A significant number of revolutionaries have moved from Trotskyism to various forms of libertarian socialism. What attracted them to Trotskyism in the first place? Why did they come to reject it? Did they gain anything of value from Trotskyism? These are my questions. ---- There is a notable overlap between the broad tradition of class struggle anarchism and the minority tradition within Marxism that is anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, and humanist (Schmidt and van der Walt, 2009). This latter current is often referred to as "libertarian Marxism" or "autonomist Marxism" (Cleaver, 1999). Along with some similar currents, such as guild socialism (Cole, 1920/1980) or pareconism (Albert, 2003), they are all usually grouped under the label of "libertarian socialism" or "libertarian communism."
Trotskyism doesn't seem to fit in, not even within autonomist Marxism. The goal of Trotskyism is to create a centralized "vanguard party" that would overthrow the capitalist state in order to build a centralized "workers' state," a "dictatorship of the proletariat." The centralized party would use the centralized state to manage a centralized and nationalized economy. Trotsky believed that Stalin's Soviet Union was a "degenerate workers' state" in which the working class remained the ruling class, not because it had real power (he knew it didn't), but because the economy remained nationalized. All of this is far from libertarian. It's not hard to understand why anarchists and anti-statist Marxists have rejected Trotskyism. But the question of why so many embraced it in the first place remains unresolved.
Libertarian socialists who were formerly Trotskyists
Daniel Guérin first encountered Trotskyism in 1930s France (Guérin (1973) considers himself a model Trotskyist). He became an anarchist after World War II. He was also a gay activist and a militant supporter of the Algerian national liberation struggle. Identifying as an anarchist, he sought to integrate anarchism with the best of Marxism. His legacy continues to influence the Alternative Libertaire movement, and his translated books are widely known in the United States (e.g., Guérin, 1998).
Grandizo Munis was the leader of the main Trotskyist group in Spain during the Civil War/Revolution. He befriended Jaime Balius, the leading writer of the anarchist group Friends of Durruti. In exile in Mexico, they shared a house. He abandoned both the vanguard party and Trotsky's thesis that Stalin's Soviet Union remained a "workers' state" (albeit a "degenerate one") in favor of a theory of "state capitalism" (Guillamón, 1996; Hobson and Tabor, 1998). He was a friend of Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's widow. He likely influenced her to abandon the theory of the "degenerate workers' state" and break with the Trotskyist Fourth International because of its support for the Stalinist North in the Korean War. (To say that the Soviet Union was "capitalist" is not to deny the existence of a collectivized bureaucracy in charge; it is to affirm that its mode of production is based on the capital-labor relationship.)
After World War II, Cornelius Castoriadis, of Greek origin, was the most influential member of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie. After breaking with the Trotskyists, he replaced the concept of the "workers' state" with the theory of "bureaucratic capitalism." He evolved toward libertarian Marxism and, later, abandoned Marxism altogether. Without ever calling himself an anarchist, Castoriadis used the label "libertarian socialist" (Castoriadis, 1997).
He had like-minded colleagues in Great Britain, who had also broken away from British Trotskyism. They translated many of Castoriadis's works and produced their own original writings. They called themselves the Solidarity Group, and their main author was Maurice Brinton (Brinton, 2004).
In the United States, libertarian socialists typically came from the dissident wing of Trotskyism, led by Max Shachtman (and including Hal Draper). In 1940, this split the American Trotskyist organization (then the Socialist Workers Party, unrelated to the current British SWP) in two, giving rise to the Workers Party and, later, the International Socialist League. They rejected Trotskyist support for the Soviet Union as a supposed "degenerate workers' state" in the impending inter-imperialist war. They replaced this theory with "bureaucratic collectivism": that the Soviet Union was neither working-class nor capitalist, but a new type of class society (similar to the recent Pareconist conception of "coordinationism"; Albert, 2003). However, although the Shachtmanists had broken with both Trotsky himself and his orthodox followers, they still considered themselves Trotskyists. They continued to defend many Trotskyist objectives (for example, the vanguard party and the workers' state). But by the 1950s, Shachtman himself had evolved towards the pro-imperialist social-democratic right (Drucker, 1999).
However, a group known as the "Johnson-Forest Current" had also split from the orthodox Trotskyists along with Shachtman. It was led by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya (as well as Grace Lee, later Boggs). As a Trotskyist, James had already developed a brilliant conception of the autonomous role of African Americans in the American Revolution (James, 1996). The group elaborated a Marxist theory of the Soviet Union as "state capitalism" (in my opinion, the best theoretical treatment up to that time). Over time, after various twists and turns, the tendency would reject Trotskyism and adopt its own libertarian Marxist perspective (Dunayevskaya, 2000; James, 1994). Finally, Dunayevskaya would organize the News & Letters group, which still exists, despite recent splits.
Dwight Macdonald was a writer who remained with the Shachtmanists when they broke away from Trotsky, but he soon became independent. During World War II, he published an influential, one-man, anti-imperialist journal, Politics . He moved from heterodox Trotskyism to anarchist pacifism. During the Cold War, he became an apolitical liberal, but he radicalized again in the 1960s in response to the Vietnam War and the prevailing political climate (Wreszin, 1994).
One of the most influential American anarchists of the 1960s and 1970s, and to this day, was Murray Bookchin. Initially a member of the Communist Party, he became a Trotskyist and a follower of Shachtman during World War II. After the war, he was influenced by former Trotskyists. He developed his own version of anarchism, in the tradition of anarcho-communism, but rejecting a working-class perspective. In his later years, he came to reject anarchism, at least as a label, although he continued to accept it as an influence (Bookchin, 1999).
An interesting example is Stan Weir. Coming from the working class, he joined the Shachtmanists. However, he was also influenced by C.L.R. James's group. In the 1960s, he joined the attempt to revive a more or less revolutionary version of Shachtmanism, the International Socialists (IS) (Hal Draper was practically the only other ex-Shachtmanist of his age who also participated). But he eventually abandoned the vanguard party perspective to emphasize the importance of grassroots workers' groups. He increasingly opposed the bureaucratic model of trade unionism (Weir, 2004).
Another former member of the International Socialists was Loren Goldner, who became a libertarian Marxist specializing in the critique of political economy. His analysis of the relative prosperity of the past and the current crisis is, in my opinion, particularly accurate (see his website, Goldner).
There was also the group I belonged to, the Revolutionary Socialist League. Its most prominent leader was Ron Taber. It developed as an opposition within the International Socialistsbased on the Shachtman tradition, as well as the British tradition that led to the current UK Socialist Working Party (its organizational descendants in the US are today the International Socialist Organization[ISO]and Solidarity[no relation to the former British libertarian socialist group]). We broke away from the IS to constitute ourselves as revolutionary socialists. At first, we believed this could be achieved by becoming orthodox Trotskyists, except that we regarded the Soviet Union as a capitalist state (Hobson and Tabor, 1988). Over the course of 12 years, we became increasingly libertarian, rejecting Leninism and finally abandoning Marxism for revolutionary anarchism (Taber, 1988). Finally, the RSL dissolved, most of its members became apolitical, and a few joined with some anarchists to form the Revolutionary Anarchist Federation Love and Rage, which lasted nine years. (In my case, I should add that, as a teenager, I was first an anarchist-pacifist, influenced by reading Dwight Macdonald. Then a Trotskyist convinced me that a revolution was necessary and that pacifist anarchism was not a sufficient programwhich I still believe. So I joined the SI and then moved on to the RSL, eventually becoming a revolutionary anarchist. My own history could be titled "From Anarchism to Trotskyism and Back to Anarchism"; Price, 2009a.)
In my interactions with young anarchists, I often encounter people who have been members of the ISO or close to it, or to some other Trotskyist organization. Given that the ISO is probably the largest group on the left, that it has a high turnover, and that there are many other Trotskyist groups, this probably shouldn't surprise us.
Trotskyists like to throw the example of Victor Serge in the faces of anarchists, a man who went from individualist anarchism to Leninism and then to Trotskyism (Price, 2007). They usually omit that he criticized the policies of Lenin and Trotsky, rejected Trotsky's theory of the "degenerate workers' state," and had a bitter falling out with Trotsky, for both good and bad reasons. There have been others like him. But, while Serge is an interesting figure to study, I prefer the example of Daniel Guérin and the other revolutionaries who moved from Trotskyism to libertarian socialism.
The questions
I don't want to exaggerate. Most Trotskyists did not become libertarian socialists, and most libertarian socialists have never been Trotskyists. Anarchism has its own history, which began at least with Bakunin, independent of and opposed to most of Marxism. Libertarian Marxism has only ever been a marginal and minority current among Marxists. It includes tendencies that had never been close to Trotskyism, such as the European "Council Communists," who broke with Lenin in the early days of the Third International (Mattick, 1978/2007; Rachleff, 1976). The Italian "autonomist Marxists" of the 1960s and 70s, and also of later periods, did not come from Trotskyism, but emerged from communist and socialist parties (Wright, 2002). Like many ex-Trotskyists, many autonomist theorists ended up rejecting both the working class and revolution (e.g., Hardt and Negri, 2000).
Neither "anarchists" nor "libertarian Marxists" are unified tendencies, much less a single unified tendency. As should be clear from the lists above, there are different types of Trotskyists, while anarchists differ widely among themselves, and autonomist Marxists also have extensive disagreements. Each group has disagreements with the others. Therefore, we are not dealing with a simple phenomenon (Trotskyists becoming "libertarian socialists").
However, it is a fact that many influential radicals first became Trotskyists before becoming some kind of libertarian socialist. Which brings me to my three questions: What initially attracted them to Trotskyism? What led them to ultimately reject it? And is there anything in Trotskyism that might still be useful for libertarian socialists?
The answers may seem obvious at first glance. First, radicals were drawn to Trotskyism because it advocated an international revolution of the working class and its allies. Following in the tradition of the Russian Revolution, Trotskyists opposed both Western capitalism and the ruling bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. Second, libertarian radicals abandoned Trotskyism because it betrayed the vision of a free socialist society by accepting a totalitarian state as if it were, in some way, a workers' state. And third, the best of the libertarian ex-Trotskyists continued to believe in an international revolution of the working class to create a classless and stateless society (goals consistent with those of Marx and Bakunin). These answers are correct, but not sufficient. Let me delve into them in more detail.
Why did they join the Trotskyists?
One of the main attractions of Trotskyism was the romanticized view of Leon Trotsky's life. A Russian Marxist leader, independent of both the Mensheviks and the Leninists, he was elected chairman of the Petrograd mass workers' council (soviet) during the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. During the 1917 revolution, he joined the Bolsheviks, becoming Lenin's partner. Trotsky organized the forces that overthrew the bourgeois Provisional Government and established the Soviet regime. He was the chief foreign negotiator for the communist government. In the civil war and the subsequent foreign invasions, Trotsky built the Red Army from scratch and led it to victory.
As the repressive bureaucracy, led by Stalin, established its dominance, Trotsky fought against it. When almost all the communist leaders capitulated to Stalin, only Trotsky continued to fight (however well or poorly he did so). Consequently, he was removed from all his posts and expelled from the Soviet Union. Capitalist governments denied him asylum. His followers in the Soviet Union were exterminated (and many Trotskyists in Europe were murdered by fascists). He was slandered and denounced by the Russian state. His four children died, at least two of them directly at the hands of Stalin's agents. Although opposed to Stalin's regime, he never lent any support to Western capitalism. In exile, he wrote several important works, among them the great History of the Russian Revolution (which remains worth reading for libertarian socialists; Trotsky, 1932-3/1967). He attempted to create a new and revolutionary Fourth International virtually through sheer willpower. After finally finding asylum in Mexico, he was murdered by an agent of Stalin (Segal, 1979).
(It should be made clear that, in this section, I deliberately omit the darker side of Trotsky's life. Everything I have just written is true, but it is not the whole truth. However, it must be remembered that most Trotskyists were unaware of any problematic aspects, especially the New Trotskyists, such as those who later became libertarian socialists. The darker side will be addressed in the next section.)
Let us consider Murray Bookchin's comments on Trotsky, long after he had rejected Trotskyism and Marxism, and even the revolution of the working class: "Trotsky had many faults... But in the late 1930s he stood up to Stalinthe quintessential counter-revolutionary of the timeand he did so almost entirely alone. All the liberals of the time supported the Stalinists... It was only for his heroic stand as an anti-Stalinist revolutionary that Trotsky won my deep admiration and ideological support" (Bookchin, 1999; p. 44).
Furthermore, Bookchin adds: "Trotsky's ideas became increasingly democratic toward the end of his life..." (p. 46). The culmination of Trotsky's program was the Transitional Program of 1938 (more aptly titled The Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International; Trotsky, 1977). In this work, he abandons the one-party dictatorship. Instead, he advocates that the bourgeois state of capitalism and the bureaucratic state of Stalinism be replaced by a pluralistic system of councils (soviets). "All political currents of the proletariat can fight for the leadership of the soviets on the basis of the broadest democracy" (p. 136). The soviets would emerge from factory committees and other people's councils formed in the struggle against capitalism. Centralized planning of the economy, he wrote, should be balanced by workers' control of production and a democratic cooperative of consumers. Collective farms would be self-managed (p. 146).
These are the foundations of proletarian democracy and the steps toward a classless communist democracy. In the Transitional Program and elsewhere, he also advocated struggles based on the traditional program of bourgeois democracy: land for the peasants, self-determination for oppressed nations, freedom of speech and civil liberties against the state, women's rights, etc. This is reminiscent of Lenin's work, What Is to Be Done?
"The ideal of the social democrat should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, capable of reacting to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects: capable of generalizing all these manifestations and offering a unified view of police violence and capitalist exploitation; capable of seizing every event, however small, to set forth before everyone his socialist convictions and democratic demands, in order to make clear to each and every person the world-historical significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." (Lenin, 1970; p. 183; emphasis in Lenin)
Throughout this work, Lenin proposes the defense by workers not only of large groups such as peasants, oppressed nationalities, and women, but also of university students, rank-and-file soldiers, minority religious groups, censored writers, and so on. This appears alongside the more authoritarian aspects of What Is to Be Done?, such as the assertion that "socialist consciousness" can only reach workers "from outside" the class struggle. Later, Trotsky would claim that Lenin had abandoned this conception (Daum, 1990; but see Tabor, 1988).
Trotsky argued that the most revolutionary forces were found among those for whom class exploitation overlapped with the denial of bourgeois democratic rights, due to gender, age, nationality, race, etc. (today we would include sexual orientation). It was these sectors of the working class who had the fewest privileges, those who "had nothing to lose but their chains." The Transitional Program states: "Opportunist organizations, by their very nature, concentrate their attention primarily on the main actors of the working class and, therefore, ignore both working youth and working women. The decadence of capitalism, however, deals its hardest blows to women as wage earners and as housewives. The sectors of the Fourth International must seek bases of support among the most exploited sections of the working class, and consequently among working women." There they will find inexhaustible reserves of devotion, self-denial and willingness to sacrifice" (1977; p. 151).
Trotsky's programmatic thinking stemmed from the belief that capitalism was in a fundamental crisis (hence the title: The Agony of Capitalism ). Building on Marx's analysis that capitalism would eventually reach a point where it could no longer progress, Trotsky, like Lenin and Luxemburg before him, concluded that this was the era of capitalist decadence, parasitism, monopoly, and imperialism (Price, 2009b). Reforms could be achieved here and there, but not lasting ones. The same was true of the bourgeois democratic rights of oppressed peoples, which could not be won permanently in this era; they required a firmly established socialist revolution (the central idea of the theory of "permanent revolution"). The years between 1914 and 1945 confirmed this, as the world reeled through a world war, the Great Depression, failed revolutions, the rise of fascism and Stalinism, and, as Trotsky knew, an impending Second World War. Therefore, the workers, along with all the downtrodden of the earth, needed an international revolution.
To win this revolution, Trotsky said, it was necessary to build a revolutionary party on an international scale. The first line of the Transitional Program reads: "The world political situation as a whole is characterized mainly by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat" (1977; p. 111).
Whatever its limitations, this concept at least did not blame the working class for the failure of the revolution (as, for example, Bookchin would later do). It makes no sense to blame the workers, just as it makes no sense to idealize them. From time to time, under the pressure of capitalist decadence, workers have launched revolutionary uprisings, only to be betrayed by the very organizations and leading individuals in whom they had previously placed their trust. These individuals, in turn, had become integrated into capitalist society, corrupted by their privileges, and, at best, wished to become the new rulers, not to create a society without rulers and without classes.
Therefore, Trotsky said, let us organize a new revolutionary International of parties. It would not be based on all workers, since they have different opinions and living conditions: some are trapped in their privileges; others are oppressed until a way out is shown to them. But there is a radicalized, advanced, and militant layer of workersa minority for nowwho can be won over even during lulls in the class struggle. They can be won over to a revolutionary program, they can take root in the masses and prepare for the uprisings to come.
If this minority was to lead a revolution (becoming part of a majority), it had to be astute in its tactics and strategy. It should not be reformist, like the so-called revolutionary parties that joined coalitions with capitalist parties in Popular Fronts to govern capitalist governments. Unfortunately, the main Spanish anarchist organization did precisely that in the war/revolution of the 1930s. Trotsky vehemently opposed the anarchists' policies from the outset (Trotsky, 1973), as did the Friends of Durruti group later on (Guillamón, 1996).
At the same time, Trotsky sought ways to prevent his followers from becoming isolated sects. The very "transitional demands" were one such way, demonstrating how current problems could only be resolved through elements of the socialist program; for example, that unemployment could be eradicated through a massive public works program, creating jobs for all at union wages. Or that companies claiming they could not afford to pay living wages should be expropriated and managed by the workers. Permanent revolution and the struggle for full democratic rights for all sectors of society were integral to participation in mass struggles, while simultaneously demonstrating that only socialist democracy could guarantee full democratic rights.
In particular, he advocated forms of united front and critical support. He called on his followers to join mass trade unions and collaborate with reformists whenever possible, in a non-sectarian manner, without concealing their own revolutionary policies. During the rise of Nazism in Germany, he wrote extensive arguments urging members of the Communist Party to offer an alliance with the larger Social Democratic Party to defend themselves against the Nazis and drive fascists from the streets (Price, 2009a). This was ignored by almost everyone, with the results we now know.
Thus, one could interpret Trotsky as proposing a revolutionary-democratic socialist program, based on a realistic analysis of the stage of capitalism, with a strategy for achieving an international revolution. So why would anyone reject this?
Why did they reject Trotskyism?
Radicals rejected Trotskyism for both good and bad reasons. Those who became anarchists and autonomist Marxists did so, at least in part, because of an awareness of its darker, more authoritarian aspects.
Trotsky was Lenin's comrade in building the one-party police state that was the communist regime in its early stages. Together with Lenin, by 1921 at the latest, he participated in outlawing other socialist parties, opposition groups within the single legal party, and independent trade unions. They repressed and murdered Russian anarchists, suppressed and massacred the Kronstadt rebel sailors, and betrayed and annihilated Makhno's anarchist-led partisan army in Ukraine.
Trotskyists justify these crimes by pointing to the objective pressures the Soviet Union faced in its early days: the country's poverty and backwardness, its predominantly peasant population, civil war and foreign invasions, and, above all, the revolution's failure to spread successfully. All these pressures existed, but they do not justify Lenin and Trotsky's authoritarian behavior in response. More democratic alternatives were possible (such as a united front with other parties that supported the Soviet system), but they made their decisions based on their own political agenda.
Even during his conflict with Stalin, Trotsky and his faction continued to support the communist one-party dictatorship. It pains me to say this, but Russian Trotskyists went to their deaths defending the one-party dictatorship. In exile, Trotsky continued to support it until the mid-1930s, when he abandoned it (but he never apologized for his past opinions and actions).
Trotsky continued to regard Stalin's regime as the workers' state, even though he described it as structurally similar to Hitler's state. It was a continuation of the nationalized ownership of industry and land, and economic planning, which he considered "conquests of the revolution." This meant considering nationalized ownership more important than workers' democracy in defining the "workers' state." As dissident Trotskyists pointed out, the state owned the economy, but who "owned" the state? Obviously not the workers! Only the bureaucracy, as a collective body, "owned" it (that is, controlled and used it for its own benefit). It was collective "private property"that is, as a group, they owned the separate (private) property of the workers and peasants as their own property.
But Trotsky insisted that nationalized and collectivized property was linked to workers' government and only workers' government. The apparent rule of the collective bureaucracy was a kind of illusion, which had to collapse very soon, he said. At the end of the impending Second World War, either the workers would stage a revolution and reclaim nationalized property, or the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy would convert everything into traditional private property. This was consistent with his goal of a centralized state managing a centralized economy, which he and Lenin had inherited from the Marxist social democrats.
This, too, fell within Trotsky's erroneous predictions. Just as he was certain that Stalinism would end, one way or another, after the coming war, he was equally certain that capitalism had reached its catastrophic end, and that postwar capitalism would only prolong the Great Depression (though it should be noted that most other Marxist and bourgeois economists also predicted this). These two errors went hand in hand, because the strength of postwar Stalinism was one of the factors that held postwar capitalism together, by suppressing working-class revolutions in Western Europe and elsewhere.
Interestingly, Trotsky had already made a comment in 1928: "A new chapter of general capitalist progress cannot even be ruled out... But for this to happen, capitalism... would have to strangle the proletarian revolution for a long time; it would have to completely enslave China, overthrow the Soviet republic, and so on" (quoted in Daum, 1990; p. 101). Which is essentially what happened, although the Chinese and Russian revolutions were defeated through state capitalist distortions.
The implication of this statement is that the defeat of the working-class struggles of the 1930s and 40s could lead to a limited period of relative capitalist prosperity within the broader era of capitalist decline. Eventually, the limited and uneven prosperity of the post-World War II boom would fade, and a return to the economic decline of the decadent era would occurwhich, in fact, began around 1970 and is becoming increasingly evident. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic ruling class of the Soviet Union managed to maintain its grip on power for 60 years before reverting to traditional forms of capitalism.
However, by the time of Trotsky's Transitional Program , he no longer considered the possibility of a period of limited prosperity within the era of decline. He insisted that the Stalinist bureaucracy could not maintain collectivized property beyond the next world war. This drastically disoriented his followers when they faced the relative postwar prosperity in the imperialist countries, while they watched as the Stalinists not only maintained their collectivized system but also created new collectivized economies in a third of Europe and in China.
This error was part of the mechanical determinism ingrained in much of Marxism. Trotsky argued that the bureaucracy could not be a new ruling class because it was not foreseen in Marx's scheme of historical development; if it were a new ruling class, the revolution of the working class would no longer be on the agenda.
The Trotskyists were completely disoriented after the war, as a relative boom unfolded in the US and Western Europe while Stalinism survived and spread. They could not explain the apparent prosperity: their chief theorist, Ernest Mandel, proposed a theory of "neo-capitalism." They could not explain how Stalinism, supposedly counter-revolutionary, seemed to be creating all these revolutions. Most eventually declared that the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe, China, and so on, were "deformed workers' states," where the working class ruled even though it did not, because nationalized property existed. And Cuba was considered a "healthy workers' state," which did not need a revolution to overthrow the regime. In effect, most abandoned the revolutionary-democratic aspect of Trotsky's thought (that revolutions of the working class and revolutionary parties were necessary and that Stalinism was entirely counter-revolutionary). Most became known as "orthodox Trotskyists" or "Pablists" (referring to the leader of the Fourth International at the time). They supported the Soviet Union during the Cold War (although they formally remained in favor of workers' revolutions in Stalinist countries).
As mentioned, there were dissident Trotskyists who rejected the theories of "degenerate" and "deformed" workers' states. They believed that the bureaucracy was a ruling class and that the system was either state capitalism or a new form of class economy. However, they remained Trotskyists, aiming for centralized parties to establish centralized states to manage centralized economieswhich would inevitably create monstrous and inefficient oppression. For example, one of the leading Trotskyists (who believed that Stalinism was "state capitalism") refers to "...the highly centralized character that a workers' state would need to guarantee the rule of the working class...Many socialist opponents of Stalinism reject not only Stalin's dictatorship but also centralization... Their alternative of decentralization and 'democracy' amounts to a return to the class norms of the bourgeoisie" (Daum, 1990, p. 123).
These unorthodox Trotskyists continued to defend Lenin and Trotsky's one-party police state after the Russian Revolution. They considered the Soviet Union to have remained a "workers' state" for years after Stalin came to power, until 1929 or the late 1930s (Price, 2009a). Thus, they agreed with the "orthodox Trotskyists" that a "workers' state" could exist without the workers actually governing. Most of them were also disoriented by the relative postwar boom, generally denying that this boom would end and that a return to crisis would occur (becoming reformists in practice). As mentioned, for example, Shachtman eventually capitulated to the American labor bureaucracy and to American imperialism, supporting the invasions of Cuba and Vietnam and advocating for workers' support for the Democrats.
What could they learn from Trotskyism?
It is clear that revolutionary libertarian socialists cannot be Trotskyists. But isn't there anything positive we can learn from Trotsky and Trotskyism? It is often accepted that anarchists can learn from autonomist Marxists and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as from other currents within Marxism, such as the Frankfurt School and other "Western Marxists." Similarly, libertarian Marxists have shown a willingness to learn from other types of Marxism, especially regarding their more abstract theories. For example, the council communist Paul Mattick greatly admired Henryk Grossman's theory of capitalist crisis, even though Grossman was a Stalinist (Mattick, 1934). Could this also be true in the case of Trotskyism?
Paul Le Blanc quotes the Marxist theorist Perry Anderson (who is not a Trotskyist as such), who states that "the tradition descending from Trotsky... provides one of the central elements for any revival of revolutionary Marxism on an international scale." Contrasting it with "Western Marxism," politically passive but academically prestigious, Anderson noted that "this other traditionpersecuted, vilified, isolated, dividedwill have to be studied in all the diversity of its underground channels and currents. It may surprise future historians with its resources" (from Introduction to James, 1994; p. 3). It should be noted that Anderson considers Trotskyism as "one," but presumably not the only, "of the central elements," and that he does not focus on a single orthodox version of Trotskyism, but is interested in all its "divided" and diverse forms.
We know that Marxist economic theory can be interpreted as consistent with anti-statist and anarchist aims, because several libertarian Marxists have done so. The writings of Trotsky and the Trotskyists must be taken into account in debates about Marxist economics. In particular, the notion of the epoch of capitalist decline, with the post-World War II boom as a period within this epoch, is essential for understanding our current situation (Price, 2009c). The questions of what causes the epoch of long-term stagnation and what caused the 20-year period of limited prosperity must be debated. In my opinion, the best analysis currently published on these questions is offered by a Trotskyist group that took the theory initially developed by Ron Tabor in the organization I belonged to (the RSL) and has further developed it (Daum, 1990; Daum and Richardson, 2010; but see Tabor's recent statement, 2009).
We libertarian socialists cannot accept the Leninist-Trotskyist conception of the "democratic centralist" vanguard party. We do not believe in an organization governed from the center by a leadership that knows the answers thanks to its knowledge of "scientific socialism." Nor are we in favor of a party in the sense of an organization that aspires to seize state power, whether through elections or by establishing a new state. Our goal is not to bring a party to power, but to bring the working class and the oppressed to power.
But we can agree that revolutionaries who share a (libertarian) program must organize to spread their ideas and oppose authoritarian organizations. Our smaller, more politically homogeneous organization would participate in broader organizations such as trade unions, community groups, andin revolutionary situationsworkers' and people's councils. This vision of a democratic, federated, and anarchist organization overlaps with the concept of a revolutionary party, while profoundly diverging from the Leninist-Trotskyist approach. We agree that the majority will not join our organization at any point before the revolution, and that we expect to reach only the minority of workers undergoing radicalization. This self-organization of a revolutionary minority is not opposed to the self-organization of the working class; it is an essential part of it.
Organization has been the subject of much debate among libertarian socialists. Many have opposed any kind of organization and continue to do so, except in the case of local collectives and projects. But a pro-organizational current has long existed within anarchism and autonomist Marxism, such as platformist anarchists, contemporary South American specificists, the FAI of Spain (Ibérica), and others.
Unlike the Trotskyists, we do not advocate for a "workers' state," whatever that may mean. In particular, libertarian socialists deny that a party, an individual, or a bureaucracy can govern a state "in the name" of the workers, "representing" the people. We reject "substitutionism." Some of us identify with the Friends of Durruti in Spain. We advocate replacing the state with a federation of workers' and community councils, associated with an armed people (a workers' militia). This is not a state because it is not a bureaucratic-military-police machine separate from and above the working people.
I think anarchists and others can agree with Trotsky on the need to support the most oppressed sectors of society and to back every struggle for democratic rights and against injustice. Again, there are libertarian socialists who reject this view, arguing that only the class struggle matters and that everything else is a distraction. This is ironic, since Marxists have traditionally criticized anarchists for supposedly focusing not on the working class, but on the peasantry, the urban poor, prisoners, and the "declassed" and "lumpen" sectors of society. This was supposedly Bakunin's program. And it's true that we want them in the movement, but that doesn't contradict a working-class orientation. There are also anarchists who, instead of defending proletarian democracy, prefer to denounce "democracy" as such. I prefer to see anarchism as the most extreme, radical, and participatory form of democracy. We mustn't cede a good slogan to our enemies.
Many anarchists accept an orientation toward the most oppressed, but they make an exception when it comes to defending oppressed nations, opposing demands for national liberation and national self-determination. On this point, I believe Lenin and Trotsky were right. We must support all struggles against capitalist imperialism, including those of oppressed nations, while arguing against the ideology of nationalism that the international revolution of the working class is the only real solution (Price, 2005). Except that Lenin understood national self-determination as a stepping stone toward an eventual centralized world state, whereas anarchists are decentralists as well as internationalists and genuinely value local cultures.
I think anarchists and autonomist Marxists could learn a great deal from Trotskyand from Leninabout the need for tactical and strategic flexibility. Or, to put it another way, what Trotsky said about tactics and strategy is generally compatible with libertarian socialism. This view conflicts with that of those libertarian socialists who adopt a left-communist (so-called "ultra-left") position on tactics. For example, many of those who became council communists initially broke with the communists not because of the party-state, but because of Lenin's demands for united fronts with the reformists. The reformists had far more workers than the radicals, but the left-communists wouldn't join the reformist trade unions (which were much larger than the independent revolutionary trade unions), and so on. But I think the radicals were quite right to oppose Lenin's demands that they participate in electoral action (running for parliament, supporting reformist parties in elections, etc.). However, they were wrong to oppose united fronts and to join existing unions, because we must find ways to reach the majority of workers.
For example, in 1920s Italy, the Fascists attacked and destroyed working-class premises and socialist newspapers. The anarcho-syndicalists organized coalitions of left-wing workers to fight the Fascists and expel them. This worked in some places, but the Communist Party was led by Amadeo Bordiga, who was later expelled and organized a left-wing communist current that still has some influence among libertarian Marxists. Bordiga and his followers rejected the united front on principle and refused to collaborate with the anarchists against the Fascists. (Anarchist Magazine, 1989; meanwhile, the Socialist Party effectively signed a "pact" with the Fascists promising peace between themwhich the Fascists, of course, ignored.) The anarchists were right; the left-wing communists were terribly wrong. Later, when Trotsky fought for a united front action of German social democrats and communists against the Nazis, he was advocating something that was consistent with what the Italian anarcho-syndicalists had done (Trotsky, 1971).
How can libertarian socialists have anything in common with Trotskyism? I've already reviewed the democratic side of Trotsky's legacy. However, I must agree with Trotsky's harshest critics that all that talk about democratic soviets embracing diverse tendencies, however sincere, was aimed at serving as a springboard for his party to power. He did want to create a centralized party, state, and economy. He advocated a workers' revolution, but I believe his policies would have created a new bureaucratic ruling class.
Butand this is the crucial pointlike Lenin, Trotsky genuinely wanted a workers' revolution. Although his aims differed from those of the anti-statist socialists, he sincerely advocated similar means to a certain extent. He was truly concerned about the decline of capitalism and believed that the only way to solve its problems was through an international revolution of the working class.
This differs considerably from what those who came after Lenin and Trotsky did. The Stalinists did not sincerely desire working-class revolutions. Where the working class was in the majority, they generally advocated reformist policies, as in Western Europe. Where they could use the weight of the Russian army to crush the workers, they established Communist Party dictatorships, as they did in most of Eastern Europe. Where they could organize armies based on the peasantry and keep the working class passive, they staged revolutions to put their bureaucracies in power, as they did in China, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. They never, ever, mobilize the working class to overthrow the capitalists; that would be far too dangerous for them. Stalinism is Leninism, but a moribund and frozen Leninism.
Thus, our aims differ from those of the Trotskyists, but our means may overlap, and therefore we can learn from them on practical and even theoretical matters. They certainly don't have all the answers, but neither do the anarchists. They are divided into many currents, as are the libertarian socialists. As Anderson is quoted, Trotskyism, in all its various forms, can be usefully studied if we consider it only as one of the various currents that can contribute to a truly revolutionary, democratic, and libertarian socialism.
Wayne Price, economist and anarchist activist.
Translation - Embat OLC - Original in English: https://web.archive.org/web/20140226122515/https://zinelibrary.info/files/11_Trotskyism.pdf
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https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/05/26/del-trotskismo-al-anarquismo/
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