- IX - León Trotsky and his legacy: a thousand and one times slandered, a thousand and one times falsified

Why was a character as Trotsky so slandered in History? For the German imperialism and the 14 imperialist armies, defeated by the Soviet and European proletariats in the ‘20s, Trotsky was “a vile and bloodthirsty assassin”, who “massacred defenceless children”. For Stalinism, that usurped the power in the Soviets, Trotsky had turned a counterrevolutionary agent working for the Japanese Mikado and the German Nazi Gestapo. For the Gestapo “there was not a more dangerous red agent” than him.
Thus Trotsky ended as a refugee in Mexico, without a visa, calumniated as being an agent of Franco and then of Cardenas. When Stalinism signed the “non-aggression” pact with Germany in 1938 (the so called Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement) the Soviet bureaucracy accused Trotsky of being an agent of US President Roosevelt. Under those terrible conditions, however, Trotsky had brought into being the international centre of the Fourth International, a net of steady revolutionaries who from Portugal to Moscow organized the soviet section and put in place a revolutionary party in the own heart of the US, the SWP of young Cannon.
Why so much slandering against this revolutionary “personality”? we may ask ourselves. UK Prime Minister Churchill and US President Roosevelt, the representatives of the British and American imperialists, respectively, discussed about who would win if the US took part in the war. Both of them agreed in that no doubt “the winner would be Trotsky”, in spite of the latter not having but a few thousand followers in the world.
For the class enemy and its general staffs, in this case the chiefs of the “democratic” imperialist gangs, Trotskyism, as in 1948 had been the League of the Communists of Marx and Engels, meant the looming ghost of revolution. They knew that war engenders revolutions and that Trotskyism could well be the midwife of revolution in the same way that the internationalists that met in the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal –who scarcely filled a sofa in 1914 when the 1WW was at its beginning- had been.
But Trotsky, as well as Lenin, not only was calumniated and falsified. He was also revised, tried to be softened, put to the feet of the Castros, the Titos, the Maos, or any “left” or “progressive” social democrat appeared in the world. His legacy was submitted to the cheapest trade-unionism and not less cheap parliamentarism.
What explanation has the terrible fury with which they act in this 70th Anniversary of Trotsky’s murder? What explanation can be given to such an amount of falsifications and impostures from those that have long ago broken with Trotskyism and its legacy? We have to be clear: so much ignominy exist so that not even one Trotskyist dares to commit himself to the task of reviving and applying the theoretical and programmatic legacy of the Fourth International, which keeps all its vigour and validity; they don’t wont that even one Trotskyist dare to occupy the empty chair in the congress of the founders of the Fourth in order to give continuity to the revolutionary Marxist program before the new developments with the method of historical-dialectical materialism, under the banners of the theory of Permanent Revolution and the program for the seizing of power. They want that not even one Trotskyist dare to put again in place an international centre for grouping the world proletariat under the banners of internationalism.
It is for them a question of life and death that a fulcrum isn’t created for the levers to be applied by any revolutionary worker in the world who wants to fight for the international proletarian revolution and unite with his/her class brothers and sisters in the world –as the only possibility for victory in each country- under the stainless banners of the program of the founders of the Fourth International of 1938, of Zimmerwald-Kienthal and the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky in the ‘20s.
The reformists, servants to the bourgeoisie and those who pay them, the finance capital and the capitalists, all of them know that if the internationalist fraction of the world proletariat returns to the heart of the exploited, the revolution will return as that of the worker councils in Germany, the soviets with revolutionary leaderships will return in order to take the power, revolutionary parties will emerge in the imperialist powers that will tie their destiny to that of the proletariat of the colonial and semi colonial world oppressed and massacred by their own imperialist bourgeoisies. In the semi colonial world the revolutionary parties will emerge again that will not cede a step or give the most minimum support to the cowardly national bourgeoisies and their governments, but will tie the fate of the proletariat of the colonies and semi colonies to the victory of the proletariat in the imperialist powers.
They know that there are accounts to be settled and that the militant internationalism of the revolutionary fraction of the world proletariat will certainly settle them. The time will come in a moment when the Chinese workers have already begun to struggle in mutinies, revolts and revolutionary actions.
From Kyrgyzstan, from the periphery to the centre, the proletariat of the former USSR threatens to return to the stage with revolutionary manoeuvres. The heroic combat of the Afghan masses poses a Vietnam-like scenario. The ghost of Trotskyism is frightening all the class enemies.