In Defence of Trotskyism

2018-19

The great scientific socialists, beginning with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, defended the role of the working class as the main agency for fighting capitalism and establishing a new socialist society. This was a thread running throughout their works. The working class, organised and disciplined by mass production, is the only class capable of developing the necessary collective consciousness through their organisations to achieve this task.

In 2018-19, a dispute broke out within the Committee for a Workers’ International (the CWI) over this question. This section of our website brings together key documents produced to defend a working-class, Trotskyist CWI, a process which culminated in the CWI’s re-foundation, and those of the opposition.

Marx
1991

Marxism and the British Labour Party – the ‘Open Turn’ debate

The ‘Open Turn’ debate, the documents of which we present here, took place in 1991 at first within what was then widely known as the Militant Tendency, the British section of the Committee for a Workers’ International, that published the ‘Militant’ newspaper, today called ‘The Socialist’.

Lenin
1989

Party, Programme, Reformism and the International – the ‘Scottish debate’

The Scottish debate covered the questions of the revolutionary party and its programme; reformism; and the role of a workers’ revolutionary international.

Engels
1991

The Collapse of Stalinism

“1991 marked a turning point…We have entered a more disturbed period in world history, marked by sharper inter-imperialist rivalries and a deepening capitalist crisis.”

The world watched as the former Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union crumbled. And the destabilising effects of this and the capitalist restoration in these countries can still be felt today.

Trotsky
Archive site

Visit archive site for more links to debates over the last few decades

Marxist Classics

Recommended Reading

Karl Marx

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto

Marxist view of the development of human society

Frederick Engels

Frederick Engels

The materialist conception of history

The “division of labour”

The “economic conditions”

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

The State and Revolution 

The Historic Service Of Marx And Engels

The Three Sources And Three Component Parts Of Marxism

The Historical Destiny Of The Teaching Of Karl Marx

On The Theory Of Marxism

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

In Defence of October

Stalinism and Bolshevism

Lessons of October

The Class, The Party and the Leadership

Transitional Programme

The ABC Of Dialectical Materialism

Marxism and Individual Terrorism

Leon Trotsky’s Assassination

James Connolly

James Connolly

Socialism Made Easy

The Friends of Small Nationalities

Labour in Irish History

Become a supporter

You can join a section of the CWI in your part of the world