Leon Trotsky

Stalinist Terror: The First Sixteen Years, to the Murder of Trotsky

The Struggle Begins THE murder of Leon Trotsky culminated an epoch. It marked the end of the epoch of Old Bolsheviks, for Leon Trotsky was the lone survivor of that grand school of revolutionary Marxists. His murder at the same time was the final personal victory of Cain Stalin, and, if any more evidence was required, of the irrevocable counter-revolutionary degeneration of his bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and therewith the Communist International. The struggle in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between the Russian Left Opposition and the Stalin regime was accompanied by the...

Sixteen Years Of Stalinist Terror and the Murder of Trotsky

The Struggle Begins THE murder of Leon Trotsky culminated an epoch. It marked the end of the epoch of Old Bolsheviks, for Leon Trotsky was the lone survivor of that grand school of revolutionary Marxists. His murder at the same time was the final personal victory of Cain Stalin, and, if any more evidence was required, of the irrevocable counter-revolutionary degeneration of his bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and therewith the Communist International. The struggle in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between the Russian Left Opposition and the Stalin regime was accompanied by the...

Leon Trotsky: Stalinism and Anti-Semitism

At the time of the last Moscow trial I remarked in one of my statements that Stalin, in the struggle with the Opposition, exploited the anti-Semitic tendencies in the country. On this subject I received a series of letters and questions which were, by and large – there is no reason to hide the truth – very naive. “How can one accuse the Soviet Union of anti-Semitism?” “If the USSR is an anti-Semitic country, is there anything left at all?” That was the dominant note of these letters. These people raise objections and are perplexed because they are accustomed to counter-pose fascist anti...

How Trotsky Worked

When Engels, revered patriarch of international social democracy passed away peacefully in London, burdened with years, the end of the century was approaching which separated the revolutions of the bourgeoisie from those of the proletariat, Jacobinism from Bolshevism. The transformation of the world, announced by Marx, was to become the immediate task, and revolutionists were to know un-paralleled vicissitudes. And in fact the heads of the three greatest revolutionary leaders since Engels sustained the blows of reaction. The historian of the future will not fail to see in this one of the...

Leon Trotsky and the (Shachtman) Workers Party (1946)

The infancy and childhood of the movement was fortunate in having the intellectual leadership of one of the greatest minds of all time, Karl Marx. It was doubly fortunate in having in Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a genius in his own right, whose true stature always remained obscured in the public mind as a result of his modest subordination to the towering height of Marx. The period of the formation of the Second International under the sound, experienced guidance of Engels, his last great service to the working class, coincided with the rise of the Marxist movement in Russia. The...

The fate of the Fourth International: 75 years on

This article was written to mark the 50th anniversary of the Fourth International in 1988. In September 1938, 30 Trotskyists met in Paris and declared that the 'World Party of Socialist Revolution” was now in existence, the fourth Marxist International, in the direct line of succession from Marx and Lenin. Workers' Liberty bases itself on the politics personified by Trotsky until 1940. Yet we find ourselves at odds on many issues with almost all the wide spectrum of groups which today call themselves Trotskyist. We have recently concluded that we can no longer give even the most qualified...

75 years ago: the Fourth International is founded after a 15-year fight against Stalinism

Max Shachtman, writing in 1938, surveys the stages of the long struggle against Stalinism which was crystallised in September 1938 by the founding of the Fourth International. Shachtman, who together with James P Cannon had represented the US Trotskyist organisation there, had chaired the Founding Conference. Just as the main body of the Communist International came out of the Second International, so the roots of the Fourth International are to be traced to the beginnings of the crisis in the Third. Fifteen years have elapsed since the movement now organized under the banner of the Fourth...

Atomic Energy: for Barbarism or Socialism? A Socialist Manifesto From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

A comprehensive Trotskyist response to the new age which opened with the American atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It was published in Labor Action, New York, at the end of 1945. "The impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast." - From a Tokyo broadcast describing the result of the atomic bomb dropped by a Superfortress on Hiroshima. The explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the missiles that were produced by the United States for the...

The Price of Isolation for the Russian Workers and their Revolution

The world is paying dearly for the isolation of the Russian Revolution, paying in blood and sweat, and tears and in car- nage and destruction such as history records nowhere else. The Bolshevik Revolution of November, 1917, opened up a new eporh for mankind. It contained, the promise of a life of security and peace, of abundance and brotherhood, of equality among men in a world freed of classes and class rule. What no other social upheaval before it had even dared to hope for, the Russian Revolution proclaimed boldly and confidently. Not the great French revolution, not even the Paris Commune...

The Price of Isolation for the Russian Workers and their Revolution

The world is paying dearly for the isolation of the Russian Revolution, paying in blood and sweat, and tears and in car- nage and destruction such as history records nowhere else. The Bolshevik Revolution of November, 1917, opened up a new eporh for mankind. It contained, the promise of a life of security and peace, of abundance and brotherhood, of equality among men in a world freed of classes and class rule. What no other social upheaval before it had even dared to hope for, the Russian Revolution proclaimed boldly and confidently. Not the great French revolution, not even the Paris Commune...

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