Trotsky actually defended Stalin till 1938 by opposing the Fourth International founded in 1921 and defending the Comintern as a tool for the Russian state as it excluded the working class from its own parties internationally. This was the reverse policy of the British Marxists, (Marx predicted that a successful revolution against capitalism would come first from the UK) who were removed by Stalin and Trotsky’s Comintern. The unity of opposites of Stalin and Trotsky could not hope to produce a real revolution but only a return to Russian capitalism. The unity of Trotsky and the “state capitalists” or British Marxists produced the delayed unity of the Fourth International of the post-WWII era. The full force behind the unity became clear when Trotsky’s own wife became a state capitalist after his death. Schachtman, a close collaborater of Trotsky’s during the 30s defended the theory.

State capitalism as a description of the Russian state was a term that originated in the writing of Pankhurst, a leading British Marxist. It followed from Lenin’s theory that a revolution that did not spread from Russia to Western Europe would not end capitalism, and would lead to a restoration of capitalism in Russia as well. Even under Marxist leadership, Pankhurst argued, a Russian revolution could not establish socialism without taking over the accumulated economic capital of Western Europe. It would have to accept a definition of itself as half socialist and half capitalist, and it would have to share power with the Menshevik Party that argued for an intermediary capitalist government after the revolution against the Tsar.

Lenin’s theory left out the fact that the Bolsheviks already abandoned the world revolution at Brest-Litovsk. They also abandoned democracy by using political appointments and a political police to replace all elected candidates, as written about by Rosa Luxemburg. At that point, Trotsky went along with Lenin while attempting to cover up the secret war on the workers and the war aginst the concept of internationalism as a core communist principle of the Comintern. He gave up on his pre-war dream of uniting the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Pankhurst summed up the response of Marxism to these changes by founding the Fourth International 17 years before Trotsky finally submitted.

This secret war that Trotsky fought with Stalin against Pankhurst has to do with the economic causes of the civil war, the world war, and to secret diplomacy and covert class warfare in general. The British Marxists were already excluded as if by accident by the British authorities from participating in the Zimmerwald Conference, which was the Communist conference that seperated Leninism and internationalismfrom the rest of Social Democracy, i.e. the Second International, such as that which conquered Germany through the Social Democratic Party after WWI and the UK through the Labor Party. The Democratic Party has incorporated social movements in a similar way under capitalist leadership. By the impossibility of unity with these parties, we mean that the workers must leave their organizations and join ours, accepting our leadership of the Left and the Revolution and the new state. Had the British Communists participated, they could have incorporated rules into the resolutions of the Zimmerwald Conference to protect against the autocracy of the Russian side, Lenin’s side of the International pro-Labor and anti-War movements.

These new left-center parties arose out of a definite class war against the Third International and later the Fourth International as well. However, no war can prove to the working class that it is not a revolutionary class. The working class always reawakens to realize once more that it is a revolutionary class and must again and again and again rise up until it succeeds in taking the power.