Leon Trotsky
The Fourth International and Trotsky's Transitional Programme - North London AWL branch meeting
Submitted on 22 February, 2008 - 13:02
Red Rose, 127 Seven Sisters Road, near Finsbury Park tube (Picc/Victoria)
North London's AWL branch meetings are open to all. At the moment we are doing a series on the life and work of Leon Trotsky.
This week the focus is on his “transitional programme”, a method by which to relate immediate struggles in the here and now to the ultimate goal of revolution, by posing demands which implicitly raised questions about power in society and the rule of capitalism.
Reading: The Transitional Programme (the Pathfinder edition with associated articles and transcripts of discussions is particularly useful). http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm. Short reading: the programme itself, the first seven sections up to and including “‘Business secrets’ and workers’ control of industry”
For more info contact David Broder - 07828 844695/davidthetrot@googlemail.com
Trotsky on the struggle against fascism - North London AWL branch meeting
Submitted on 22 February, 2008 - 12:51
Red Rose, 127 Seven Sisters Road, near Finsbury Park tube (Picc/Victoria)
North London's AWL branch meetings are open to all. At the moment we are doing a series on the life and work of Leon Trotsky. This week the focus is on his writings on the struggle against fascism.
In the 1930s, as the Kremlin-backed German Communist Party ignored the Nazi threat, claiming that fascists were no worse than Social Democrats, Trotsky highlighted the danger fascism posed to all democratic and workers’ organisations and made the case for working-class forces to form a united front against the Nazis.
Suggested reading: The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (or the Bookmarks collection: Racism, Stalinism and the United Front) (1930-1934). Alternatively all of Trotsky’s writings on Germany of this period are collected at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/index.htm
Short Reading: The United Front for Defense: A Letter to a Social Democratic Worker (1933)
For more info contact David Broder - 07828 844695/davidthetrot@googlemail.com
Trotsky on Art and Literature - North London AWL branch meeting
Submitted on 22 February, 2008 - 12:46
Red Rose, 127 Seven Sisters Road, near Finsbury Park tube (Picc/Victoria)
North London's AWL branch meetings are open to all. At the moment we are doing a series on the life and work of Leon Trotsky. This week the focus is on Trotsky's writings on Art and Literature
“Before the proletariat will have passed out of the stage of cultural apprenticeship, it will have ceased to be a proletariat. Let us also not forget that the upper layer of the bourgeoisie passed its cultural apprenticeship under the roof of feudal society; that while still within the womb of feudal society it surpassed the old ruling estates culturally and became the instigator of culture before it came into power. It is different with the proletariat in general and with the Russian proletariat in particular. The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture. The working-class strives to transform the state apparatus into a powerful pump for quenching the cultural thirst of the masses. This is a task of immeasurable historic importance. But, if one is not to use words lightly, it is not as yet a creation of a special proletarian culture.”
Suggested reading: Literature and Revolution (1924) - http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/index.htm.
Short reading: Chapter 6: Proletarian culture and proletarian art.
For more info contact David Broder - 07828 844695/davidthetrot@googlemail.com
An article by Trotsky relevant to the LCR's debates
Submitted on 26 January, 2008 - 09:36
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.
Chris Harman on Respect
Submitted on 4 January, 2008 - 17:52
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.
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Leon Trotsky
Submitted on 16 December, 2007 - 16:57
By Victor Serge
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Leon Trotsky
Submitted on 16 December, 2007 - 16:57
Lev Davidovitch
By Victor Serge
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Lev Davidovitch Trotsky
Submitted on 16 December, 2007 - 16:57
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.
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1917 + 90: Leon Trotsky — Stalinism and Bolshevism
Submitted on 11 December, 2007 - 22:30
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.
1917 + 90 — Leon Trotsky: All power to the soviets!
Submitted on 19 November, 2007 - 10:02
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
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Trotsky's Courtroom Speech — "In Defence of Insurrection"
Submitted on 22 October, 2007 - 23:57
* 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.
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The Trotsky I knew
Submitted on 26 August, 2007 - 23:39
Memories of Leon Trotsky by Max Shachtman
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A Life For Socialism: Leon Trotsky — October, 1879 - August 21, 1940
Submitted on 26 August, 2007 - 08:22
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.
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Trotsky and 21st century socialism
Submitted on 24 August, 2007 - 23:38
“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
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The assassination of Leon Trotsky
Submitted on 21 August, 2007 - 23:39
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.
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The assassination of Leon Trotsky
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:20
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.”
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Trotsky and the Red Army in the civil war
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:17
By Larissa Reissner
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The break with the Communist International
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:16
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.
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How Trotsky saw himself
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:15
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.
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Trotsky's habits of work
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:14
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.
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Trotsky's critics
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:13
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.
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Leon Trotsky October 1879-August 1940: introduction to the documents
Submitted on 15 August, 2007 - 09:10
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…
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The Spanish Revolution and the Civil War, 1936-9 - A "Diary" of Events, by Leon Trotsky
Submitted on 26 July, 2007 - 13:02
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.
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Trotsky on the national question
Submitted on 21 June, 2007 - 05:45
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.
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Permanent revolution after Trotsky
Submitted on 25 May, 2007 - 23:02
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.
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The fate of the Russian Revolution: introduction to Trotsky's "Three Conceptions"
Submitted on 25 April, 2007 - 23:02
By Sean Matgamna.
Glossary for Trotsky's "Three Conceptions"
Submitted on 25 April, 2007 - 22:46
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.
Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution
Submitted on 25 April, 2007 - 22:35
An article by Trotsky from 1940
The Life of Leon Trotsky
Submitted on 21 April, 2007 - 18:48
By John O'Mahony
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L’autre histoire du trotskisme américain
Submitted on 20 April, 2007 - 07:09
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.)
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