page_title: Anti-Stalinist left
section_title: Trotskyism
hierarchical_section_title: Anti-Stalinist left / Trotskyism
caption_attribution_description: part of the Rivera mural "El hombre en cruce de caminos" (1934) in the Bellas Artes building, Mexico City.
context_page_description: The anti-Stalinist left comprises various kinds of communistic left-wing politics opposing Joseph Stalin, Stalinism and the actual system of governance Stalin implemented as dictator of the Soviet Union between 1927–1953.
  It may also refer to centre-left wing opposition to dictatorships, cults of personality, totalitarianism and police states, all being features commonly attributed to Stalinist regimes such as Kim Il-sung, Enver Hoxha and others, including in the former Eastern Bloc.
context_section_description: Associates and followers of Leon Trotsky were organized in the Left Opposition within the Communist parties before they were purged in the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. Trotskyists differ from most other ideological manifestations on the "anti-Stalinist left" in that they, like Marxist–Leninists, also claim to be Leninists. Subsequently, his followers formed the Fourth International in opposition to the Stalinist Third International. Trotsky saw the Stalinist state as a deformed workers' state, where a political structure gave most workers very little power in decision making.
  Trotsky and his followers were very critical of the lack of internal debate among Stalinist organizations and societies and political repression enacted by Stalinist governments (i.e. the Great Purge); nationalist elements of Stalinist theory (the Socialism in One Country thesis, for example, adopted by Stalin as state policy), that led to a very poor revolutionary strategy in an international contest (and breaking with the internationalist traditions of Marxism); and its totalitarian, bureaucratic, obscurantist, personalistic, and high repressive methods (which Trotsky called "inquisitorial", in a speech that was read and broadcast in English). Less orthodox Trotskyists and other critics of Stalin have seen it as a new form of class state, called bureaucratic collectivism (James Burnham, Milovan Đilas and Max Shachtman) or as state capitalist (Tony Cliff, C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya).
caption: A Diego Rivera mural (Man, Controller of the Universe) depicts Trotsky with Marx and Engels as a true champion of the workers' struggle.
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