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Workers Vanguard No. 1160 |
6 September 2019 |
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TROTSKY |
LENIN |
Trotskyist Defense of the Workers States
(Quote of the Week)
Writing at the outbreak of World War II, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky underlined how revolutionary Marxists must strive to win the international proletariat to defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. Such defense, based on the collectivized property forms in the Soviet Union, did not constitute political support to the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy, which had renounced the struggle for workers revolution internationally. The Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense against imperialism and counterrevolution and for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy today applies to China and the other remaining deformed workers states of Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam.
Mistakes on the question of defense of the USSR most frequently flow from an incorrect understanding of the methods of “defense.” Defense of the USSR does not at all mean rapprochement with the Kremlin bureaucracy, the acceptance of its politics, or a conciliation with the politics of her allies. In this question, as in all others, we remain completely on the ground of the international class struggle....
We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition, not only in capitalist countries but also in the USSR. Our tasks, among them the “defense of the USSR,” we realize not through the medium of bourgeois governments and not even through the government of the USSR, but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a “defense” cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit themselves to be caught unawares, and prepare the general sentiment of their own class for the revolutionary solution of the tasks confronting us.
The defense of the USSR coincides for us with the preparation of world revolution. Only those methods are permissible which do not conflict with the interests of the revolution. The defense of the USSR is related to the world socialist revolution as a tactical task is related to a strategic one. A tactic is subordinated to a strategic goal and in no case can be in contradiction to the latter.
—Leon Trotsky, “The USSR in War” (September 1939),
published in In Defense of Marxism (1942)
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