Leon Trotsky

Before the year 2018 reaches its end, the 100th anniversary of the death of Georgi Plekhanov should be noted and remembered. He is sometimes referred to as the “father” of Russian Marxism, and for good reason. Plekhanov was the most important figure in the early Russian Marxist movement, a major theorist and voice in the Second International; and, as a member of the editorial board of Iskra, a collaborator with Lenin in the first years of the twentieth century. Plekhanov and Lenin were to go their separate ways. By the time of the October Revolution in 1917 Plekhanov had moved considerably to...

People tried to construct flying machines for thousands of years before the first planes were built in the early 20th century, and the first regularly-produced helicopters from the 1930s. Suppose a historian were to study all the documents she or he could find about that effort, prior to say 1900, but without registering that the purpose was to find a flying machine. Maybe the historian would imagine that the purpose was just to find some way of getting from place to place, and would comment: why didn’t they just walk? John Kelly, an academic at Birkbeck University, structures his account of...

Why revolutionaries organise The working class has the potential to become a great power in society, but can make that potential a reality, even on the most limited scale, only by organisation. That fact follows from two facts about the working class in developed capitalist society. It is the basic productive class. It is simultaneously a wage-slave class. Its members are relegated to relative poverty, cultural and educational restrictions, insecurity, and exhausting work burdens of parcellised tasks. Individual workers, without collective organisation, are merely troops under capitalist...

From The Left in Disarray Central to the formation of the ideas of the ostensible left on imperialism and anti-imperialism has been the fact that the Orthodox Trotskyists conflated working-class socialist revolution and the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, in what they saw as a variant of Trotsky's permanent revolution. What is "permanent revolution", as Trotsky expounded it? The French revolution had been a particularly radical bourgeois revolution against the remnants of feudalism in France. Tsarist Russia needed a similar revolution to establish civil liberty and a...

A small pamphlet published by us in 1989, reprinting extracts from Trotsky previously presented by us in 1983 with a new introduction. For something like two decades, from the mid-1950s, trade union militancy in Britain increased in a succession of waves. There were ebbs as well as flows, of course, but each time the movement picked up again and rose higher. That working- class movement frustrated a series of attempts by the ruling class to change Britain to their own advantage. It stopped the ruling class from ruling as it wanted to and as the needs of the profit-regulated capitalist system...

In the discussions prompted by centenary of the first workers’ government, little has been said about the Bolsheviks and their science policies. This series of articles about Marxism, the Bolsheviks, Stalin, and science draws, amongst other sources, on Simon Ings’ recent book Stalin and the Scientists,1 Douglas R Weiner’s book Models of Nature,2 and Loren R Graham’s Lysenko’s Ghost.3 “No previous government in history was so openly and energetically in favor of science. …[it] saw the natural sciences as the answer to both the spiritual and physical problems of Russia” (Graham quoted).1 “An...

Klara Feigenbaum, a Trotskyist activist of Romanian origin, known as Irène, died at the age of 97 in March 2017, a year ago. Alongside her then-partner David Korner, alias Barta, she founded the “Groupe Communiste”, which in 1944 took the name “Union Communiste” (UC), and which led the 1947 Renault strike alongside the militant worker Pierre Bois, at a time when the CGT and the PCF (which was then in the government) were opposed to all strikes. It was from this group that would later spring Voix ouvrière (although Irène was only active in it for the first few years) and then Lutte ouvrière and...

The US constitution famously states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed”; historically, revolutionary democrats insisted on this right as a guarantee against arbitrary state power and the development of tyranny. But the early United States was a society composed predominantly of independent small farmers, with only a small urban population. It is obvious that carrying a gun around your farm is different from carrying a gun in the hot house of a big city packed with people, full of social tension and with numerous potential flashpoints for violence...

Here's a 2015 letter (not from one of us) to the US magazine The Nation : "I’m respectfully requesting that you retract the slur 'Trotskyite' in Richard Kreitner’s column on Bill Kristol. Kreitner incorrectly uses this derogatory word in reference to Kristol’s father, Irving. "The difference between 'Trotskyite' and 'Trotskyist' is a bit like the difference between the 'N-word' and 'black' or 'African-American'. As I recall, the pejorative 'Trotskyite' was coined by Stalinists, casting Left Opposition followers of Trotsky as anti-Soviet fifth columnists and/or fascist agents. The slur...

The Russian Revolution has had all sorts of things grafted onto the image it projects to us. But what was it in reality? In the revolution, the workers and the farmers — and the soldiers who were mainly peasants — revolted against the ruling classes and the war. This was a tremendously democratic movement. It was a movement that created soviets, that is workers’ councils. No powerful state made the revolution. It was the people, the workers, the red guards in St Petersburg and Moscow, the factory militias. What they thought they were doing was liberating themselves from all future class rule...