Leon Trotsky

Returning to the sources

Andrew Coates reviews The Two Trotskyisms confront Stalinism, edited by Sean Matgamna. Part one of the review was printed in Solidarity 394. The debates in this volume are about the armed foreign policy of the USSR. But behind this is the issue of the nature of that regime. Some might consider that arguments about the character of the former Soviet Union — whether it was a workers’ state, a degenerated workers’ state, state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivist, a “new class society” — resemble discussion on the Trinity. If some Trotskyists have sunk into religious veneration for Trotsky a...

The world economy since 2008

Since the immediate recovery from the great 2008-9 economic crisis, world economic growth has been slow and troubled. Major areas have slipped back into recession. Now a “third leg” of the crisis, or even a new crash, are possibilities for 2016. Martin Thomas surveys the path, the causes and the sequels of the crisis. The story started in finance. In June 2005 mortgage interest rates in the USA started rising sharply. They levelled off and declined after July 2006, but in the meantime house prices had reversed their giddy rise of previous years. House prices would continue to fall until...

“Unite the workers and bury the religious hatreds”

At Workers’ Liberty 2015 summer school, Ideas For Freedom, Michael Johnson summarised on the history of the far left in Northern Ireland. Here we publish his presentation. Marc Mulholland’s speech in the same session was published in Solidarity 386 . There are two main approaches that Trotskyists have taken to Ireland since partition in 1921. Both approaches are wrong in different ways. The main problem with both of them is that they ignore the democratic programme to overcome an unresolved national problem which is dividing the working-class movement in Ireland. The first approach I want to...

Orthodox Trotskyism reshaped Trotsky's ideas

Paul Le Blanc’s review of The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 2 ( Solidarity 388) is a thoughtful and detailed piece. Le Blanc defends The Two Trotskyisms against some on the left who deride the book as pointless obsessing over long-ago spats. He is right to do it: such complaints remind one of Homer Simpson, who, warned that he’s late for English class, sneers “Pff! English, who needs that? I’m never going to England!” The truth is that the two Fate of the Russian Revolution books are about the Trotskyist movement as it is right now. They are not just...

The mass psychology of Islamo-fascism

This is a regular guest column by Eric Lee of LabourStart. There can be little doubt that the murderous ideology of Islamic State is a form of fascism. In discussing how the left should react to it, it is therefore necessary to return to our sources, to learn how earlier generations of socialists understood — and fought — fascism. In that fight, Trotsky was of course an inspiring and authoritative figure. As opposed to the Stalinists, who saw no difference between the Nazis and the Social Democrats (and indeed sometimes preferred the Nazis), Trotsky understood fascism to be a mortal danger to...

Beyond the fragments of the Trotskyist movement

Why is the revolutionary left today in such a mess? Why are the politics of the SWP, the Socialist Party, the various Fourth Internationals and most of the splinters, grouplets and fragments so incoherent? When did it start to go wrong for the classical Marxist tradition, which had reached such a flowering with Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks? And what were the alternatives, the roads not taken or barely trodden, which might help orientate Marxists today in the situation we start from? The AWL’s new book, a second volume of documents from the early Trotskyist movement goes a long way...

The two Trotskyisms

This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the murder of Leon Trotsky by an agent of the Stalinist USSR’s secret police. Next month, Workers’ Liberty will publish a second volume of documents from the movement which kept alive and developed the revolutionary socialist politics Trotsky fought for. Just before Trotsky’s death, the American Trotskyist organisation split after a dispute triggered by Stalin’s invasion of Poland. The majority was led by James P Cannon, the minority by Max Shachtman. Shachtman’s “heterodox” side, would later repudiate Trotksy’s analysis of Russia as a...

From permanent revolution to permanent confusion

Originally published in two parts in Workers' Liberty magazine in 1986-7. 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. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was one of the most important of his contributions to Marxism, but it has become one of the most vulgarised aspects of his legacy. In particular, the theory of permanent...

Tasks of Communist Education (1923)

It is frequently asserted that the task of communist enlightenment consists in the education of the new man. These worda are somewhat too general, too pathetic, and we must be particularly careful not to permit any formless. humanitarian interpretation of the conception “new man” or the tasks of communist education. There is no doubt whatever but that the man of the future, the citizen of the commune, will be an exceedingly interesting and attractive creature, and that his psychology (the futurists will pardon me, but I fancy that the man of the future will possess a psychology) will be very...

Permanent revolution and the Irish left

Workers’ Liberty has recently examined Trotskyist debates on Ireland (Trotskyists debate Ireland WL 3/45). There is another set of relevant debates worth looking about: over how, and if, Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” relates to Ireland. The first debate took place in 1966-67 in the largely émigré Irish Workers’ Group (IWG). It was an attempt to clear away some of the confusions generated by a mechanical application of the theory to Irish realities. In 1983, another debate took place in Socialist Organiser (forerunner of Solidarity ). That debate showed how confusion present in the...

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