theory/polemical journal of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) between 1940–45, until displaced by E R Frank (Bert Cochran) on the maneuvers of James P Cannon and the SWP majority who opposed his views on perspectives for European Trotskyists at the mid-war point. He was one of 18 SWP leaders, including the party's National Secretary, James P. Cannon, imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War. In 1943 he formed a faction, with Albert Goldman which challenged the SWP's "orthodox" catastrophic perspective. Morrow and Goldman projected the likelihood of a prolonged period of bourgeois democracy in western Europe and emphasised the need for democratic and transitional demands against the maximalism advocated by the majority.
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Many on the NEC, then with a left-wing majority, were "determined not to allow a return to what they saw as the 'McCarthyism' of the past". The proscribed list had fallen into disuse and Ron Hayward, Labour Party General Secretary from 1972, claimed he burned the Labour Party central office files on left-wingers. In 1975 Eric Heffer, a member of the NEC, remarked "There have been Trotskyists in the Labour Party for thirty years". Tony Benn, frequently nicknamed 'Kerensky' by the leadership of MilitantLeo Panitch and Colin Leys The End of Parliamentary Socialism: from New Left to New Labour, London: Verso, 2001, p.72; David Powell Tony Benn: A Political Life, London: Continuum, 2004, p.82 (Alexander Kerensky's provisional government was 'replaced' by the Bolsheviks), defended the group.
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The IMG was quickly noted for its energetic support for international solidarity campaigns concerning Vietnam, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, and its support for socialists facing repression in France, Bolivia and Mexico, support for which was organised through the Black Dwarf. International's May 1969 famous headline "Permanent Revolution Reaches UK" reflected its support for armed self-defence against the British state's forces in Northern Ireland in the Red Weekly and in its propaganda activity. It also supported, in orthodox Trotskyist fashion, the Communist-influenced struggles of the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique and the ANC in South Africa despite the complete contempt of the Communist parties for Trotskyists: some opponents nicknamed them 'MIGs', after the Soviet military MiG. In domestic politics, the early 1970s saw the IMG completely reject parliamentary politics.
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The book is introduced as an attempt by Moufawad-Paul to reclaim Maoism, as a contemporary political ideology and contest the negative conceptualizations by Trotskyists and Anarchists in the political left. For Moufawad-Paul, Maoism must be understood as being both a continuation of Leninist political, philosophical and strategic positions, while simultaneously, acting as a rupture from the dogmatic orthodoxy and theoretical limits of standard Marxism-Leninism, thus Maoism is characterized as both continuity and rupture. Throughout the work, Moufawad-Paul offers a critique of contemporary and historical Maoist organizations, such as The Revolutionary Communist Party USA, The Shining Path, The Naxalite insurgency in India, and The New People's Army, as well as contemporary Marxist intellectuals, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Tom Clark (author of State and Counter-Revolution).
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Bensaïd and the current of Trotskyism represented by the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International have come under attack from more orthodox Trotskyists for the strategy they have advanced of entering the "new social movements"; in particular, for seeing reform and revolution as a false dichotomy, and proposing the formation of "broad parties," rather than forming parties of the traditional Leninist type. In one such critique, Luke Cooper criticised Bensaïd for arguing that—in certain specific circumstances—it maybe permissible to enter a capitalist government, and seek to use the existing state as an instrument of revolutionary transformation.Daniel Bensaïd and the “Return of Strategy” Bensaïd also debated revolutionary strategy with other Fourth International members, and the British Socialist Workers Party's International Secretary Alex Callinicos."Hegemony and the United Front"; "The Return of Strategy".
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He joined the exodus of Trotskyists that left the RWL in the early 1980s and focused instead on working within what had become the Canadian Auto Workers union. He freelanced in the CAW's education department where he helped develop the union's political education program for workers and taught Marxist Economics in the CAW's Port Elgin, Ontario education centre. When asked what political party he belonged to, he'd joke he was a member of the "Joe Flexer Communist Party, we have a very small membership but a very lively internal discussion". He joined the Communist Party of Canada while it was in crisis due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and helped organize the split that saw Flexer and much of the CPC's leadership leave to form the Cecil-Ross Society.
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In that year he and other Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party en masse as part of the so- called "French Turn" tactic, a brief interlude ending with their expulsion late in 1937. In 1938, Abern helped found the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he was on the National Committee of that organization from 1938 until 1940. The April 1940 convention of the SWP instructed the National Committee of the party to take disciplinary action against Abern, Shachtman, James Burnham, and their factional supporters if that group failed to abide by the decisions of the convention. In accordance with these instructions, the National Committee suspended Burnham, Shachtman, and Abern at its meeting of April 22, 1940, giving the members of this so-called "petty-bourgeois opposition" an opportunity to recant and return to the party.
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It was only a sharp intervention by the ILO in 1933 that ended the fight. Although the line-up of opponents largely anticipated Shachtman's 1940 split from the mainstream Trotskyists, the years from 1933 to 1938 restored the co-operation between Cannon and Shachtman. In 1933, in an internal party document entitled "Communism and the Negro Question," Shachtman dissented from Trotsky's view that Black self-determination was a transitional demand for recruiting Black workers in the United States to a socialist program, a position that was later more fully developed by C.L.R. James. His views, later published by Verso as Race and Revolution in 2003, launched the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism within the U.S. Marxist movement, later to be further developed by Daniel Guérin, Richard S. Fraser, and James Robertson.
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This turned out to be the prelude to a period of purges in East Germany that recalled events in Moscow during the later 1930s. The targets in East Germany were (again) identified as "Trotskyists" and "anglo-american agents". Marie Weiterer's work for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee in the south of France and later in Paris had always been undertaken with the full agreement of the leadership of the exiled German Communist party, but in the new spirit of the age it was nevertheless now characterised by the East German authorities as amounting to espionage activity undertaken in the service of Noel Field. On 1 September 1950 the party Central Committee published the text of a resolution dated 24 August 1950 (identified as the "Field resolution") which excluded various senior party officers from party membership.
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Deane was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1956 and was appointed as its first General Secretary. Deane was to go on several international missions of behalf of the International during this period including going to Morocco to help the Algerian FLN break through the electrified Algerian/Moroccan border as well as attempting to unite Indian Trotskyists in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras into a single all-India organisation. After attempting to bring about an unsuccessful fusion between the RSL and the International Group as well as joint work with the International Socialists in the magazine Young Guard, Jimmy Deane suggested Peter Taaffe as his successor as General Secretary and editor of the soon to be launched Militant newspaper. He left Britain for India in 1965 and subsequently spent a few years in Fiji.
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Presidential elections against the Workers' Party With the imminent collapse of the military dictatorship in the early 1980s, a group of left-wing intellectuals were mobilized to create a leftist party. Some of them attempted to work with the labour movement led by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but the group split over ideological grounds. A group of democratic socialists and Trotskyists joined the labour movement and founded the Workers' Party (PT) while the social democrats remained in the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) and would later create the Brazilian Social Democracy Party. Founded on 25 June 1988 by members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) linked to the European social democratic movement as an attempt to clarify their ideals, its manifesto preached "democracy as a fundamental value" and "social justice as an aim to be reached".
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An SWP member edited the Northwest Organizer, the weekly newspaper of the Minneapolis Teamsters, and the local union remained militant even as the national union grew more conservative. The CPUSA supported the trial and conviction of Trotskyists under the Smith Act. The defendants were accused of having plotted to overthrow the U.S. government in violation of the newly passed Smith Act and of the Sedition Act of 1861, to enforce which, according to Wallace MG as at March 1920, it seems no serious previous attempt had ever been made. When critics argued that the government should adhere to the doctrine enunciated by Justice Holmes that free speech could only be prosecuted if it presented "a clear and present danger", Attorney General Biddle replied that Congress had considered both that standard and the international situation when writing the Smith Act's proscriptions.
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The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Kenneth Newman, told reporters that groups of Trotskyists and anarchists had orchestrated the violence, a theme picked up by the Daily Telegraph and others. Falling for a story from media hoaxer Rocky Ryan, the Daily Express reported on 8 October 1985 that a "Moscow-trained hit squad gave orders as mob hacked PC Blakelock to death", alleging that "crazed left-wing extremists" trained in Moscow and Libya had coordinated the riots. There was also internal pressure on detectives from the rank and file, who saw their superior officers as sharing the blame for Blakelock's death. The Police Federation's journal, Police, argued that senior officers had pursued a policy at Broadwater Farm of avoiding confrontation at all costs, and that "community policing" had led to compromises with criminals, rather than a focus on upholding the law.
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The French Turn remained a lasting issue of debate between Trotsky's often-divided followers after World War II. Some believed that the French Turn was a success, and they promoted the idea that entryism should be continued. The main advocates of this view in the 1950s and 1960s were Michel Pablo, secretary of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, and Gerry Healy, secretary of the International Committee of the Fourth International, which both supported entrism. Pablo developed a special type of the turn which involved working underground in the Communist Parties: this was strongly opposed by the ICFI. Others in the Trotskyist movement have who believed the French Turn to be either a failure or unprincipled and advocated the independence of Trotskyists from social-democratic and communist parties: Hugo Oehler developed this view at the time of the French Turn.
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Although there were no mass entries at this time, several radical oppositionists did make their way into the party, including former Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow, youth leader and ex- Jay Lovestone supporter Herbert Zam and attorney and American Workers Party activist Albert Goldman. Goldman at this time also joined with YPSL leader Ernest Erber to establish a newspaper in Chicago with a Trotskyist orientation, The Socialist Appeal, later to serve as the organ of the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Party.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pg. 113. In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard for their factional organization and alleged "violation of party discipline", James Cannon and his faction won their internal battle in the Workers Party to join the Socialist Party, when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry.
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However, he found support from the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, participated in the group Socialismo y Libertad, and co-authored Los problemas del socialismo en nuestro tiempo with Marceau Pivert and Julián Gorkin. After the United States and the Soviet Union became temporary allies in 1942, criticism of Serge spread to the American press, and though he had staunch defenders there, his ability to defend himself was limited by the fact that he was still distrusted by many Trotskyists. Serge and his allies in Mexico were also victims of several assassination attempts by the GPU and Mexican Stalinists. As Serge became increasingly unable to publish articles, he continued to write novels, including The Long Dusk, concerning the fall of France to the Nazis, and The Case of Comrade Tulayev, about the Stalinist purges (starting with the killing of Sergei Kirov).
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The rapid collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the looming reunification of Germany triggered a major crisis within the German Left. The Anti-German tendency first developed in a discussion group known as the Radical Left, which consisted of elements of the German Green Party, Trotskyists, members of the Communist League (Kommunistischer Bund), the journal konkret, and members of Autonome, Libertarian and Anarchist groups, who rejected plans by other segments of Leftist political organisations to join a governing coalition. This circle adopted a position developed by the Kommunistischer Bund, a decidedly pessimistic analysis with regard to the potential for revolutionary change in Germany. Known as the "Fascisation" analysis, this theory held that due to the particularity of German history and development, the endemic crisis of capitalism would lead to a move towards the far right and to a new Fascism.
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During the 1930s, as a left-wing journalist, Stone criticized Joseph Stalin's brutal consolidation of power in the Soviet Union in an editorial for the New York Post (December 7, 1934) that denounced and likened Stalin's purge and execution of Soviet citizens to the political purges and executions occurring in Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and stated that Stalin's régime in Russia had adopted the tactics of "Fascist thugs and racketeers." As the sham justice of the Moscow Trials (1936–1938) proceeded, Stone attacked Stalin's action as heralding a new Thermidor, which was the time of counterrevolution and reaction against the French Revolution (1789–1799). Stone also criticized Lenin and Trotsky for their "cruel and bloody ruthlessness" in brutally murdering the Romanov family. He scolded the US Trotskyists for believing that Trotsky would have been less repressive than Stalin.
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Kagan's left-wing political leanings were heavily influenced by the circumstances of his early life and upbringing: witnessing the Russian Revolution and its aftermath during the late 1910s, his family's expulsion from Russia in the 1920s, and the discrimination of Nazi regime in Berlin in the 1930s. As a teenager, Kagan read the works of Leon Trotsky and subsequently embraced socialist thinking. After settling in Australia, Kagan became associated with the Sydney-based Balmain Trotskyists, led by Nick Origlass, and would remain a member of the Australian Labor Party for the rest of his life. To honour his contribution and dedication in the party, he was awarded life membership of ALP in 1994 and, after his death, his family received personal message of condolence from three one-time Labour Prime Ministers: Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Bob Hawke.
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For Bordiga, both stages of socialist or communist society—with stages referring to historical materialism—were characterised by the gradual absence of money, the market and so on, the difference between them being that earlier in the first stage a system of rationing would be used to allocate goods to people while in communism this could be abandoned in favour of full free access. This view distinguished Bordiga from other Leninists and especially the Trotskyists, who tended and still tend to telescope the first two stages and so have money and the other exchange categories surviving into socialism, but Bordiga would have none of this. For him, no society in which money, buying and selling and the rest survived could be regarded as either socialist or communist—these exchange categories would die out before the socialist rather than the communist stage was reached.
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In 1972, several members of Hong Kong's youth made an expensive trip to Paris to meet with exiled Chinese Trotskyists including Peng Shuzhi. Several of the returnees such as John Shum and Ng Chung-yin left the 70's Biweekly, which was at the time dominated by anarchists, and established a Trotskyist youth group called the Revolutionary International League, after meeting with Peng Shuzhi in Paris. It later took the name "Socialist League", and soon after changed its name into the Revolutionary Marxist League, which became the Chinese section of the Fourth International in 1975. Famous members of the group include Leung Kwok-hung, who formed the April Fifth Action after the league was disbanded in 1990, and Leung Yiu-chung of the Neighbourhood and Worker's Service Centre, who both became members of the Legislative Council in the 1990s and 2000s.
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The Anti-Defamation League wrote that despite both sides claiming success, it is "the white supremacists who most benefit from the free publicity" generated by the violence. Genevieve Leigh, writing for the Trotskyists World Socialist Web Site, denounced the violence by counter-protesters. Leigh wrote that violence by small groups does not address the fundamental structural problems of a capitalist society and "ultimately play in the hands of the state." On June 30, representatives and community leaders across Sacramento held a unity conference at the Capitol to denounce the violence on Sunday. Darrell Steinberg, the mayor of Sacramento, said “what happened here on Sunday is the opposite of what Sacramento is about.” Richard Pan, a Senator for Sacramento’s 6th District, said ”Many people come here to articulate different views and it’s important people have the ability to do so but violence is not the answer to addressing those issues.
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With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc following the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 as well as the push for democratization, many Arab states have moved toward a model of fiscal discipline proposed by the Washington Consensus. Although authoritarian leaders of those states implemented democratic institutions during the 1980s and 1990s, their multi-party elections created an arena in which business elites could lobby for personal interests while largely silencing the lower class. Economic liberalisation in these regions yielded economies that led to regimes built on the support of rent-seeking urban elites, with political opposition inviting the prospect of political marginalisation and even retaliation. While some Trotskyists such as the Committee for a Workers' International have included countries such as Syria at times when they have had a nationalized economy as deformed workers' states,Grant, Ted (1978).
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The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938 against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There were three Moscow Trials, including: # the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center (Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial, or the "Trial of the Sixteen;" 1936); # the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center (Pyatakov-Radek Trial; 1937); and # the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" (Bukharin-Rykov Trial, or "Trial of the Twenty-One;" 1938). The defendants of these were Old Bolshevik party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the Western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism.
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The grouping's founding statement was an open letter of the National Committee of the SWP which outlined the disputes it had with Pablo's faction within the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. It reiterated what it saw as the basic principles of Trotskyism and described the direction of the "Pabloite" faction as "revisionist", claiming that this threatened the survival of the Fourth International, the liquidation of the Trotskyist program and definite steps taken towards its organisational liquidation. As an example, the letter explained that Pablo expelled a majority of the French section of the International, because they disagreed with the International's policy of working within the Stalinist Communist Party of France. This policy was described as one of entrism sui generis, entryism of a special kind, in which the Trotskyists were to join the Stalinist or Socialist mass parties with a long term perspective of working within them.
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The 1987 IUSY Festival was organised by the International Union of Socialist Youth in Valencia, Spain in July of that year. The theme of the festival was the power of solidarity and notable events included speeches by the FSLN from Nicaragua and a tentative (and rather hostile) discussion between the Israeli Labor Party Youth and the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), the exile student wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Other events of note included a row between the Trotskyists of the RSL/Militant Tendency dominated Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) and the festival organisers (the British Labour Party's student wing, the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS) sided with the organisers in trying to keep the LPYS delegation - led by Tommy Sheridan - out). During the festival a place in Valencia was renamed to Plaza Olof Palme in the presence of Willy Brandt chairman of the Socialist International.
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Protest against the Iraq War and George W. Bush in 2008 State capitalism and deflected permanent revolution came to be seen as central to a distinct IS politics by the mid-1960s along with the theory of the permanent arms economy (PAE) which sought to explain the long boom in the global economy after the Second World War. This boom was in contrast to the period after the First World War when a period of stagnation occurred. The three theories taken together are often seen as being the hallmarks of the IS tradition, although this is contested by some former leaders of the IS, including Nigel Harris and Michael Kidron both of whom worked on the PAE and now repudiate it, and by some other Trotskyists outside the IS Tradition. The PAE, the most contested of the three theories, is also the only one that did not originate with Tony Cliff.
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The group who were later to start Offensiv were students at Umeå University and members of Swedish Social Democratic Youth League (SSU, Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Ungdomsförbund: the youth organisation of the Swedish Social Democratic Party). At the 1972 SSU conference, two members of this group; Anders Hjelm and Arne Johansson; met representatives of the Labour Party Young Socialists in Britain, where supporters of the left wing Militant had won control of that organisation, and began discussing with them. As Arne Johansson puts it "One conclusion of the discussions with the British Trotskyists was that we should start publishing a paper as a rallying point for a Marxist left within the labour movement, something we then did ahead of the election in 1973".CWI 30th Anniversary - The Swedish Perspective - Retrieved 24/08/07 In the early 1980s SSU initiated expulsions against young socialists associated with Arbetarförbundet Offensiv and their newspaper, named Offensiv.
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In 1952, the RWP ceased its public activities, including the publication of Labour Challenge, and its members began to practice entrism in the CCF. During this period the group had no formal name but was known to members as The Club (Trotskyists in Britain practicing entrism during this period were also known as "The Club"). The next year, the section split reflecting the international split in the Fourth International between the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI). The majority of the RWP, including Ross Dowson, backed James P. Cannon and the International Committee, while a minority, including Dowson's brother Murray and his brother-in-law Joe Rosenthal led a split from the Canadian section to form the Committee for the Socialist Regroupment of Canada in sympathy with Bert Cochran's split from the American SWP, siding with Pablo and the International Secretariat.
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The League was founded in the background of the political changes in the early 1970s when the Cultural Revolution and Lin Biao Incident heavily discredited the Communist Party of China, as well as the emergence of the social movements in Hong Kong at the same time. International Trotskyism 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement, Robert Jackson Alexander, Duke University Press, 1991, pages 217–220 After a student movement broke out at the Chu Hai College in 1969, the student activists published a periodical called Seventies Biweekly which became the platform of the radical youths. Until in 1972, few of the Hong Kong youths made an expensive trip to Paris to meet with the exiled Chinese Trotskyists. Few of the returnees such as John Shum and Ng Chung-yin left the Seventies Biweekly dominated by anarchists, and established a Trotskyist youth group called Revolutionary International League.
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In the common program set up by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in 1949, in effect the country's interim constitution, state capitalism meant an economic system of corporatism. It provided as follows: "Whenever necessary and possible, private capital shall be encouraged to develop in the direction of state capitalism". From 1956 to the late 1970s, the Communist Party of China and their Maoist or anti- revisionist adherents around the world often described the Soviet Union as state capitalist, essentially using the accepted Marxist definition, albeit on a different basis and in reference to a different span of time from either the Trotskyists or the left-communists. Specifically, the Maoists and their descendants use the term state capitalism as part of their description of the style and politics of Nikita Khrushchev and his successors as well as to similar leaders and policies in other self-styled "socialist" states.
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Myers, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977; p. 113. Negotiations commenced between the Workers Party and Socialist leaderships, with the decision ultimately made to allow admissions only on the basis of individual applications for membership rather than en masse admission of the entire group.Myers, The Prophet's Army, pp. 113–114. On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party".Myers, The Prophet's Army, p. 115. Approximately half of the Workers Party heeded the call and entered the Socialist Party.Myers cites "about 2,000" members for the Workers Party of the US in 1935 (p. 114) and indicates they entered with "about 1,000" (p. 140) and exited in 1937 with "1,000 added to their number" (pg. 140). Myers, The Prophet's Army.
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Any thought of common-cause with the Communists was now dismissed by Thomas, who indicated that the Communists' fairly recent change of line from fighting the existing trade unions and damning of all political opponents as "social fascists" to attempting to build a "popular front" was merely tactical, related to the perceived needs of Soviet foreign policy in building coalitions with capitalist countries to forestall fascist invasion.Thomas, Democracy versus Dictatorship, pp. 19–20. The factional havoc of the move to the "all- inclusive party" paralyzed activity while the Old Guard's new group, the Social Democratic Federation of America, controlled the bulk of the Socialist Party's former property and the allegiance of those best able to fund the organization. The expulsions of the Trotskyists and disintegration of the party's youth section left the organization greatly weakened and gasping for life, its membership level at a new low.
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The Old Parliament Building in Colombo, where the House of Representatives met beginning in 1947 In May 1960, Bandaranaike was unanimously elected party president by the executive committee of the Freedom Party, although at the time she was still undecided about running in the July election. Disavowing former party ties with Communists and Trotskyists, by early June she was campaigning with promises to carry forward the policies of her husband – in particular, establishing a republic, enacting a law to establish Sinhala as the official language of the country, and recognising the predominance of Buddhism, though tolerating the estate Tamils use of their own language and Hindu faith. Though there had been Tamil populations in the country for centuries, the majority of the estate Tamils had been brought to Ceylon from India by the British authorities as plantation workers. Many Ceylonese viewed them as temporary immigrants, even though they had lived for generations in Ceylon.
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14 No. 3, December 2003 (accessed 2008-05-29) He writes in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates such as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo, whom he cites in Ecology of Fear. His early book, Prisoners of the American Dream, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U.S. history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism, as Davis, like Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman, Richard S. Fraser, James Robertson, as well as French anarchist Daniel Guérin, argued that the struggle of blacks in the U.S. was for equality, that this struggle was an explosive contradiction fundamental to the U.S. bourgeois republic, that only socialism could bring it about, and that its momentum would someday be a powerful contribution to a socialist revolution in the U.S. Davis is also the author of two fiction books for young adults: Land of The Lost Mammoths and Pirates, Bats and Dragons.
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Due to a physical altercation between a leading member of the WIL, then in Torrance's WRP, with a leading member of the Workers Press faction of the WRP during the 1986 printers' dispute in Wapping, east London, there was great hostility between the two groups, which did not help in its fledgling steps into the wider labour movement. Even so, two years after its formation, the WIL had recruited Bob Pitt, who was originally a supporter of the Workers Press faction of the WRP. The League also began to have discussions with other small groups, particularly Workers Power and the Revolutionary Internationalist League, and though these discussions did not amount to a merger of these groups, they did help the organisation to mature politically. In March 1991, the WIL fused with the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency of Belgium and Germany and a group of South African Trotskyists to form the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency (LTT).
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"Working individual peasants and collective farmers" who stole kolkhoz property and grain should be sentenced to ten years; the death penalty should be imposed only for "systematic theft of grain, sugar beets, animals, etc." Soviet expectations for the 1932 grain crop were high because of Ukraine's bumper crop the previous year, which Soviet authorities believed were sustainable. When it became clear that the 1932 grain deliveries were not going to meet the expectations of the government, the decreased agricultural output was blamed on the kulaks, and later to agents and spies of foreign Intelligence Services--"nationalists", "Petlurovites", and from 1937 on, Trotskyists. According to a report by the head of the Supreme Court, by January 15, 1933, as many as 103,000 people (more than 14,000 in the Ukrainian SSR) had been sentenced under the provisions of the August 7 decree. Of the 79,000 whose sentences were known to the Supreme Court, 4,880 had been sentenced to death, 26,086 to ten years' imprisonment, and 48,094 to other sentences.
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The treaty later attracted controversy with opponents alleging it to be one-sided: a British request to the USA needed to provide a prima facie case against a suspect while a US request to Britain needed only to provide reasonable suspicion for an arrest. There have been a series of causes célèbres involving the treaty, including the NatWest Three who later pleaded guilty to fraud against the US parent company of their employers, and Gary McKinnon who admitted hacking US defence computers. An inquiry into extradition arrangements by retired Judge Sir Scott Baker reported in September 2011 that the treaty was not unbalanced and "there is no practical difference between the information submitted to and from the United States". In a letter to The Independent in 2004, he claimed that Trotskyists "can usually now be found in the City, appearing on quiz shows or ranting in certain national newspapers," and recommended "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin.
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Arguments put forward by some of these groups included the idea that the mobilizations and political space created by smashing the Stalinist bureaucracy could bring about the ability of the working class to carry out the political revolution as a step towards creating a truly democratic and egalitarian socialist society. Most Trotskyists hold on to the historic position of Leon Trotsky in advocating only Political Revolution against Stalinism while also standing for the defense of the deformed and degenerated workers' states from imperialism and internal capitalist counter-revolution. They argue that their position has been proven correct by the drop of the standard of living of the people of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe including the lack of medical care and jobs. Internationally they point to the strengthened hand of U.S. Imperialism with the fall of the Soviet Union as a major cause of war, including the Anglo-American war in Iraq.
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The Maoist-dominated Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) passed a resolution titled "Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend" on May 3, 1976, condemning the Tiananmen protesters as "anti-socialists" and "subversives". Howewer, the resolution faced stiff opposition from the Trotskyists, who issued a statement in a left-wing periodical titled October Review, condemning the Chinese Communist Party and calling for an uprising of the Chinese workers and peasants to topple the CCP's regime. By the end of 1976, the death of Mao Zedong which was followed by the arrest and downfall of the Gang of Four severely demoralised the Maoists in Hong Kong and damaged their formerly unshakeably idealistic belief in Marxist–Leninist socialism. The official verdict of the Tiananmen Incident was also reversed after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, as it would later be officially hailed as a display of patriotism, which further diminished the prestige of the Maoists, eventually wiping out their influence from Hong Kong's left-wing movements.
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On this basis we must pull the Social Democratic > workers along with us by our example, and criticize their leaders who will > inevitably serve as a check and a break.. In Chinese history, during the First United Front (1924–1927) was the Communist Party of China worked closely with the nationalist Kuomintang. The Chinese organized a Second United Front (1937–1943) to fight the Japanese during World War II. Currently, the United Front Work Department manages relations between the Communist Party of China and other parties, such as the pro-Beijing parties in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and overseas. In Vietnam, the Vietcong organized the National Liberation Front (1960–1977) to gather widespread support for the independence struggle, first against France and then against the United States during the Vietnam War. Trotsky and Trotskyists, such as Harold Isaacs in his The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, would argue that they were popular fronts, not united fronts, that were based upon the model used by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and later.
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The Militants swept to majority control of the party's governing National Executive Committee at this gathering, and the Old Guard retreated to their New York fortress and formalized their factional organization as the Committee for the Preservation of the Socialist Party, complete with a shadow Provisional Executive Committee and an office in New York City. Thomas favored work to establish a broad Farmer–Labor Party upon the model of the Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation,Johnpoll, Pacifist's Progress, pp. 138–39. but remained supportive of the Militants and their vision of an "all-inclusive party", which welcomed members of dissident communist organizations (including Lovestoneites and Trotskyists) and worked together with the Communist Party USA in joint Popular Front activities. The party descended into a maelstrom of factionalism in the interval, with the New York Old Guard leaving to establish themselves as the Social Democratic Federation of America, taking with them control of party property, such as the Yiddish-language The Jewish Daily Forward, the English- language New Leader, the Rand School of Social Science, and the party's summer camp in Pennsylvania.
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In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin launched a campaign to bring Soviet artists to heel, and compel them all to observe the rules of 'socialist realism', which precluded avant-garde art and experimentation, and any art form reckoned to be 'formalist', in that the artist had paid more attention to the form of a work than to its political message. After Shostakovich had been singled out as being guilty of 'formalism', in January 1936, Meyerhold evidently surmised that he would soon be a target, and in March delivered a talk entitled "Meyer Against Meyerholdism" in which he said - reportedly to 'thunderous applause' - that "the path to simplicity is not an easy one. Each artist goes at his own pace, and they must not lose their distinctive way of walking...Soviet subject matter is often a smoke screen to conceal mediocrity." A year later, in April 1937, his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, wrote Stalin a long letter alleging that her husband was the victim of a conspiracy by Trotskyists and former members of the disbanded Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.
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By the early 1970s, there was a growing conflict between the original activists of the Family Squatting Movement and a newer wave of squatters who simply rejected the right of landlords to charge rent and who believed (or claimed to) that seizing property and living rent-free was a revolutionary political act or more practically decided it was a good way to save money. These new-wave squatters (often young and single rather than homeless families) were a mixture of anarchists, Trotskyists—the International Marxist Group (IMG) being especially prominent—and self-proclaimed hippie dropouts, and they denounced the idea that squatters should seek to make agreements with local Councils to use empty property and that Squatting Associations should then become landlords (or Self Help Housing Associations as they were sometimes styled) in their own right and charge rent. The Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS) continued the work of the Family Squatting Advisory Service, running a volunteer service helping squatters. ASS has been in continuous existence for almost forty years.
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In 1935 and 1936, the KPP undertook a formation of a unified worker and peasant front in Poland and was then subjected to further persecutions by the Comintern, which also arbitrarily accused the Polish communists of harboring Trotskyists elements in their ranks. The apogee of the Moscow-held prosecutions, aimed at eradicating the various "deviations" and ending usually in death sentences, took place in 1937–38, with the last executions carried out in 1940. KPP members were persecuted and often imprisoned by the Polish Sanation regime, which turned out to likely save the lives of a number of future Polish communist leaders, including Bolesław Bierut, Władysław Gomułka, Alfred Lampe, Edward Ochab, Stefan Jędrychowski and Aleksander Zawadzki (among former KPP members transferred during World War II from the Soviet Union to Poland for conspiratorial work were Mieczysław Moczar and Marian Spychalski). During the Great Purge, seventy members and candidate members of the party's Central Committee fled or were brought to the Soviet Union and were shot there, along with many other activists (almost all prominent Polish communists were murdered or sent to labor camps).
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