The commemoration meeting in memory of Leon
Trotsky was an outstanding success. 300 people gathered in the Jose Felix Rivas
hall of the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas to hear the first ever public
event organised by a government ministry on the life of Leon Trotsky. At the
entrance to the theatre staff handed out a leaflet with the programme for the
day, a short brochure that provided a brief background to the life of Trotsky
and the speakers present a poster with a sketched picture of Trotsky with a
quotation from his Testimony.
One of the main speakers was Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson, the son of
Trotsky’s daughter Zinaida. Esteban outlined some of the most brilliant
achievements of Trotsky’s life, such as his role as the founder of the Red
Army, and then explained the struggle that Trotsky waged against the Stalinist
degeneration of the October revolution. Esteban explained how this struggle led
to the creation of the 4th international in 1938, which was organised in Europe
by Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, who was murdered by Stalin’s agents in Paris as
part of Stalin’s attempt to destroy Trotskyism, which is to say the traditions
of Bolshevism. Esteban finished by describing the last period of Trotsky’s life
in Mexico when Esteban lived with Trotsky and Natalia Sedova, Trotsky’s second
wife, when there was more than one attempt to murder Trotsky. The first was
carried out by David Alfaro Siqueiros, a famous Mexican painter and a leader of
the Mexican CP, who was part of a group of CP members who entered the house in
the middle of the night and sprayed Trotsky’s bedroom with bullets without
turning on the light. Esteban commented that a painter should never change his
painting instruments for a gun. But such were Stalin’s resources and
determination to murder Trotsky that it was only a question of time before the
inevitable happened, and on August 20th Ramon Mercader brutally
murdered the man who together with Lenin led the October Revolution. Esteban
described how he was not in the house at the time because he was at school, and
that he will never forget how he walked back from school towards the house, and
saw a crowd of people standing outside, which told him that something terrible
had happened.
Ydalberto Ferrera, a Trotskyist in his 90s from Cuba, then spoke about how he
and other Trotskyst militants fought against the Machado dictatorship, which
was overthrown by a revolutionary movement in 1933. However the working class
was not able to take power and the army, led by Batista, launched a coup
against the popularly elected "government of the 100 days". Unfortunately, due
to the degeneration of the Communist International under Stalin, the Communist
Party in Cuba also degenerated, sending ministers into Batista’s government in
1942. The best elements of the Cuban CP took up the banner of Trotskyism to
defend the best traditions of the CP, and in the 1950s supported Castro’s
movement against the Batista dictatorship while the CP stood aside until the
last minute. When Cuba entered the Soviet camp Soviet advisers forced the
government to arrest and imprison the Cuban Trotskyists, and in jail they
created branches to support Castro and the Cuban Revolution. This history demonstrates
that Trotskyism is the genuine tradition of working class struggle that the
Cuban Communist Party of Julio Antonio Mella was set up to defend, and did
defend before the influence of Stalinism ruined the CP.
The subsequent speakers underlined the fact that Trotskyism is not something
foreign or imposed on the struggle against imperialism in Latin America.
Ricardo Napuri, the Peruvian Trotskyist and former Air Force officer, explained
how he gave Che Guevara books by Trotsky. Although Che didn’t call himself a
Trotskyist, his struggle against bureaucracy and his struggle to extend the
revolution throughout Latin America clearly corresponds to Trotsky’s struggle
against bureaucracy and the Stalinist distortion of socialism in one country in
the USSR. Celia Hart, a Cuban Communist and a very public Trotskyist, then
talked about the relevance of the permanent revolution in developing both the
Cuban and the Venezuelan revolutions, as part of a continental Latin American
revolution.
Comrades from the CMR (the Revolutionary Marxist Current) in Venezuela were
also present at the meeting and intervened with a stall outside the meeting,
and the sales of the stall, which exceeded 1 million bolívares (465 US$),
demonstrates the thirst for ideas, particularly the Marxist and revolutionary
ideas of Trotsky that the Bolivarian revolution has generated. Indeed before
the meeting Celia Hart ran up to the stall because the Minister had asked for
her book, published by the Spanish comrades from the Frederick Engels Foundation.
The fact that Trotsky is popular in Venezuela was reflected also in a market
trader setting up his stall with Trotsky and Che t-shirts, since this is a
profitable line of trade today. But the fact that it is the ideas of these
revolutionaries that is in demand explains why yesterday we had a very
successful day, and the trader selling t-shirts was left to look on at our busy
stall enviously.
Indeed the interest was so great that after the Trotsky meeting had finished we
stayed there selling material, gathering names of support for a petition
calling for the nationalisation of the Sanitarios Maracay and Sidor factories.
And this was because in another theatre an even bigger meeting (an assembly of
the PSUV) was held on President Chavez’s proposed amendments to the
constitution with the participation of well-known figures from the national
assembly. This meant that the discussion of Trotsky was linked yesterday and
will remain linked in the future very concretely with the programme of the
PSUV, and the need for the nationalisation of the banks, industry and the land
under workers’ control as the only way to defeat capitalism and imperialism, as
well as the dangers of reformism, corruption and bureaucracy that threaten the
revolution from within, just as they threatened and then destroyed the Soviet
Union, as Trotsky warned in his masterpiece The Revolution Betrayed. It
has to be said that the dangers the revolution faces and the need to carry it
forward, with the full democratic participation of the working class, is
instinctively understood by the working class, which is why the workers and the
masses have enthusiastically joined the PSUV. Except for visitors to Venezuela
from abroad everybody who gave their name to us was a member of the PSUV. And
all these comrades from the PSUV are looking for clear ideas and for a
coordinated plan to campaign in an organised manner against reformist elements
within the party for a working class programme for the PSUV.
Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, which was actually outlined in
essence by Marx, and the history of the Russian revolution, completely destroys
all the arguments of the reformists. They say that Venezuela is seeing a
struggle limited to fighting imperialism, which has nothing to do with Marxism
or 1917. But Marx himself began his political activity by fighting for the
bourgeois democratic revolution in Germany, while 1917 saw the working class
coming to power on a programme to solve the agrarian question and break
Russia’s dependence on imperialism. This is why the main slogan of 1917 was
"peace, bread and land" and not nationalisation under workers’
control, which followed in 1918. This is because the bourgeoisie in countries
dominated by imperialism is so rotten that it is incapable of fighting
imperialism. And this means that the task of fighting imperialism falls to the
working class, in alliance with the peasants in the countryside. A group of
peasants from Yaracuy came up to the stall and bought pamphlets by Marx and
Rosa Luxemburg as well as the paper of the CMR, El Militante, and
explained how they are concretely battling against the reformist elements in
the PSUV in their area. The peasantry is looking to form links with the working
class in the towns to defend itself from attacks organised by the landed
oligarchy today. Its level of consciousness and organisation is much better
than in Russia in 1917, while the working class is numerically much stronger in
Venezuela today than it was in Russia. If the struggle against imperialism is
waged by the working class it is organically linked to the struggle for the
socialist revolution and nationalisation under workers’ control, and there are
very favourable conditions for this to happen. It is only a question of
building the organisation of the working class, and as part of that, of the
organised Marxist current of the PSUV, the CMR.
And while the struggle against imperialism when it is led by the bourgeois is
limited to creating conditions for the development of national capitalism, the
struggle against imperialism led by the working class is international based on
the international unity of the working class. This unity was indicated by the
number of supporters of the Bolivarian revolution from abroad who were at the
meeting and many of whom came up to the CMR stall yesterday, from Spain, the
US, Britain, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador and Honduras. The
debate on Trotsky here is set to be reproduced in all these countries, the
spectre of communism in the 21st century.
