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Trotskyism – a Century of Failures

By Gwydion M. Williams

The Problem of Political Compromise

Lenin’s Militarised Socialism

Trotsky In The Middle, With Egoism

Making Soviet Democracy Unworkable

Trotsky as an Obstructive Opposition

Further Reading

The Problem of Political Compromise

Trotskyists imagine themselves as leaders of World Revolution, and it is sheer fantasy.  But it means that they confidently oppose and undermine both Democratic Socialism and functional Revolutionary Socialism.  Makes them hostile to two movements that both have had many positive achievements.  

Two movements that would have done better had they agreed that they should not try to disrupt the other in nation-states where each had its own very real achievements.

For Trotskyists, all of these must have been failures.  A foolish or treacherous diversion from something much better.  But since the diverse Trotskyist fragments have zero positive achievements, they paved the way for a confident New Right to put a right-wing spin on the same slur.

Sometimes the same people.  A lot of ex-Trotskyists among the New Right, especially in the USA.  

The New Right also got the leavings of the pro-Moscow crowd: for instance Jon Halliday.  He went smoothly from unconditional praise for North Korea in Korea: The Unknown War to malice against the vast achievements of Chinese Communism.  Co-author with his wife Juan Chang of Mao: The Unknown Story. That book also avoids dealing with the significantly different line they took in their earlier biography of Madame Sun Yat-sen. Madame Sun was Mao’s most notable and significant non-Communist supporter, taking a sensible attitude that no one with power was entirely on her side, but Mao was the best prospect.  I detail later how she may have changed history thanks to this sensible compromising view.

Trotskyists in the West were not and are not the only people rejecting a compromise or a useful advance from a false belief you can do better.  Pro-Moscow Communists did the same and with far more power in the 1970s.  And currently there are many radicals who insist that there can be no pragmatic compromises when it comes to their definitions of Human Rights.  But Trotskyists are the main source.  And this lies in the Deep History of Leninism.

Lenin’s Militarised Socialism

Lenin in 1903 split what was then the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.  His faction became known as Bolsheviks, Majority, because they were a majority of what had been the dominant Iskra faction.  The rest became Mensheviks, Minority, because they still had more in common with Lenin than with other factions within the party.  

Lenin invented what could be called Militarised Socialism.  His term was Democratic Centralism – the Central Committee decided what was allowed.  Only at a Party Congress could this be changed and top leaders replaced.  Members were expected to be committed and to accept party discipline.

Lenin assumed that a violent revolution would be needed to establish proper capitalism and bourgeois values in the backward Tsarist Empire.  This would then gradually undermine tradition and small production.  It would gradually create a large working class that could take power and build socialism a few decades later.  And might even do so by Western-style parliaments, but this was never going to happen until the Tsars had been violently overthrown.

But in 1917, he realised that everything was in chaos.  He was also well aware of the immediate defeats suffered by the three previous waves of European revolutions – early 1830s, late 1840s and early 1870s.  Of a pattern of failure of popular revolutions that had no strong leadership to keep them alive.  That tended to end with the left being slaughtered and a strong right-wing authoritarian leader emerging, though in France the Third Republic got stuck after the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune.  It emerged as a collection of weak leaders who could not decide which of three alternative French dynasties should be restored.

Lenin in 1917 did a deal with Germany, arranging for a sealed train officially outside of German authority to get back to Russia.  Trotsky, incidentally, was less practical.  He took a ship from the USA, still neutral, but overlooked that it would stop in Canada, where he was promptly arrested.  It took protests from liberals and moderate socialists within Russia to get him free, and I don’t suppose he showed them gratitude when he was the boss.

In the deal between Lenin and Imperial Germany neither side supposed they were friends, but each could expect power-political advantages.  And Lenin won massively: but if Imperial Germany had been more modest in the chunks of the former Tsarist Empire they wanted Lenin’s government to give them, they might have taken Paris and probably won the war before vast numbers of US troops arrived.

The Soviet Union might have been something vastly different, milder and more successful, had Imperial Germany understood its own self-interest rather better.  Lenin dispersed the Constituent Assembly, which had given the Bolsheviks 24% and the Social Revolutionaries 40%.  Another 13.7% to a mix of other socialists.  A mere 7.5% to the Constitutional Democrats and other liberal parties, so the claim that Lenin undemocratically denied the Russian people the liberalism they had yearned for is sheer nonsense.  A majority wanted some sort of socialism, but were not clear what.

Lenin had a Bolshevik majority in the Soviets.  Basic democracy that was an inherently better design, and which matched what Marx had praised in the short-lived Paris Commune.  I’ll go into this in a future article.

Incidentally, though there were many people of Jewish origin in the leadership of the Bolsheviks, there were even more among the anti-revolutionary Mensheviks.  And most ordinary Jewish voters were part of the liberal minority.  Some emigrated, including the family of Isaac Asimov.  Also the family of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, who became Alice O’Connor in the USA but wrote under the pen-name Ayn Rand.  Who concealed her Jewish origins, and entirely ignored the plight of Europe’s Jews.

For Russia in 1917, given that there was also a continuing war with Imperial Germany, Lenin was justified in forming a coherent government to negotiate a peace.  Sadly, the best terms he could get were unacceptable to his main allies, the Left Social Revolutionaries.  They staged an armed revolt, and there was little choice except to crush them.  Make a one-party dictatorship that was able to survive and flourish in a disintegrating Europe.  A place where fascism and similar creeds were spreading, and would spread further.

Trotsky In The Middle, With Egoism

The Bolshevik / Menshevik split was at first labelled Hard versus Soft.  And Trotsky was left wandering between them.  He reacted to this by imagining Revolutionary Marxists shoving aside the middle class and going straight to socialism if the Tsarist order broke down.  Yet also denounced Lenin as dictatorial, when Lenin insisted on making a paramilitary organisation that might actually be tough enough to thrive in such chaos.

In the run-up to the October Revolution, most socialists including some of the Bolshevik leaders were content to be left-wing critics of a bad government.  A government based on a parliament elected in 1912 on a highly undemocratic franchise: which continued the war with further disastrous losses.  But meantime ordinary people had elected unofficial and unauthorize councils, known to the wider world as Soviets, though this was merely the Russian word for council.  Still, they had a radical concern with power.  And a Bolshevik majority on several of them agreed to push aside the official government and take command.

Trotsky became a Bolshevik in order to be part of it.  He’d otherwise have been a footnote in history, like other men and women who were notable socialists within the Tsarist Empire, and who found no significant place in what became the Soviet Union.  He had hardly any followers: most people mistrusted him.

Lenin accepted Trotsky as a talented man.  In his Testament, he called him one of the two most talented men in the leadership.  And the other was Stalin: an awkward detail that Trotskyists prefer to ignore.  

Lenin could hold them together, but he died aged 53 as a result of wounds from an assassin from the Left Social Revolutionaries.  After failing to take power, they sent an assassin to remove the most effective socialist leader: a fitting end to the broadly futile tradition of heroic assassinations from which they had come.

Making Soviet Democracy Unworkable

Stalin had built a political machine out of the muddle of early Soviet power.  And he tried to make a collective leadership workable.  First partnered with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and then switching to partnership with Bukharin.  But Bukharin’s efforts to work with a rising class of prosperous farmers proved unworkable, so Stalin took command and forced collectivisation.

All of this was done within the framework of Democratic Centralism that Lenin had defined.  Trotskyists and others could protest at Party Congresses, but were expected to live with that in the hope of convincing their comrades next time round.  But Trotsky was not modest enough to do so.  And while it’s hard to define an exact moment, the year 1925 could qualify:

“1925 was a difficult year for Trotsky. After the Literary Discussion and losing his Red Army posts, he was effectively unemployed through winter and spring.”  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#A_year_in_the_wilderness_(1925)

That’s why I speak of a century of Trotskyist failure.  

Trotsky makes an interesting contrast with Mao, who accepted the authority of China’s Central Committee when they moved in on his Liberated Area.  Stayed silent in public when they lost it with an over-ambitious military strategy.  He talked quietly with other leaders and got given back his military command in 1935.  Proceeded by stages to re-unite the scattered fragments of the Red Army under his growing authority, but kept a lesser man as Party General Secretary till 1943.  Interestingly, the switch from General Secretaries to Mao as dominant Party Chairman happened in March, and Stalin formally dissolved the Comintern a couple of months later.  Mao probably knew it was coming, and that Moscow would not be arguing.

I also think Mao learned stuff from Trotsky, maybe via Madam Sun Yat-sen, who was impressed by Trotsky’s malicious autobiography.  She definitely arranged for left-liberal journalist Edgar Snow to visit Mao in 1936, at his capital of Baoan.  (Not Yennan, which Mao got given as a gift when he later made an alliance with anti-Communist warlords as part of a broad alliance against Japan.) 

Snow did a lot of interviews, but Mao chose rather to give him an entire autobiography: one extending across four chapters of Red Star Over China.  In my study of this I suspected a set-up, and one Snow may have been more involved in than he admits:

“The leader [of a Leninist party] is usually the party’s General Secretary.  In 1938 this was Chang Wen-t’ien (Zhang Wentian), about whom Snow says remarkable little, even though the man spoke fluent English.  This omission interested me – as did the relatively small amount said about Zhou Enlai, who also spoke English fairly well.”  (China: Nurturing Red Stars, https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/china-nurturing-red-stars/.) 

Zhou Enlai – Chou Enlai in older books – was already known, though absurdly misrepresented by André Malraux in La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate).  Among other goofs, the Chinese Communists never did assassinations.  Snow ought to have known of this and might have been expected to correct it.  Instead he focuses his main attention on Mao.

It did a lot to boost Mao’s reputation among Chinese.  And was translated back into Chinese, aiding his growing stature.  If Mao kept his original notes from which the English was translated, they remain unpublished.

Mao achieved a lot, some of it against Stalin’s wishes.  Though Stalin was almost certainly correct when he insisted that the captive Chiang Kai-shek be released and accepted as leader of the entire nation.  Mao and the anti-Chiang warlords wanted a trial and condemnation, but Stalin threatened to cast the Chinese Communists out of World Leninism if they did so.  Mao presumably disliked it, though I’d not rule out the possibility that he privately realised that Stalin was correct.  It happened well before he became an undisputed authority within China.

I also see the Cultural Revolution in China as a practical expression of what Trotsky meant when he protested at party bureaucracy.  But Mao did it with caution, and only after he had entrenched his power.  

A measure of that power is that Mainland China seems not to have had a single visible political movement that declared itself anti-Mao.  Which may have convinced Nixon of the utter hopelessness of placing any hope in the Taiwan exiles.  And since modern Western studies mostly prefer not to mention it, let me remind everyone that the USA claimed that Taiwan was the real China till Nixon ended it in the early 1970s.  Let Chiang Kai-shek keep the Chinese seat as a Permanent Member of the Security Council, and gave themselves a legal pretext for an invasion of China with Taiwan as a front.  Chiang Kai-shek never stopped promising to retake the mainland, and in Britain in the early 1960s I encountered people who were generally sensible and who actually believed it.  

Critics of Mao tend to overlook what he was up against.  The Vietnamese anti-Communists also dreamed of retaking the north.  Only the clear failure of the USA to control even their own half of Vietnam ended such fantasies.

Trotsky as an Obstructive Opposition

Mao was radical, but also realistic about what he might hope to achieve.  Trotsky by contrast fell into a pattern of grand claims and no real achievements.

Lenin’s idea when he took power was for a single militant party for the entire world.  He revived the name Communist, which had fallen out of use among militant socialists since the late 1840s and the Communist Manifesto.  Under Lenin’s scheme for a Third International, the various sovereign states would each have their own party, but they were all supposed to obey the Comintern.  The aim was a World Socialist State – one that would presumably manage the colonies of the various European states on an equal basis to their former rulers.  Much what the Soviet Union did for those Tsarist possessions they kept when their Civil War was over, and there was a real desire to have Central Asians as equals, which had not been the case under the Tsars.

People of Black African origin often looked to Moscow for liberation, at a time when most Western governments saw White Racism as legitimate.  The USA accepted Civil Rights when they feared losing the Cold War.  And when they needed the votes in the UN of newly independent African countries.

With hindsight, it would have been wise for Moscow to adjust to something more modest in the early 1960s.  An immediate World Socialist State should certainly have been recognised as impractical by the 1970s.  People’s China implicitly abandoned it when Mao made peace with Nixon: he must have worked out that a wave of Chinese-inspired uprisings were not going to succeed any time soon.  There were serious movements – in South Arabia, in Peru, and maybe other places.  In Nepal one such movement forced the abandonment of royal government and now shares power in a Western-style republic.  

The various small Maoist parties in the West mostly stayed small, but one transformed into the Socialist Party (Netherlands), with modest electoral success.  And though the various pro-Moscow Communist parties have shrunk, many remain significant forces.

By contrast, a plethora of Trotskyist parties have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.  After about a century of claiming to be the real Leninists, Trotskyists have done no more than waste the time of some gifted individuals. Ken Loach might have publicised the forgotten truths of Spain, including that the mainstream Communists had no intention of trying to rule and simply wanted a win for a government led by non-socialist Radicals. Instead his ‘Land and Freedom’ makes heroes of the ineffective half-Trotskyist POUM, whose share of the front was noticeably quiet until Franco had disposed of much more dangerous enemies.

The grand achievement of Trotskyist journalist Paul Foot was to end the career of Reginald Maudling over minor corruption.  Who might otherwise have been a moderate successor to Edward Heath.  Instead Thatcher won out against the much less impressive William Whitelaw.

Their best results for socialist aspirations may have been the defectors from Trotskyism, who brought their plausible misunderstandings to the political Right in the USA.  . In my view they have done far more damage to the West while trying to serve it than they ever did as enemies. Had the same unrealistic notions of what was politically possible, but were able to have the US military play out their errors across the suffering flesh of people in the Global South.

There’s an old joke about there being one reliable way to go gambling in Las Vegas and return with a small fortune.  You go there with a large fortune. 

Given amazingly lucky circumstances in the 1980s and 1990s, the entire New Right has been very weak in its achievements.  The authentic conservatives who accepted the Mixed Economy in the 1940s won over former enemies Italy and Japan and West Germany.  Made them firm friends, and then also won Spain after Franco died.  By contrast this lot have had very mixed results in Middle-Europe, and made a committed foe out of once-friendly Russia.  And have confirmed Chinese suspicions rather than easing them.

Apart from that, what does Trotskyist militancy mean?  From a ruling class point of view: with enemies like that, there is no pressing need for friends.

The newly-emerging ‘Your Party’ includes Trotskyists, as has been true for successful new left parties and alliances in Continental Europe.  But I very much hope it keeps them under control.

Further Reading

Copyright ©Gwydion M. Williams

23rd September 2025

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