Leon Trotsky

Problems of Trotskyist history

Problems of Trotskyist history: introduction to Shachtman's Where is the petty-bourgeois opposition? George Santanyana’s aphorism, “Those who do not learn from history are likely to repeat it”, is not less true for having become a cliché. And those who do not know their own history cannot learn from it. Take the history of the Trotskyist movement — that is, of organised revolutionary Marxism for most of the 20th century. To an enormous extent the received history of that movement is not “history” but the all-too-often mendacious, and always tendentious, folklore generated by competing sects...

1940: Max Shachtman's reply to Leon Trotsky - A “petty bourgeois” opposition?

Where Is the Petty Bourgeois Opposition? A Repeated Challenge Remains Unanswered. In his open letter to Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Shachtman, repeating the challenge issued by the Minority since the moment it was accused of representing a petty-bourgeois tendency in the party, declared: “... it is first necessary to prove (a) that the Minority represents a deviation from the proletarian Marxian line, (b) that this deviation is typically petty-bourgeois, and (c) that it is more than an isolated deviation — it is a tendency. That is precisely what has not been proved.” Comrade Trotsky has been the...

Cliff's state capitalism in perspective: The "Russian Question" in Britain in the 1940s

Click here to download as pdf Click here to download as epub Click here to download as mobi Or read online below: Introduction I. The great riddle of the twentieth century II. 1917 and Marxist socialism III. Trotsky IV. Trotsky's picture of the USSR V. 1933: Trotsky discusses state capitalism VI. 1933: Trotsky discusses 'bureaucratic collectivism' VII. Perspectives: before World War Two VIII. The results of World War Two IX. The other Trotskyists: the Workers' Party X. One, two, many state capitalisms XI. Tony Cliff's revolution in science XII. Cliff and Haston-Grant XIII. Being arbitrary XIV...

How the Trotskyists fought and died in Stalin's camps

Suzanne Leonhard, once a militant of the Spartakusbund in Germany and a personal friend of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, was forced to flee Hitler’s Germany because of her underground Communist activities. She sought refuge in the USSR. In October 1936, Stalin’s secret police arrested her and she spent ten years in Stalin’s forced labour camps. On her liberation (living in Western Germany), she wrote a book on her experiences in these camps, One Quarter of My Life. The following extract tells the story of Yelena Ginsburg, one of many Trotskyists who died in Stalin’s jails. She was then...

Antarsya and the united front

The second Conference of Antarsya, the main far-left coalition in Greece outside of Syriza and the Stalinist KKE, took place on 1-2 June. It was marked by increased participation, and involved over 1,000 elected representatives of local and sectoral committees across the country. More than 3,000 militants were involved during the preconference talks. The conference opened with a motion of solidarity with the Turkish protesters. Greetings were received from a range of other far-left, trade-union, and working-class community organisations. Arif Raman, a Bangladeshi migrant workers’ rights...

Trotsky and the Communist International

The rich and noble history of the Communist International, formed in a period of tremendous class struggles, has yet to be written. Trotsky has contributed a considerable amount of material toward that history and a portion of it is now available in The First Five Years of the Communist International. Since the formation of the Comintern in 1919, a new generation of revolutionaries has grown up. It knows little about the travail which attended its birth, the heroic period of its early growth, the tremendous figures – martyrs all – of the world revolutionary movement who directed its destinies...

Wellington seafarers and the invasion of Finland

Readers with a knowledge of the history of Trotskyism will know that the USSR’s invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 marked a turning point for the movement. It triggered a fierce debate, and eventually a split among the US Trotskyists. What is less well known is that a contemporary parallel development emerged among the Wellington [New Zealand] seafarers. The Evening Post of 7 December 1939 reproduced the full text of a long resolution passed by a stop-work meeting of the Federated Seamen’s Union which expressed its “profound sympathy with the people of Finland now suffering under a brutal...

One million council homes

It is time for Trotsky’s transitional programme list of demands and the key demand is the building of one million new council houses over four years. This demand was put forward by Owen Jones in The Independent recently. Building one million new council houses over four years answers the question which many workers ask about what a workers’ government would do. A council house building programme can be achieved under capitalism but raises a whole series of questions about how such a demand can be met. One answer is to use the £24 billion a year currently paid to private landlords via housing...

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky: ABC and NEP

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky (1886-1937), was a Bolshevik, economist, and one-time member of the Trotskyist Left Opposition against Stalin. From 1904, Preobrazhensky sided with the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, becoming a member of its Ural provincial bureau of the Party. During 1917, he was a delegate of the Chita Soviet in south-east Russia, and became a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. In 1918, Preobrazhensky sided with Bukharin and the Left Communist faction against signing the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. In...

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