EUROPE is awash with racism and reactionary nationalism. Nothing could be a bigger indictment of the failure of the 'official' labour movement – of the social democratic and Stalinist parties. The collapse of the Stalinist system in the east combines with the chronic failure of the social democratic parties to offer the prospect of radical change during the last 20 years.
Social democratic governments, like those of Mitterrand in France and Gonzalez in Spain, have provided nothing but austerity and slavish support for the priorities of the market.
The international political scene is profoundly affected by this failure of the dominant trends in the labour movement. The space has been opened up for a reactionary offensive claiming socialism is 'dead'.
For millions of people worldwide this offensive has credibility because of the experience of Stalinism and social democracy, forces which became profoundly reactionary and conservative.
In many countries there is much discussion on the left of the necessity for a 'refoundation' of socialism. In Italy, because of the right-wing collapse of the once-powerful Italian Communist Party, a new party of 'communist' refoundation will be formed this autumn.
Marxists should not be afraid of the idea of a refoundation of socialism. A renovation of what has passed for socialism for the last hundred years is vital.
Democracy
But the events in eastern Europe are graphically showing what is *not* the answer – the capitalist market plus liberal democracy. A good example is contemporary Poland, where the market and liberal democracy have led to authoritarianism and economic collapse.
Socialism needs an alternative framework that shows how anti-capitalism and the idea of a socialised economy can be combined with democracy.
The international workers movement needs an alternative vision of a movement that can wipe out capitalism without imposing the rule of the tanks and secret police.
Any such project will inevitably confront the ideas of Leon Trotsky. It is no accident, for example, that Joe Slovo and other leaders of the South African Communist Party are forced into grappling with Trotsky in discussing 'what went wrong' in the Soviet Union.
This is not just an historical question, a question of the fact that Trotsky led the fight against the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. It is a matter of the political content of that fight and its contemporary relevance.
In fact Trotsky analysed the contradictions of the bureaucratic command economy, and predicted its crisis and collapse in a way which makes uncanny reading after what has happened in the Soviet Union. Key to Trotsky's analysis was a refusal to separate 'economics' from 'politics'.
He insisted that a socialised economy could only work, could only ensure high quality production, if it was under the democratic control of the workers, and harnessed their creative endeavours. By contrast, he insisted, a bureaucratic economy could only result, eventually, in stagnation and collapse.
Trotsky's solution – a socialised economy plus democratic workers control – is the only viable solution against the twin evils of the bureaucratic command economy and the capitalist market. Which is why all debates about 'feasible' socialism must eventually confront Trotsky's ideas.
Internationalism
Opponents of Trotskyism generally put the persistence of organised support for Trotsky's basic ideas down to the dynamics of quasi-religious sects. This kind of flip response fails to get to the heart of the matter; it is a way of avoiding dealing with Trotsky's global vision of the nature of socialism and the struggle for it.
It also evades the fact that historically it was the trotskyist tradition which predicted the inevitable collapse of the Stalinist system – a view treated with derision by many left-wingers for decades.
Trotsky argued that the situation in each country was 'an uneven crystallisation of the elements of the world process'. The world could not be understood as the sum of different national situations, but was dominated by the developments of world capitalism and the international class struggle.
This understanding underpinned Trotsky's internationalism. In a world of rapidly advancing international integration of capitalism, with economies dominated by transnational corporations, the need for the international organisation of the workers movement and especially of its revolutionary component is vital.
Permanent Revolution
No idea of Trotsky's has been more controversial than that of permanent revolution. It is a simple idea. In the jargon it says that 'the national and democratic tasks of the revolution cannot be solved outside of the dictatorship of the proletariat'.
Put plainly, it says that in the semi-colonial and dominated countries the way forward to industrialisation can only be opened up by a radical break with imperialism and the domination of the world economy.
The third world is littered with countries thrown into poverty, misery and despair. In the post-war world dozens of bourgeois nationalist governments have taken power with promises of modernisation and progress. Almost invariably they fail, generally declining into corrupt dictatorship.
Permanent revolution points out the necessity for the working class to seize the leadership of national and democratic struggles in the third world, and the fatal consequences of any 'stages' theory – the notion that the struggle for socialism should be abandoned until after national liberation, inevitably leading to the subordination of workers struggle to bourgeois nationalist forces, with disastrous consequences.
Workers' power
Trotsky's writings, especially those of the 1930s, are a vast storehouse of theorisation of the struggle for workers' power. His writings cover the character of the capitalist state and the transition to socialism; the nature of fascism, bonapartism and military dictatorship; the methods for constructing a revolutionary workers' party; the revolutionary programme; working class independence; women's liberation and the struggles of youth; and the fight for the workers' united front.
Focusing all these writings is the idea of leadership, the necessity to renovate the labour movement from top to bottom. Time and again Trotsky returns to the disparity between the objective strength of the labour movement and the working class, and its capacity to reorganise society on socialist lines, and the political weakness of its organisations – dominated by a class collaborationist bureaucracy.
He rejects any notion that this is a problem which will be spontaneously overcome simply by 'struggle'. On the contrary, the renewal of the labour movement is a fight which has to be consciously prepared and organised through a struggle inside the mass organisations and movements of the working class for the programme of workers' power.
Contrary to what is commonly alleged, Trotsky loathed sectarianism or ultra-left impatience. While he was organising the Fourth International he repeatedly insisted that his supporters reject attempts to go outside the existing labour movement, or be satisfied with making 'revolutionary' propaganda, a lesson which many latter-day sympathisers have ignored.
There are vital elements of socialism today which cannot be simply found in Trotsky's work – in particular the centrality of struggles for women's liberation and in defence of ecology. But the political framework for a successful struggle for these goals – the fight for worker's power – directly connects with Trotsky's legacy. If socialism is to be 'refounded' – reorganised and strengthened – the ideas of Leon Trotsky will be a crucial aspect of that process.