ABSTRACT
In Soviet Russia and the socialist countries, Leon Trotsky’s name was until recently virtually erased from the annals of the Russian Revolution, dropped down the memory-hole and forgotten. In the west, too, ‘Trotskyism’ is something of a bogey, even though its endemic sectarianism, dogmatic rigidity, and in-fighting have prevented it from gaining any real foothold in the working class. In spite of media hysteria, which at one time blamed the disintegration of the Labour Party on ‘Trotskyist’ subversion, the movement in Britain, as elsewhere, maintains a very fragmented existence. Modern Trotskyism, in its attempts to recruit a mass following, has in fact found itself obliged to move away from the legacy of its founder, whose charisma serves today as little more than a vehicle for romanticized revolutionary myths. The neo-Trotskyist generation ignores Trotsky’s own change of position on the Jewish question in the mid-1930s as a result of the ferocity of Nazi antisemitism.
