Workers' Liberty

This article by Leon Trotsky, "On the theses, Unity and Youth" (summer 1934) gives us, I think, the essential indications of what is wrong with the LCR Platform B's use of the idea "working-class political representation" to justify a search for a reformist combination with the Communist Party and fragments of the Socialist Party.

The split in Respect though ‘finalised’ in the sense that the SWP and George Galloway are unlikely to work together again has still not run its course.

By Victor Serge

Lev Davidovitch
By Victor Serge

It was to the cause of the workers that Leon Davidovitch devoted his long life of toil, combat, thought, and inflexible resistance to inhumanity. All those who approached him know that he was disinterested and conceived of his whole existence only as part of a great historic task, which was not his alone, but that of the movement of the socialist masses conscious of the perils and possibilities of our period.

By Leon Trotsky (August 1937)

Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through.

This is the 90th anniversary of the Russian workers’ revolution of November 1917. Since the fall in 1991 of the Stalinist regime which eventually overwhelmed the workers’ government and made a counter-revolution in the 1920s, more has been available to researchers in the west. Some new books have advanced our understanding of the revolution. None, however, can match the exciting exposition of the course of 1917, in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution

* The 1906 Speech of Leon Trotsky, on Trial for His Life, to the Tzarist Court.
* Introduction: Sean Matgamna

The “war on terrorism” being waged by George W Bush’s US hyperpower and its political satellites, such as Tony Blair’s Britain, poses strongly the question of the attitude of Marxists toward political violence.

Memories of Leon Trotsky by Max Shachtman

Max Shachtman

The disclosure [in Trotsky’s diary of 1935] that Trotsky contemplated taking his own life, or, as he put it himself, reserved the right to determine the time of his death, will startle, perhaps even dismay, many who followed his rich and robust career.

“I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.”
Leon Trotsky, April 1940

By Natalia Sedova Trotsky

“I can therefore say that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as an exception to the rule.” Trotsky: June 8, 1940.

Leon Trotsky October 1879 — August 1940 - The Spartacus of the 20th century

Trotsky’s critics

The assassination of Leon Trotsky

Natalia Sedova Trotsky

“I can therefore say that I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as an exception to the rule.”

By Larissa Reissner

Jean van Heijenoort was for seven years (1932-9) Trotsky’s secretary. Here he outlines the story of Trotsky’s break with the Communist International and turn towards building a new international. His account of Trotsky’s reasoning on the class nature of the USSR is an important element in the history of post-Lenin revolutionary Marxism.

Anatoly V. Lunacharsky

I first met Trotsky in 1905, after the event of January [when the Tsar’s soldiers opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in St Petersburg]. He came to Geneva, I have forgotten whence, and was to speak with me at a big meeting called to discuss that tragedy.

By Charles Cornell*

One must understand Trotsky’s passionate devotion to the cause of the oppressed to appreciate the full import of his work. He hated the injustices and indignities forced on man with his whole being. His polemics against political opponents are not at all the brilliant stylistic exercises which his petty-bourgeois critics make them out to be. Nor did he dash them off with the literary glibness which they attribute to him. Trotsky’s powerful and incisive writing merely reflects his ardent convictions in the struggle for the liberation of mankind. The barbs of his sharp pen were completely at one with his hatred of all that degraded humanity. The style was truly the man. He did not write with facility at all; his polished writing was the result of strenuous and lengthy application.

By Jean van Heijenoort

Everything that the liberals have written on Lenin is barren, revealing the limitations of their thinking rather than Lenin’s genius. An even more difficult object study for them is Trotsky.

Introduction

The legacy of the Bolsheviks

The fact that the Bolsheviks staked their whole policy on the world revolution of the proletariat is precisely the most striking testimony to the range of their far-sightedness, to their fidelity to principles, and to the daring impetus of their policy…

Though Leon Trotsky’s writings on Spain fill a large volume, he wrote no concise overview of the Spanish revolution. Our “diary” is culled from the commentaries he produced all through the last decade of his life: the last item here is dated 20 August 1940, the day Trotsky was assassinated.

By Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was murdered by an agent of the Stalinist USSR in August 1940. Leon Trotsky was a great defender of the traditions pursued by the Bolshevik Party when they made a revolution in Russia in 1917. One of the Bolshevik’s great contributions to socialist ideas was their approach to the national question.

By Clive Bradley

In latter-day Trotskyism the theory of 'permanent revolution'-- anti-landlord or anti-colonial revolution being merged with socialist revolution under the leadership of the working class -- has become a dogma, used more to obscure the fact of many colonies winning freedom on a capitalist basis than to enlighten. Clive Bradley discusses the issues.

By Sean Matgamna.

19O5: strikes broke out in December 1904 and January 1905. On 9 January workers marching to the Tsar's palace lo appeal for his help were shot down. The strike wave grew.

An article by Trotsky from 1940

By John O'Mahony

Workers' Liberty Numéro 3/8

L’autre histoire du trotskisme américain

(Introduction du numéro 3/8 de novembre 2006 de la revue Workers’ Liberty qui reproduit quatre textes de Max Shachtman : Quel est le rôle de l’organisation révolutionnaire ? paru dans New International d’Avril 1945, Vingt ans du trotskisme américain et La fondation du Workers’ Party, parus dans New International de janvier - février 1954, L’accusation de Natalia Trotsky contre la Quatrième Internationale de Cannon de 1951. Ce numéro reproduit aussi la lettre de rupture de Natalia Sedova Trotsky du 9 mai 1951 adressée au comité exécutif de la QI et au comité politique du SWP.)