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What was this 'revolutionary method' which Trotsky felt urgent to pass on to the new generation?
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It involved the skills acquired through experience, but above all it involved the will and the ability to succeed in
transforming society using social forces and their revolutionary might in struggles, however small. This was the method which
the Russian revolutionaries had started to implement in 1917 under Lenin's leadership.
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The revolutionary tide had ebbed unexpectedly and dramatically. In the name of communism the Stalinists were working to push it
back even further. What was needed was to find the means to force history back onto its course, using the resources of the
working-class movement.
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To this end, a whole proletarian generation was available, a communist generation. Though it was now heading for catastrophy
without understanding that a false road had been followed for several years, it had not taken the revolutionary road simply to
end up as cannon-fodder for some sinister 'Father of the People'.
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Trotsky hoped that, through the forthcoming revolutionary crisis, this communist generation would rejoin the Fourth
International
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Despite the disappointments and the severe blows it had experienced, the working-class movement had still the strength to change
the world.
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The new generation, born with the century, had experienced success as well as failure. But in either case it had waged strikes,
insurrections and revolutions. It had taken what was best in social-democracy before being won over to the best of communism -
the revolutionary impetus of bolshevism.
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With the rising revolutionary wave this generation had fought in different countries under a common flag. Through this common
struggle it had become deeply internationalist. It had become even more consciously so with the foundation of the Third
International in 1919, even though joining a new organisation and adopting a new programme could not by itself bring about a
real understanding of the "revolutionary method" referred to by Trotsky.
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Yet, all through this period, this generation had discovered many ways of organising, legally and illegally, aimed both at
spreading ideas and intervening in events. From the early 1920s, it had covered the whole capitalist world with a network of
communist cells and nuclei, for political as well as military purposes, which were all based on a communist consciousness,
solidarity and morals. It started to function as a revolutionary yeast against the capitalist order.
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The sharpest and most experienced batallions of this generation were in the USSR. By the end of the 1920s, the old Bolshevik
generation was becoming exhausted and demoralised, and it gradually capitulated to the Stalinist bureaucracy... But another,
younger, generation was also active. It was this which made up the militant backbone first of the Trotskyist opposition in the
USSR then of the International Left Opposition after 1927-1929 when Trotsky was exiled and eventually expelled from the USSR.
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This generation succeeded in convincing militants in the various sections of the Third International that Stalinism was a
mistake. These militants were either contacted abroad by members of Russian diplomatic missions or even in Moscow during travels
or conferences. Some were influenced, some were shaken, some actually won over in this way.
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By the end of the 1920s the Stalinist dictatorship was still far from stable. But it became wary of the situation and tightened
its grip. People were arrested and even deported. Unlike the older generation the youth held out longer against against Stalin.
But it was to meet with the same tragic end. Trotsky was left without any practical means to direct the work of this generation
and it ended up in the jails and the camps, particularly in Vorkuta where two to three thousand Trotskyist oppositionists were
systematically executed in small groups between March and May 1938.
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Yet the discussions and the debates continued in the USSR itself. But always secretly, behind the scene. In 1937 Ignace Reiss, a
senior official in the GPU, rallied to the Left Opposition raising a host of relevant criticism against Stalin's policies (he
was immediately murdered by agents of the very same GPU). Probably others made the same choice as they approached the end of a
career of renouncements and servility. They were best placed to know that servility to the regime could no longer safeguard
their lives and they chose to meet an honourable end.
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At the beginning of the 1930s, there were probably tens of thousands of militants in the USSR who could have been invaluable for
an International - even within the secret police, whose members were often former communist activists. But because the
repression had left Trotsky isolated from these militants for the time being, his hopes were pinned on the working-class
movement in the rest of the world with its enormous untapped potential.
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Trotsky's policy of building a new International - a worldwide party of socialist revolution - was of course based on the
strength of the communist programme and methods, on the political heritage of Marx and Engels with the developments made by the
Bolsheviks. But it was also based on the invaluable human heritage made of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of communist
militants all over the world, and of the millions of workers these militants were able to pull behind them.
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Of course some of these communist militants were irreformable, corrupted to the core by Stalinist gangsterism. As a rule these
were the ones selected by Stalin to lead the International and its sections. But Trotsky thought he had a chance to regain from
them the leadership of the militants.
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In 1933, when Trotsky decided to break from the Third International, he was making a desperate search for a way to address this
working-class movement, in particular the German working-class.
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