However, Lenin and Trotsky differed from the Mensheviks (minority members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour movement) who believed that the task of the working class was to play second fiddle to the so-called liberal capitalists.
TROTSKY MODELS FREE
Last but not least, the completion of this revolution would free the economy from the domination of imperialism, particularly of Anglo-French imperialism which saw Russia as a virtual colony.Īll trends of opinion within the Russian workers’ movement saw as the main task the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. It also involved the introduction of democracy, the right to vote, the election of a democratic parliament, a free press, and trade union rights for the working class. The main tasks of this revolution were the elimination of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the land, unification of the country, and the solution of the national question. Russia had not completed the capitalist democratic revolution as had England, for instance, in the 16th century, and France in the 18th century. Like India today, the majority of the population were peasants who eked out an existence on narrow parcels of land while the urban working class had no rights and were ruthlessly exploited in rapidly developing industry. Russia prior to 1917 was a feudal or semi-feudal system which meant virtual slavery for the population.
Take Trotsky’s famous theory of the permanent revolution, which brilliantly anticipated the class forces involved in the outcome of the Russian revolution. His ideas, his method of analysis, and the conclusions drawn from this, are as relevant today as in the past. If Karl Marx was the man of the millennium, then Leon Trotsky was undoubtedly, with Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Rosa Luxemburg, also one of the greatest figures of the millennium, and certainly of the 20th century. He then created and led the Red Army which defeated the twenty-one counter-revolutionary armies of imperialism that attempted to crush the revolution.īut above all, Leon Trotsky was one of the greatest theoreticians of the workers’ movement.
In 1917 he was the organiser of the October Russian revolution, the greatest single event in human history. He was the chairman of the first ever soviet – committee of workers’ representatives – in the first Russian revolution between 1905-1906. Just to list Trotsky’s ‘practical achievements’ would in itself justify commemorating this anniversary. This brain – in a sense, the brain of the working class at that stage – would no longer illuminate and clarify the problems confronting working class movements internationally. It was not just the Trotskyists who felt the terrible blow of his death but the working class and labour movement of the whole world. Sixty years ago this August, Stalin’s hit man, Raymond Mercader, murdered the greatest living revolutionary of that time, Leon Trotsky.
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