Description
By Peter Jenkins
“For Trotsky and his followers in the newly founded Fourth International (FI), the Second World War represented such an ‘abyss’. His catastrophist perspective was held by this organisation to provide a literal prediction of the actual course of events. It counterposed to the decaying and stricken democracy of the bourgeoisie the tradition of direct soviet democracy, which alone could provide the basis for overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society.
This outlook has contributed to the current impasse of Trotskyism, and its relative weakness in the labour movement. This perspective of capitalist ‘decline’ has focused its attention away from the central problems of the strength of bourgeois democratic institutions and the lasting hegemony of reformist ideas amongst the working class. The question of precisely how this will be changed is too often left to the operation of ‘objective factors’, such as economic collapse, or betrayal by Labour or trade union leaderships.”
