Workers' Liberty

In answering your question I will endeavor to jot down here, as a preliminary to an exchange of opinions, a few general considerations pertaining to the slogan of workers’ control of production.

So far in this series we have looked at how Marxist socialists developed their ideas about how a political programme should look. We have also seen, by looking at programmes for the current economic crisis, a little of how the left relates to this task today. But what about the tradition on which the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty bases itself — the politics personified by the activity and writings of Leon Trotsky?

When in 1938 Trotsky wrote the document which became known as “The Transitional Programme”, the founding statement of the international group he helped set up, what was he trying to do? What did that group, the Fourth International, stand for?

In the first two articles of this series, we looked at how, after the Russian revolution, the Communist International developed the concept of “transitional demands”. Many socialists in the international movement before the First World War had instead operated with a combination of “minimum programme” (minimal demands, enough for now and for the foreseeable future) and “maximum programme” (the goal of socialism, put off indefinitely).

1. Fascism and War Are Threatening!
To all the toilers of France!

Post-Trotsky “Trotskyism” became known to a very large reading public in Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky. Its three volumes were published over a decade up to 1963, when the last one, The Prophet Outcast, came out.

A biography of Leon Trotsky written by an author who understands that his life was nothing more than his political ideas and political activities, is of necessity a political document. The fact that this biography is written by Isaac Deutscher gives it more than ordinary importance.

Can socialism be built through tyranny? Max Shachtman on Isaac Deutscher's "Trotsky". Download as pdf (see "attachment")

EX-COMMUNIST CONSCIENCE.
"The day I meet old Trotsky,
He'll take me by the hand
And peer suspiciously

COLLAGE FOR A BLEAK APRIL

[The third part of this is
also listed separately as:
"What Is To Be Done?"]

APOLOGIA
Should I one day run into Trotsky,
I think I'd shake like a child:
How could I look him in the eye,

Lenin and Trotsky lost

Lenin and Trotsky lost; defeated, they died.
You tell me: "They could not have ever won,
Those blood-infected dreamers, who essayed

VICTORY OR DEATH!
Waning unsatisfied, he can not rest,

Introduction:
Marxism and Lenin's "State and Revolution"

THEIR MORALS AND OURS
(In Memory of Leon Sedov)

Moral Effluvia

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

“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.”