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Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today, Woman Worker, Class Fighter and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Castro launches Trotskyism

Socialist Press no. 81, 4 January 1978 · scan p. 3 · about 1,275 words

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Castro the self-proclaimed "marxist" chatting with US vice-president Nixon soon after the downfall of the Batistà dictatorshin in 19.59 The following article was published in November 197? in the section of the Cuban Communist Party newspaper "Granma' reserved for "political education' We publish it to give readers an opportunity to see &t first-hand the scandalous method of lies and slanders employed by the Cuban Stalinist bureaucracy.

The policy of Trotsky -the "Judas Trotsky" as Lenin would say-was characterised by disguising its capitulationist essence in an ultraleft phraseology, sonorous but empty the sea shells. . - While Lenin gave the Party the orientation that revolutions are not "made" but arise out of historic crises and turning points which have matured by virtue of objective laws, independently of the will of parties and classes, revolutionary leaps were the Trotsky considered that result of the action of certain select group which could "accumulate" the will of the proletariat for the revolutionary transformation of society.

He sought to cheat history with cunning, claiming that social leaps are produced in a completely voluntaristic way.

In his fake theory of permanent revolution he claimed that steps could be leapt over, that history always proceeded by leaps.

Lenin reckoned that in certain conditions of social development some phases of it could be avoided.

He was expressing what we are sensing i and witnessing today. In the epoch of powerful socialist forces not all countries and peoples have to pass through all the historical phases of social development known to humanity.

But that didn't mean that when the corresponding conditions didn't exist that it was scientifically admissible to leap over certain stages whose premises must be tactically used. • In the case of the Russian revolution, what was indicated was not leaping over the stage of the bourgeois democratic revolution, but to work within it to convert it into the socialist Time and history - have shown that the genius of Lenin was right.

The bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 was converted, following the inexorable course of the materialist dialectic, into the Great Socialist October Trotsky denied the revolutionary potential of millions and millions of peasants who made up the majority of the Russian population.

He always had a contemptuous attitude • towards the role of the workers of the countryside in the revolution.

Trotsky had prophesied that the peasants would make war against the working class would place the conquests under mortal threat.

And what happened? What Lenin had forseen. The alliance of the working class with the working peasants Although ership has doubt of its skyism, and Although this filth is not untypical of what passes for political education in Cuba, it also marks a new stage in the Castro bureaucracy's fight against revolutionary socialism the Cuban leadnever left any hostility to Trot-. although slandsoviet power.

On the eve of the October Revolution, Trotsky declared that the imperialist epoch left no place for national revolutions.

He denied the possibility of a socialist society in one country.

He wanted to raise the slogan of a United States of Europe without monarchies, without standing armies, without feudal governing castes and without secret diplomacy..

This slogan, which has nothing to do with the proletarian revolution, as is seen, made pertectly plain the cosmopolitan and capitulationist character of Trotsky's "theory of permanent revolution"

• In proclaiming this idea, precisely when the Russian people were advancing towards a revolution, he was expressing his lack of faith in the possibility of the triumph of the working class and its allies in one country, his forgetting of the national peculiarities of the class After the October Revolution Trotsky, on the pretext of carrying the Russian revolution to other countries on the points of bayonets, showed his revolutionary capitulationism and his lack of faith in the Russian proletarat.

But Lenin argued:

... radical change now consists in the creation of the Republic of the Soviets of Russia; the supreme thing, both for us and from the international socialist point of view, is to preserve this republic which has now begun the socialist History proved that it was possiblé to set up and maintain the workers' and peasants' state in one country and that revolutions, as Lenin pointed out, don't break out all at the same time. w raaf th pr bE ci Lne all erous references to Trotsky have become increasingly common in recent years in official publications this is the most emphatic and flagrant attack on Trotskyism to have been made up to now.

'Granma's' slanders are lifted from the standard Stalinist works published in Moscow. The fact that they feel obliged to publish them again le class struggle in concrete yuntries and they grow on slitical terrain which cannot = the same in all national rcumstances.

Trotsky considered that le revolution should spread" to the whole world y means of armed detachients from Soviet Russia.

His Atilla-like pseudo:volutionary adventurism 'as not limited to theory.

In the peace negotiations, • Brest, he tried to drag the . ussian people into a war and Castro lace it under the threat of lilitary defeat.

The genius of Lenin btained the national peace eeded - to consolidate the ›cialist state, whose victory 'ould be a model and a stimlus for the development of Je world revolutionary rocess.

The international revoltion would be the sum of a hain of national revolutions rhich would follow one after ie other at different stages, 1 accordance with the objecve and subjective conditions I each case.

Imperialism would go on eing smashed through its reakest links.

Sixty years have passed ince the October Revolution.

war..

Practice has thrown down 11 the metaphysical and anitailatinnint anaffoldine of socialism, on Trotskyism-the political • force which the Cuban leaders are forced to revile because they fear it.

We do not intend to use the limited space of these pages to reply to these hoary old slanders. Readers who wish to follow up by reading Trotsky's answers to such attacks are referred to the books advertised on Page 9. Trotsky and the Trotskyists.

For 28 years the first socialist state in the world held out, working and developing itself alone. It did not export armed detachments, but it spread around the world that the workers could emancipate themselves from the yoke of capitalist exploitation and take power tor ever.

Attacked by tascist hordes, it threw out its enemies from the vast soviet lands; it pursued them mercilessly to their final bunker in Berlin, leaving in the footsteps of the glorious Red Army a constellation of new socialist states, not .. posed but born out of the historic premises.

Today when the red star shines its light of salvation on the reality or the certain hope of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America; today when national liberation movements ask for and receive the cooperation of the Soviet Union and of all the peoples of the socialist community; today when the international workers' movement is converted into a potent force; what Will the Trotskyists say in relation to true proletarian internationalism and the world revolution?

It was not, nor could it be, what Trotsky wanted; but it was as Vladimir Illich Lenin wanted and knew it would be.

However, there remain pseudo-revolutionaries, petty bourgeois minorities who, in the face of the summit of socialism and the unhideable truth of the Soviet Union, try to revive Trotsky, to take his ashes and shape them into mud images and empty reeds blowing with lies.

Rodney Arismendi, first secretary of the Uruguayan Communist Party, accurately called these Trotskyist remnants "jetsam from a sunken boat"

The cruiser Aurora continues its triumphal Front fighters

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 81, 4 January 1978

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