'Justice demands that Leon Trotsky be restored to his rightful place in the history of the Soviet Union'

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(The following speech was delivered at the Aug. 6 rally in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Fourth International. Esteban Volkov is Leon Trotsky's grandson.)

Human labor is the basis of our survival and progress. It produces almost all the goods that surround us. From very old times, it has been a cherished booty. In almost all societies known by history, there have been individuals, groups, or parasitical classes that through strength, power, or cunning have been able to get hold of other people's labor. With the advent of capitalism and the growth of population, the appropriation of human labor in the form of surplus value became more sophisticated and widely extended. In the present world, the development of modern capitalism, with its ruthless financial imperialism, has widened the gap between the poorest, most vulnerable, larger sectors of population of the world and smaller groups of people who are accumulating inconceivable amounts of riches and power.

And we also have the development of the stratified societies of bureaucratic dictatorships, where on a lesser scale, you can still find great inequalities between the working classes and the power groups.

It is a universal law that every action provokes a reaction. The unfair and heartless exploitation of huge masses of people in the dreary and unhealthy factories of the rising capitalism of the last century gave birth to the response of Marxism. Capitalism, with its more sophisticated form of slavery—without lash or chain, but with the specter of hunger for the worker and his family—was nonetheless cruel. Marxism, the human response to this cruelty, was undertaken by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, brilliant revolutionary thinkers with an inviolable sense of justice. They deciphered the dynamics of history, creating a rational and scientific methodology: historic materialism.

They thoroughly studied the capitalist system, discovering its laws and its unavoidable contradictions. They dedicated their lives to the goal of eradicating forever the exploitation of the working class by parasitic minorities holding power and capital.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, creators of scientific socialism, or Marxist theory, provided the working class and other exploited classes with a powerful ideological weapon to struggle against all forms of exploitation, oppression, and alienation suffered in present society.

Marxism is not a crystal ball nor a magic wand. We don't have any MacGraw Hill book on "How to Perform a Successful Revolution." Marxism constitutes an essential analytical method of economic, political, and social phenomena and a basic tool for any revolutionary process. One doesn't need to be a great strategist to understand the reason for more than a century of constant attacks and distortions against the so-called obsolete ideology of Marxism and for the persecution and extermination of many of its defenders and revolutionary leaders.

The exploited masses, according to the ruling minorities, must be kept away from dangerous ideas and loyal guides. This seems to be the simplest way to try to preserve the happy world of the fortunate minorities at the top of the social pyramid.

Enemies within own ranks

Those who have damaged Marxism most, however, those who have most hampered the struggle of the oppressed, have been the disguised enemies coming from its own ranks. They have been able to confuse, mislead, and distract the oppressed working classes from their revolutionary goals. As the ship of socialism had in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels its two greatest designers and constructors, it also had two expert captains, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, to direct it across the foggy sea of conciliations, class collaboration, and reformism of the social democracy. They were able to direct the craft toward its true revolutionary road, arriving successfully at its port in October 1917 in Russia with its first triumphant revolution.

The revolutionary euphoria didn't last long. Ten years after the glorious October 1917, began the greatest betrayals and distortions of the Marxist principles of internationalism and proletarian dictatorship expressed in workers' democracy, disintegration of the oppressive state, and abolition of human exploitation. These betrayals and distortions were brought about by the Stalinist counterrevolution, which consolidated itself during the lowering of the revolutionary tide of the exhausted and depoliticized masses in the context of the terrible scarcities and isolation of the Soviet Union. The cruel and bloody Czarist dictatorship of ancient Russia showed its repulsive face during the Stalinist dictatorship and its new court of ambitious mercenaries.

Lenin once said that the great revolutionaries, after death, are frequently transformed into harmless icons, canonized by the oppressors to cheat the oppressed masses, castrating their ideas and destroying their revolutionary cutting edge. This became especially true in his own case at the hands of the Stalinist counterrevolution. To the innumerable distortions and falsifications of the Marxist-Leninist ideals, one has to add the endless list of betrayals and crimes.

No justification before history

The pain and suffering brought upon hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens by the backwardness in which they lived for more than half a century and by the stupid enclosure in a schizophrenic world of total misinformation, saturated with lies and monstrous repression brought about by the bloody bureaucratic dictatorship, cannot, nor will ever have a justification before history. Nor will the authors of such aberrations obtain forgiveness.

The Stalinist counterrevolution dedicated itself to the extermination of the revolutionary vanguard of the working classes mainly inside the Soviet Union, and on a smaller scale outside its borders through its satellite parties and the executioners and bloody GPU [Stalin's secret police]. It constantly established treaties with the working-class enemies, aborting many revolutionary movements and facilitating the road for the triumph of Nazism and the Second World War.

The wounds bestowed upon the revolutionary Marxist Leninist vanguard and the exploited masses of mankind were too severe and painful. Because of this, many regimes of exploitation consolidated themselves for long periods of time, and the coming forth of a true socialism was postponed in the world.

The oppressed classes and their revolutionary vanguard had many ruthless visible enemies and others hiding inside their ranks. Fortunately, though, they also had men and women of great minds and of unusual heroism and dedication who gave their whole minds, their creative energy, and even their lives for the struggle for the abolition of exploitation.

Indomitable revolutionary

Leon Trotsky, indomitable revolutionary, great Marxist theoretician, close friend in struggle of Lenin and key element for the triumph of the Soviet Revolution, was one of these men.

His dedication, absolute loyalty to the socialist cause, mixed with his lucid and deep Marxist appreciation of his historical milieu, made him one of the first to understand in its whole severity the Stalinist bureaucratic counterrevolution; that is, the gradual transformation of the true Bolshevik Party, creator of the revolution, into a gigantic and obedient bureaucratic apparatus unconditionally under the orders of Stalin.

In 1923, Trotsky organized the Left Opposition along with other loyal and vigorous revolutionaries. He started the heroic struggle inside the party to restore the true Marxism Leninism, which was the ideological basis for the October insurrection, in defense of the exploited people.

Trotsky tried to save the Russian Revolution from its total distortion and deviation, but the counterrevolution was irresistible, and the Left Opposition, which wielded a difficult and heroic struggle, was ruthlessly repressed. It went underground, and its leaders were sent to Siberia in 1928 and expelled from Russia in 1929.

While Marx studied capitalism from all its angles, disguises, and contradictions, Leon Trotsky studied the Stalinist bureaucracy exhaustively with a Marxist methodology in its morphology and physiology. Half a century later, it is almost impossible to modify his rigorous analysis and concepts of the Stalinist Bonapartism. Today Stalinism can hardly fool even a small child.

Trotsky's most important task

In 1933, Trotsky considered it to be a lost cause to try to straighten the wayward roads of the Third International, which had definitively exchanged Marxism for pragmatism and opportunism and had totally abandoned and betrayed the working class.

Leon Trotsky gave himself to what he considered the most important task of his life: the creation of the Fouth International. This was a task which culminated in 1938, two years before he was assassinated.

Trotsky considered essential the creation of a new proletarian vanguard that could bravely wield the banner of Marxism Leninism and that could be prepared to take action in history. From the time of the Left Opposition, and then later in the Fourth International, Trotskyists have always been in the front lines of the fight against oppression.

Trotskyism is today the main crucible of Marxist thought and action in modern history.

I am moved by a deep emotion, by the fact that at this moment we have here among us comrades, companions in struggle of Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon, the pillars of the Trotskyist movement in the United States. They are for all of us and for the new generation a living example of courage, of full confidence in Marxism, and absolute loyalty to the working classes. I want to convey my profound admiration and respect to all of them.

The duty of the new generation of revolutionary Marxists will be to retake the banner of the fallen in order to continue with the fight for socialism and reach it. In the words of Leon Trotsky: "Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full."

Clear Trotsky's name!

I would like to conclude my talk by taking up another subject: the question of the rehabilitations in the Soviet Union.

If Gorbachev's glasnost [openness] is to have some credibility, it is vital that there should be no forbidden areas. Leon Trotsky must be now be rid of all the avalanche of false accusations, lies, slanders, and falsifications which have been leveled at him and his ideas in the Soviet Union and the other deformed workers' states for more than half a century.

Justice strictly demands that Trotsky be restored to his rightful place in the history of the Soviet Union. His works, writings, and political theses must be published, freely discussed, and objectively evaluated, as must the writings of all the others who played a role in the Russian Revolution.

The analysis and basic ideas of Marxism have in no way lost their applicability. Capitalist society has been able to generate a wealth of knowledge and scientific development. Yet it has not found—nor will it ever find—a formula to eradicate hunger, misery, and injustice from our planet. On the contrary, it has placed the human race on the edge of an infernal atomic conflagration.

The only other alternative before us is a socio-economic system in which humankind can master its own destiny and is not just an object to be used and discarded. Real socialism or barbarism, that is our dilemma.

I would like to end up with these words: I had a very difficult childhood, very lonely and full of suffering. But today, after more than half a century, I feel like a privileged human being. I had one of the most interesting and passionate lives to have been an actor and witness to one of the most important historical moments in contemporary history.

I feel that, in a way, I am a very lucky human being to be able to see, after these 50 years of absolute darkness, a change underway in history. I feel we are starting to see some light. Today I see closer the possibility of the advent of socialism.