ABSTRACT
This chapter examines more fruitful lines of inquiry into the weaknesses and failings of world Trotskyism, centred on the role of doctrine and its relevance, or otherwise, to contemporary politics. Powerful, sometimes rigid, attachment to the core elements of doctrine generates the most characteristic features of Trotskyist policies and political thinking and accounts for its chronic and persistent inability to garner any kind of popularity: the alleged impossibility of reforms; the crude reduction of world politics to a binary choice between ‘socialism and barbarism’; the insistence that every significant social, political and economic problem can be solved only under socialism; the dismissal of parliamentary democracy and politics as an irrelevance; the desperate illusion that every new protest, strike or insurgency could be the harbinger of an upsurge in revolutionary class consciousness and of a revolutionary struggle for power; and the continued inability to acknowledge and understand the persistent and pervasive unpopularity of Trotskyist ideas.
