Editing Trotskyism (section)

=== Founding of the Fourth International ===
{{main|Fourth International|Entryism}}
[[File:Lenin, Trotsky and Voroshilov with Delegates of the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).jpg|thumb|left|Trotsky with [[Vladimir Lenin]] and soldiers in Petrograd]]
Trotsky founded the [[International Left Opposition]] in 1930. It was meant to be an opposition group within the [[Comintern]], but anyone who joined or was suspected of joining the ILO was immediately expelled from the Comintern. The ILO, therefore, concluded that opposing [[Stalinism]] from within the communist organizations controlled by Stalin's supporters had become impossible, so new organizations had to be formed. In 1933, the ILO was renamed the International Communist League (ICL), which formed the basis of the [[Fourth International]], founded in Paris in 1938.

Trotsky said that only the Fourth International, based on Lenin's theory of the vanguard party, could lead the world revolution and that it would need to be built in opposition to the capitalists and the Stalinists.

Trotsky argued that the defeat of the German working class and the coming to power of [[Adolf Hitler]] in 1933 was due in part to the mistakes of the [[Third Period]] policy of the [[Communist International]] and that the subsequent failure of the Communist Parties to draw the correct lessons from those defeats showed that they were no longer capable of reform and a new international organisation of the working class must be organised. The [[transitional demand]] tactic had to be a key element.

At the time of the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, Trotskyism was a mass political current in [[Vietnam]], [[Sri Lanka]] and slightly later [[Bolivia]]. There was also a substantial Trotskyist movement in China which included the founding father of the Chinese communist movement, [[Chen Duxiu]], amongst its number. Wherever Stalinists gained power, they prioritised hunting down Trotskyists and treated them as the worst enemies.{{Citation needed|date=May 2019}}

The Fourth International suffered repression and disruption through the Second World War. Isolated from each other and faced with political developments quite unlike those anticipated by Trotsky, some Trotskyist organizations decided that the USSR could no longer be called a [[degenerated workers' state]] and withdrew from the Fourth International. After 1945, Trotskyism was smashed as a mass movement in Vietnam and marginalised in many other countries.
[[File:V A Antonov-Ovseenko.jpeg|thumb|upright|[[Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko|Antonov-Ovseenko]] was the first former Trotskyist to be posthumously [[Rehabilitation (Soviet)|rehabilitated]]]]
The [[International Secretariat of the Fourth International]] (ISFI) organised an international conference in 1946 and then World Congresses in 1948 and 1951 to assess the expropriation of the capitalists in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, the threat of a Third World War and the tasks of revolutionaries. The Eastern European Communist-led governments, which came into being after [[World War II]] without a social revolution, were described by a resolution of the 1948 congress as presiding over capitalist economies.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/fi-2ndcongress/1948-congress02.htm |title=The USSR and Stalinism |date=December 1948 – January 1949 |via=[[Marxists Internet Archive]] |access-date=6 June 2016}}</ref> By 1951, the Congress had concluded that they had become "deformed workers' states". As the [[Cold War]] intensified, the ISFI's 1951 World Congress adopted theses by [[Michel Pablo]] that anticipated an international civil war. Pablo's followers considered that the Communist Parties, under pressure from the real workers' movement, could escape Stalin's manipulations and follow a revolutionary orientation.

The 1951 Congress argued that Trotskyists should start to conduct systematic work inside those Communist Parties, followed by the majority of the working class. However, the ISFI's view that the Soviet leadership was counterrevolutionary remained unchanged. The 1951 Congress argued that the USSR took over these countries because of the military and political results of World War II and instituted nationalized property relations only after its attempts at placating capitalism failed to protect those countries from the threat of incursion by the West.

[[File:Ludwig Binder Haus der Geschichte Studentenrevolte 1968 2001 03 0275.4212 (17086177105).jpg|thumb|The [[West German student movement]] in 1968]]
Pablo began expelling many people who disagreed with his thesis and did not want to dissolve their organizations within the Communist Parties. For instance, he expelled most of the French section and replaced its leadership. As a result, the opposition to Pablo eventually rose to the surface, with the Open Letter to Trotskyists of the World, by [[Socialist Workers Party (United States)|Socialist Workers Party]] leader [[James P. Cannon]].

The Fourth International split in 1953 into two public factions. Several sections of the International established the [[International Committee of the Fourth International]] (ICFI) as an alternative centre to the International Secretariat, in which they felt a [[Marxist revisionism|revisionist]] faction led by Michel Pablo had taken power and recommitted themselves to the Lenin-Trotsky Theory of the Party and Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1967/party.htm |title=The Revolutionary Party & Its Role in the Struggle for Socialism |last=Cannon |first=James P. |via=[[Marxists Internet Archive]]}}</ref> From 1960, led by the [[Socialist Workers Party (United States)|U.S Socialist Workers Party]], many ICFI sections began the reunification process with the IS, but factions split off and continued their commitment to the ICFI.<ref>{{cite book |title=The Heritage We Defend |last=North |first=David |author-link=David North (socialist) |publisher=[[Mehring Books]] |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-929087-00-9 |pages=Sections 131–140}}</ref> Today, national parties committed to the ICFI call themselves the [[Socialist Equality Party (disambiguation)|Socialist Equality Party]].