Trotsky, Trotskyism and Trotskyites
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has warned that his party could be taken over by old Trots - Trotskyist entryists, who have no interest in winning elections but instead see Labour as a vehicle for revolutionary socialism.
But what is a Trot, who was Leon Trotsky and what do his followers in Britain actually want?
David Aaronovitch is joined by:
Prof John Callaghan, Salford University
Amy Leather of the Socialist Workers Party
Michael Crick author of 'The March of Militant' and a journalist with Channel 4 News
Dr Bert Patenaude, Stanford University, author of 'Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary'
Producer: Joe Kent Researcher: Kirsteen Knight Editor: Innes Bowen.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Survival. That's what's at stake for the Labour Party. |
| 0:07.0 | First they try and enter the party, then they destroy it, |
| 0:10.0 | in order then to try and advance the revolution. |
| 0:17.0 | We've got a considerable number of people swarming into the party, and they, as Tom Watson said, are being manipulated by fairly small but very effective, hard-left Trotskyist groups. |
| 0:30.6 | The T-word, as used by a veteran member of the Labour Party right, MP John Speller. |
| 0:41.1 | But is Mr Speller correct, as Marxists say? |
| 0:43.4 | Who are these Trotskyists? |
| 0:45.1 | How many of them are there? |
| 0:46.7 | And what do they believe? |
| 0:49.2 | Step into the briefing room, |
| 0:53.6 | where, under a portrait of the goateed, long-dead Russian revolutionary, we'll try and find out. |
| 0:58.0 | But first, who was Leon Trotsky? |
| 1:06.0 | One of the reasons that Trotsky was so attractive a figure |
| 1:09.0 | is that he is this unusual combination of the man of ideas and the man of action. |
| 1:16.6 | Really one of the most charismatic revolutionaries of the 20th century. |
| 1:22.6 | Bertrand M. Patenord is a biographer of Trotsky and lecturer at Stanford University in California. |
| 1:29.7 | He agreed to help us chart the revolutionaries' life |
| 1:32.7 | and explain his enduring appeal. |
| 1:35.1 | The great what-if of Soviet history, |
| 1:39.4 | what if Trotsky, the great cosmopolitan, |
| 1:43.2 | internationalist, intellectual, had come to lead the Soviet Union |
| 1:48.5 | instead of the backward autocratic dictatorial Stalin. |
... |
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