The International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO) was established in 1992 at an international conference in Florence, Italy.
The conference brought together Trotskyists from a number of countries. The essential idea uniting the people attending the conference was to reconstruct the Fourth International as an authoritative World Party struggling to overthrow capitalism. Our approach to achieving this was:
a) to participate with our small forces in the daily struggles of the working class;
b) to intervene patiently and constructively into the crisis of the existing international organisations identifying themselves as Trotskyist to organisationally reconstruct and politically regenerate the Fourth International;
c) to encourage the, generally marginalised, forces identifying with Trotskyism to intervene themselves in the larger organisations of the broad workers vanguard and, in particular, the left splits from the mass workers parties which were then developing in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism. The ITO has supporters in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Malaysia, the Ukraine and the United States.
--that since the so-called "free market" began to replace the centrally-planned economies in the ex-USSR and eastern Europe, the infant mortality rate has risen sharply and life expectancy has plummeted?
--that in the West, in the period since 1979, trades union membership has declined substantially, mass unemployment and the underclass have become a permanent feature of life, casualisation of labour has mushroomed and the gap between rich and poor has increased dramatically?
Trotskyists are not, and never have been, Stalinists: we have never defended the repression of the working class by the former Stalinist regimes in the Eastern bloc countries. However, we do say that, despite the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy by the Stalinists, the basic economic welfare of workers in these societies was much more secure than it is now (could it be any worse?). This was a direct result of the centrally-planned economy established by the 1917 Russian Revolution. Please do not accept the fabrications of bourgeois literature on this question. We do not accept that Leninism led to Stalinism. Read for example Moshe Lewin's book, Lenin's Last Struggle. Trotskyists continued to struggle against Stalinism after Lenin died. See also Leopold Trepper's The Great Game. Trepper was not a Trotskyist himself, but he acknowledged the bravery of the Russian Trotskyists in the 1930s in the face of Stalin's repression.
If you believe that improvements in technology should be used to benefit working people instead of throwing them on the scrapheap. If you think that working people of all races, nationalities, sexes, and sexual orientations (straight, gay or bisexual) etc., have the same rights and common interests, then you are a socialist. JOIN US! Struggle for a better, more egalitarian and more humane society!
For More information, e-mail us at itofi@igc.org