Trotskyism on the 12 Axes

Leon Trotsky led the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and, after Lenin's death, lost the struggle for power to Stalin, who expelled him from the country in 1929. In exile he developed the theory of permanent revolution: socialism cannot survive in one country and must spread internationally, especially to advanced economies. He described the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state ruled by a privileged bureaucracy, and in 1938 he founded the Fourth International, which later split into many rival groups across Europe, Latin America and Asia. Trotskyists keep Lenin's vanguard party and central planning, so they stand close to Leninism, but they stress internal party democracy and internationalism far more, and they reject the Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country.

• Revolutionary Socialism 85%Revolutionary socialism holds that capitalism cannot be reformed away and must be overthrown by a mass uprising of the working class, which then reorganizes society on socialist lines.
• Marxism 82%Marxism is the body of theory begun by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that explains history through class struggle and expects capitalism to give way to a classless, communist society.
• Leninism 73%Leninism is the theory and practice of Vladimir Lenin: a disciplined vanguard party leads a revolution, takes state power and builds socialism through a dictatorship of the proletariat.
• Eurocommunism 71%Eurocommunism was a current within Western European communist parties in the 1970s that sought socialism through parliamentary democracy and independence from the Soviet Union.