Leon Trotsky

Facebook event here.

To mark the 70th anniversary of his murder by a Stalinist agent, AWL North East London is hosting a series of discussions about different aspects of Leon Trotsky's revolutionary politics. Debate is welcome. The meetings will take place at 7:30pm every Tuesday (until Tuesday 2 November) and will include a short business/planning session for members of the AWL NE London branch. For more info, email Stuart (stuartjordan32@hotmail.com) or Daniel (skillz_999@hotmail.com).

Tuesday 19 October – the “French Turn”

In 1934, Trotskyists in France began working inside the SFIO (the broad equivalent of the British Labour Party). What can their experience tell us about how Trotskyists can relate to mass labour-movement parties of that kind?

Facebook event here.

To mark the 70th anniversary of his murder by a Stalinist agent, AWL North East London is hosting a series of discussions about different aspects of Leon Trotsky's revolutionary politics. Debate is welcome. The meetings will take place at 7:30pm every Tuesday (until Tuesday 2 November) and will include a short business/planning session for members of the AWL NE London branch. For more info, email Stuart (stuartjordan32@hotmail.com) or Daniel (skillz_999@hotmail.com).

Tuesday 2 November – Art and revolution

In 1927 Trotsky wrote what remains the definitive contribution to developing a Marxist theory of art. As Stalinist Moscow was churning out grim “socialist realism” and nauseating paintings of heroic peasants and labourers, Trotsky was collaborating with visionary artists such as André Breton to develop a conception of a “free revolutionary art.” We look at his ideas and how the debate between the Stalinist and anti-Stalinist theories of art played out down the decades.

70 years on: celebrating Leon Trotsky's revolutionary life

A meeting to celebrate Leon Trotsky's revolutionary life, on the 70th anniversary of his murder, organised by Workers' Liberty

Speakers include:
Sean Matgamna (Workers' Liberty)
Jill Mountford (Workers' Liberty)
John McDonnell MP
Farooq Tariq (Labour Party Pakistan)
Kim Moody (American union activist and author)
Yvan Lemaitre (New Anticapitalist Party, France)

"For 43 years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for 42 I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I were to begin all over again, I would try to avoid making this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth."

Facebook event here.

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