Leon Trotsky

History of the Trotskyist movement

By the eve of Leon Trotsky’s death in August 1940, the American Trotskyist organisation, which was by far the most important group in the Fourth International, had split. Two currents of Trotskyism had begun the process of complete separation, but only begun. It would take most of a decade before the evolution of two distinct species was complete. For brevity they can be named after their chief proponents, James P Cannon and Max Shachtman. Trotsky’s political relationship to those two currents is one of the things that will concern us here. There is no question where he stood in the actual...

Defending the Soviet Union

From Fourth International , May 1944. The collection of articles entitled The New Course was Trotsky’s opening gun in the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. In 1923, the year of the writing of these articles, the Russian Bolshevik Party was passing through a profound internal crisis. It was not the first struggle inside the Bolshevik Party which had grown and developed through many previous internal disputes over questions of program, strategy, and tactics. The 1923 conflict, however, differed from all the previous ones in culminating in the triumph, not of the proletarian-Leninist...

Why we needed a new theory

From New International , August 1944. Leon Trotsky’s name will be forever linked with the Russian Revolution, not of course as a Russian revolution but as the beginning of the international socialist revolution in Russia. He fought for this revolution with pen and sword, from his study and from his armoured train in the Red Army. Between the start of his fight, under Tsarism, and its end, under Stalinism, there is a continuous line, the line flowing from Trotsky’s great contribution to Marxism, the theory of the permanent revolution. Except for the first period of the Bolshevik revolution...

What is Trotskyism?

From The Struggle for the New Course , preface to an edition of Trotsky’s The New Course , 1943 Our criticism of Trotsky’s later theory of the “workers’ state” introduces into it an indispensable correction. Far from “demolishing” Trotskyism, it eliminates from it a distorting element of contradiction and restores its essential inner harmony and continuity. The writer considers himself a follower of Trotsky, as of Lenin before him, and of Marx and Engels in the earlier generation. Such has been the intellectual havoc wrought in the revolutionary movement by the manners and standards of...

What is Leninism?

From The New Course , 1923 Leninism cannot be conceived of without theoretical breadth, without a critical analysis of the material bases of the political process. The weapon of Marxian investigation must be constantly sharpened and applied. It is precisely in this that tradition consists, and not in the substitution of a formal reference or of an accidental quotation. Least of all can Leninism be reconciled with ideological superficialty and theoretical slovenliness. Lenin cannot be chopped up into quotations suited for every possible case, because for Lenin the formula never stands higher...

Trotsky: "The Lever of a Small Group"

A letter to the British Trotskyists, 2 October 1933. The British Trotskyists were then a small group recently emerged from the Communist Party. The Independent Labour Party had been the main precursor of the Labour Party, and then, as an affiliated group within the Labour Party, the main bulk of Labour's individual activist base. In 1932, after conflict with the Labour leadership, the ILP disaffiliated. ILP membership, which had stood at 17,000 in 1932, plummeted to just 4,000 in 1935, but there was also left-wing ferment within the ILP. Trotsky favoured arguing within the ILP for an...

Remember Leon Trotsky!

Articles: Remember Leon Trotsky (Max Shachtman, 1967) Trotsky and Trotskyism Download PDF

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