A derogatory name given by stalinism to the Left Opposition in Russia, the current that led the resistance to the counter-revolutionary drift of the Bolshevik party until 1928 and that, from that date onwards, brought together the great majority of the International Communist Left. Stalinism later applied it to the whole Communist Left and its offshoots, regardless of their political content and of whether they are inside or outside the class terrain.
Origins of the term
For stalinism, the inventor of the term "trotskyism", the whole Communist Left will therefore be "trotskyist". The internationalists accepted the term at the time, not without a touch of irony. The brutality of the persecution and mass murder, under the charge of being "trotskyists", of the militants and leaders of the Russian communist party of October made the name an emblem. However, some national tendencies of the communist left, those that did not join the International Left Opposition to stalinism, disowned the term.
Even after the abandonment of internationalism by the structure and the largest sections of the Fourth International during the Second World War, the internationalists within it, who once again had to form a left fraction and finally break with the international organization, continued to make the name their own.
I formally broke with the Fourth International in 1948 -as Natalia Sedova-Trotsky did later- but that will not prevent me from raising my hand as a trotskyist in the face of the police slanderers of Moscow or Beijing.
From "trotskyism" to "trotsko-stalinism" after 1948
In reality, what remained in the failed Fourth International after the split at the Second Congress can hardly claim continuity either with Trotsky or with the organization he built to rally the vanguard of the class, in the course of the approaching world war, under the banners of revolutionary defeatism. Because what remained were precisely the sections that had supported, in one form or another, recruitment into the European national "resistances".
The organization that went on calling itself the Fourth International and claiming to be trotskyist soon took a course that rapidly turned it into a satellite of stalinism. After asserting that the statified economy was socialism, they would assert that Russian imperialist expansion had created "workers' states", albeit with "bureaucratic degenerations", to which the principle of "unconditional defense", until then applied to Russian state capitalism, should be extended.
In 1953, the Third Congress declared that the bourgeoisie-proletariat contradiction had been superseded by the US-USSR contradiction and that in the event of war the Soviet armies would be forced to be revolutionary. Trotskyism split in two. It would be temporarily reunified under the effect of Castro's triumph, only to break up again afterwards into dozens of new groups. And yet a series of common elements would remain, exacerbating the obsolete elements of the "transitional program" written by Trotsky for the Fourth International.
The result is trotsko-stalinism, "trotskyism" in the sense commonly used today: a "democratic" and "leftist" squire of stalinism, defender of state capitalism as "socialism with bureaucratic excrescences", in some cases even extending that definition to today's Russia. A position completed by the defense, on principle, of democracy in the abstract -not the "islands of workers' democracy" of Trotsky's formula- and of national liberation, the perfect excuse to betray internationalism at the slightest opportunity, from the Falklands War to the massacres in Syria.
However, the fact that they are commonly called "trotskyists" means neither more nor less than the fact that the stalinists are called "communists", the social-patriots of 1914 "socialists", or that the most degenerate anarchism uses the acronym IWA as if it represented the continuity of the First International. The great defeats of the proletariat made Humanity lose precious time and hundreds of millions of lives. That the common meaning of a few names once wielded by the revolutionary generations of the past has been lost should no longer scandalize us.