Trotskyism

Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism and Leninism developed by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky together with other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox and revolutionary Marxist and a Bolshevik-Leninist. The doctrine favours workers' control of production, council democracy, a vanguard party of the proletariat, socialist internationalism and a transitional programme, and it rests on Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, which Trotskyists set against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Trotskyists criticise the bureaucracy and anti-democratic current that grew in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the movement is organised in several internationals and in parties across Europe, Latin America and North America, of which the French party Lutte Ouvrière is one.