November 7th is the 90th anniversary of the birth of Leon Trotsky, organiser of the Red Army and founder of the Fourth International, It is also the 52nd anniversary of the great Russian Revolution, It is a fortunate whim of history that these two dates coincide,
The October (November new style calendar) Revolution was, no doubt, the greatest event in man's history. It tore one-sixth of the surface of the world out of the grip of capital, It began the process of world revolution.
Trotsky's role in both these events was crucial, He was second only to Lenin in the Russian Revolution and was the principal standard bearer in the struggle to keep the ideas of world revolution alive after the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union,
Today, thirty-odd years after the Moscow trials which were to have destroyed Trotskyism, the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union still finds it necessary to issue books combatting Trotsky's ideas, Leading Soviet intellectuals have to admit, that Trotsky's ideas have greater appeal to the youth in the west than those of the official communist parties.
Why is this so?
The ideas in men's heads always reflect and are conditioned by a living reality, Trotskyism is Marxism in our time, It represents the striving of mankind to get out of the impasse capitalism has created, It is essentially the ideology of the only class which can carry out the historical mission of destroying capitalism before capitalism destroys mankind, In a word it is the ideology of world proletarian revolution,
All other systems which have claimed to provide this ideology have been put to the test and found wanting. No other ideology can explain, without throwing socialism out of the window, what went wrong in the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin, No other set of ideas can get to grips with the problems of revolution today, in fact most other tendencies have given up the idea of revolution just at the moment when society is most pregnant with it,
Sometimes, when they can find no other flaw, Trotskyism's opponents point to the fragmentation of the Trotskyist movement as proof of its lack of viability. We regret very [illegible] that the movement is fragmented but reject this argument completely. This fragmentation (which tends to be much exaggerated anyway) is due to the difficulties in building a movement in face of attempts by various forces to keep Trotskyism isolated. It also reflects the great difficulties of the present era and the huge organisational and theoretical problems which face the revolutionary movement, Other movements which have tried to build an alternative to the official communist and social democratic movements are much more fragmented than the Trotskyists, One has only to look at the numerous Maoist and Anarchist organisations, for instance, Now the "official" communist movement is starting to split up.
In an ironic way, some of the fragmentation in the Trotskyist movement is a tribute to the strength of Trotskyist ideas, The fact that there are contenders for the mantle of Trotskyism is proof of the political capital there is in being seen as the continuers of Trotsky's ideas, This is because many of the essential ideas of Trotskyism have been vindicated by history.
However, we must say that for us the ending of divisions in the movement and continuing the process of unification of revolutionary forces started by the re-unification conference of the Fourth International in 1963 is a vital task.
Next year will be the [illegible] anniversary of the assassination of Trotsky, Stalin thought that the assassin's ice-pick would end the threat to the rule of his bureaucracy - how wrong he was, Today a new generation of young communists in the workers states is taking up Trotsky's ideas.
Had Trotsky been alive today he would have been an old man but his spirit would have been young as he saw his ideas grasped by wider and wider sections of the youth, Well might the bureaucrats of Moscow, Peking, Prague and Transport House fear this influence.
The world today cries out for proletarian revolution; capitalism can solve none of the problems facing mankind, the only perspective it offers is of starvation, greater and greater repression and an eventual nuclear war, Without in any way denying the heroism and devotion of other revolutionary currents, we say that only the heritage Trotsky left us in the form of his analysis of the Soviet union, his theory of permanent revolution and - above all — his writings on the creation of a world revolutionary party, begins to get to grips with the problems of revolution today,
In this sense Trotsky lives on.