The Legacy of Trotskyism

Mike Macnair, Communist Party of Great Britain (Oxford Univ. St. Hugh College)
Bryan Palmer (Trent University)
Richard Rubin, Platypus
Jason Wright, representative of the International Bolshevik Tendency
representative of the International Socialist Organization (Declined to attend)

What is the relevance of Trotskyism for the Left today? One the one hand, there is a simple answer: The mantle of Trotskyism is claimed by many of today's most prominent and numerous Leftist parties in America and Europe (and beyond). In America, there is the International Socialist Organization; in Britain it is the Socialist Workers Party; and in France the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste also has its origins in Trotskyism. Evidently, the collapse of Stalinism in 1989 left Trotskyism's bona fides, as anti-Stalinist Marxism, intact. On the other hand, Trotskyism has been infamously associated on the Left with sectarianism -- and martyrdom, not least in the circumstances of the murder of Trotsky himself in 1940. Certainly, the ISO, SWP and NPA long ago made their peace in crucial ways with the politics of the post-Marxist New Left -- a revisionism that their sectarian brethren (for instance, Trotskyism's bete noire, the Spartacist League) have proudly and doggedly opposed. However, despite their differences, all varieties of Trotskyism today evince the conditions of the New Left's "return to Marxism" in the 1970s, for which the legacy of Trotsky provided one significant vehicle (the other being Maoism). For instance Trotsky's biographer, Isaac Deutscher, strongly influenced the journal, the New Left Review, still a flagship of the Left today. And yet there is something peculiar about this legacy. As one Platypus writer has suggested, Trotsky is as out of place in the post-WWII world as Voltaire or Rousseau would have been in the world after the French Revolution. Trotsky, unlike Trotskyism, exemplifies the classical Marxism of the early 20th century, and that tradition certainly died with him. Thus, before we can understand how Trotskyism's legacy has influenced the Marxism of our time, we must first answer the question: What has Trotskyism made of Trotsky's Marxism?

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