Only a handful of the 46 people elected to the union's national executive committee are Trotskyite.

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Mr Jospin was for years a Trotskyite, dedicated, like Genoa's extremists, to the overthrow of global capitalism.

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The last time I was in Liverpool, Derek Hatton's Trotskyite militants were running the city council in the 1980s.

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For the next, the pollsters predict he will get just 5-6%, behind even Arlette Arguiller, the amusingly perennial Trotskyite candidate.

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But then the old Trotskyite theory of the permanent revolution was predicated on the notion that the forces of counter-revolution, too, were permanent.

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Arlette Laguiller , leader of the Trotskyite Workers' Struggle, is an almost iconic figure: in 1974 she was the first woman to run for president.

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Scottish protesters had more convincing alternatives, such as the Trotskyite Scottish Socialist Party (which won six seats) led by the charismatic Tommy Sheridan, and the Greens, who picked up seven seats.

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But what I want to focus on is a sin of Hitchens that Seymour, being a Marxist and a Trotskyite, is in a very poor position to denounce but that ought to outrage anyone with a functioning moral compass.

FORBES: The 'Unhitched' Controversy And Christopher Hitchens' Fondness for Leon Trotsky