To what extent have revolutionary Socialists followed the teachings and doctrines of Marx?
Jamie Gibson
No revolutionaries have followed Marx’s writings down to the finest detail, simply because the teachings and beliefs of Marx can rarely be applicable to the country in question, the same rules cannot apply because the situations were inherently different. The Chinese emphasis on the peasant revolution instead of following the Soviet emphasis on the urban working-class revolution was something that the Chinese could not change because they did not have an urban working class. Lenin’s New Economic Policy launched in March 1921 was seen by many in Russia and his party as a ‘Capitalist move’. The NEP was designed to allow farmers to sell their surpluses to a free market, as a means to compensate for the hardships experienced during the civil war.
Trotsky is often seen as closely following Marxist teachings and has a massive amount of support all around the world surpassing perhaps Lenin’s popularity, partly because of his ‘true’ Marxist beliefs and partly because of his encouraging oratory skills. Trotsky called for world and permanent revolution, he argued that in countries where the bourgeois democratic revolution had not triumphed already it was necessary that the proletariat carry out the tasks of that revolution, and make it permanent by carrying out the tasks of the social revolution at the same time in an uninterrupted process. Over the years Trotsky has won great support all over the world and even in Britain with the Socialist Workers party calling itself Trotskyite. Trotsky believed that he died a true Marxist “I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist”. To an extent Trotsky was the ‘ultimate’ Marxist as he was relatively working class, a great orator/leader and he intensely believed some of Marx’s key ideas like world/permanent revolution.
