Use the coming weeks to study

Submitted by AWL on 7 December, 2021 - 10:56 Author: Martin Thomas
Marxist study

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading.

Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism, for £10 post free.

It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work through alongside day-to-day activism.

Their scope and relevance is explained by Sean Matgamna in the Introduction to The Two Trotskyisms:

"In The Fate of the Russian Revolution, volume 1, I assembled key texts of a strand of Trotskyist thinking which had been confined to the archives for many decades, the “Heterodox Trotskyism” of Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, C L R James, Al Glotzer, and others. [Volume 2] continues that work of rediscovery. It documents the fact that the characteristic ideas of later “Orthodox Trotskyism” — “objectively revolutionary” Stalinism; socialist revolution by “bureaucratic impulse” or by Stalinists being “compelled” by circumstances; the supposed self-sufficiency of a “party” apparatus with an allegedly “finished” programme; the fetishisations of some formulas of Trotsky’s, such as that the USSR was a “degenerated workers’ state” — had developed within a year or so of Trotsky’s death in 1940, though it took another decade for them to develop into a locked-down system."

"It makes the case that revolutionary socialists today who want to find clean political ground on which to rebuild, in labour movements where seepage from many decades of Stalinism still poisons the ground, must go back to re-examine the old debates and the flaws and lacunae in the political legacy which Trotsky left at his death — back to 1940...

"In history, revolutionary movements suffer defeat and again defeat. That is in the nature of things for movements confronting the entrenched might and power of ruling classes. There are no words of explanation and consolation that can make that historical reality less bitter. But the movement continues, because the bourgeois oppression to which revolutionary socialism is the opposite and the antidote continues.

"The defeated bear their defeat honourably, and work to prepare the future. Brave young people pick up the fallen banners. They try to learn from the past.

"To learn from the past we must know the past. To renew and build on the history of the Trotskyist movement it is necessary to know that history. It is necessary to know the whole heritage; to know that, important as the Orthodox organisations are, theirs has not been the only strand of Trotskyism, or the best. The Heterodox are pivotal in the history of Trotskyism, and in its future. Don’t mourn: study, think, and organise! Or, as James Connolly used to put it: hope, and fight!"

The largest of our other books, The Left in Disarray, takes up the same thread by tracing the differentiations of the would-be Trotskyist left through later decades, from the 1950s through to the new century. £6 half-price: all three books for £13.

We encourage readers also to use the coming weeks to study Marxist classics. We have run Zoom study groups since early 2020 on Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and Revolution Betrayed, and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Notes from all those courses, as well as from many other courses on classic texts which we have run over the years, are available on our website here.

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