This video is an explanation of the ideology of Trotskyism. I go into all major aspects of the ideology while remaining as brief as possible. I explain Marxism and Leninism along with concepts like proletarian internationalism, the permanent revolution and the vanguardist belief.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Marxism and Leninism
1:43 History
2:39 Trotskyism
11:48 Outro
Transcript:
Hello everybody, what is Trotskyism? A complicated question but I’ll try my best to give you an overview of the important parts. Essentially Trotskyism is the ideology of Leon Trotsky who was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution in 1917 and one of the two most likely candidates to succeed Lenin, the other one being Stalin who ended up ruling the USSR.
To understand Trotskyism, you need to understand what it builds on and that is both Marxism and Leninism. I went over this in that video already but for the sake of making this video be understandable on it’s own I will briefly go over both of them again.
Marxism essentially says that for a variety of reasons our capitalist industrialized society is divided among class lines, with the working class being exploited and oppressed by the capitalist class. When the economy and society become industrialized enough the workers will begin to overthrow the capitalists in a French revolution style takeover. After which they share everything and establish socialism.
Leninism on the other hand recognised the fact that in the country they were in, Russia in 1917, there was no large industrial worker’s army to lead a revolution. So, Lenin adapted Marxism to the reality he was experiencing. Now a party would be formed with all people who are educated on Marx and they would lead a revolution and take over the state on behalf of the working class. They would then keep the revolution safe and develop the industry until the workers were educated enough to take over and reach socialism.
Trotsky was a revolutionary along with other Bolsheviks. He was a strong supporter of Lenin and not a fan of Stalin. When Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union Trotsky began to criticise everything Stalin was doing. Eventually Stalin would exile Trotsky who ended up on Mexico were his ideas cemented and he formulated his beliefs in the ideology of Trotskyism. Trotsky was also assassinated on the order of Stalin a few years later.
Also, there are people who say Lenin wanted Trotsky to take over instead of Stalin, but this is based on the Lenin testament of which historians aren’t even sure if it’s real. Either way because Trotsky was still a socialist revolutionary while living outside of the USSR, he handily held a lot of speeches talking to people, so he made a 5-step explanation of what his ideology is supposed to be.
Trotskyism is an evolution of Leninism which itself is an evolution of Marxism. That’s why I summed both of those systems up before. Trotskyism keeps the belief in a vanguard party. The logic is that the people in non-industrial countries can’t lead their own revolution because they lack the experiences of an industrialized working class and the understanding of Marxist theory, so the party does it instead.
Trotsky supported the council system of the early USSR. Essentially all workers in one job and one region would form a council, called soviet which would send representatives to the parliament .I have a video that goes in depth about the democratic system of the USSR and how it changed over time.
This is of course a democratic system but the people who stood for election had to be members of the communist party. The idea was that this way only workers and educated Marxists could be elected, because if they allowed the people to vote for capitalist populist parties then they may lose the one socialist country in the world. This was justified as dictatorship of the proletariat.
According to Trotsky these are the 5 points which set his ideology apart from other Marxist theories. Let’s go over them and what they mean one by one.
Support for the strategy of permanent revolution, in opposition to the two-stage theory of his opponents.
So, the two-stage theory says that to achieve communism you need a lot of industry, famers can’t reach communism because the productivity is too low to create superabundance in which there is so much of everything that nobody has to work.