Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky was one of the most recognisable leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution in the international press, alongside Vladimir Lenin. He played a decisive role in the creation and solidification of the new Bolshevik regime in Russia, particularly in his capacity as people’s (...)
Exactly eighty-one years ago, on 20 August 1940, an ice axe was plunged into Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s skull at his residence in Coyoacan, Mexico by Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río who was a Spanish communist and a Soviet agent of Joseph Stalin. Trotsky succumbed to his injuries the (...)
More than one friend has expressed the hope that I would write a report on my experience in attending an international conference on Leon Trotsky to be held in Havana, May 6-8, 2019 – so I have felt even more compulsion to craft such a report than I would have otherwise. Since I have come down (...)
Remarks prepared for the Havana Conference, May 6th-8th, on the occasion of the centennial of the founding of the Third International, on the topic of “Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism”.
Any discussion that has Trotsky’s ideas as a subject, and which at the same time commemorates the one hundredth (...)
We publish below a longer version, with footnotes, of Paul Le Blanc’s presentation at the Trotsky conference held in Cuba [See his report on that conference, ESSF (article 48872), International conference: Trotsky in Cuba, 2019.]. The title of this talk – “the darker the night, the brighter the (...)
Netflix’s Trotsky miniseries demonizes its namesake with antisemitic themes and rank nationalism.
Since its December 2018 debut on Netflix, historians have cataloged the inaccuracies of the Russian miniseries Trotsky [[https://www.timesofisrael.com/russian-tv-series-claims-jewish-trotsky-masterminde
Netflix’s ’Trotsky’ is a sinister and reactionary rewriting of history, intended to benefit the right-wingers who dominate modern Russian politics.
Watching the miniseries Trotsky, made by Russia’s Channel One in 2017, it is hard not be reminded of Christopher Nolan’s entries into the Batman (...)
Nicolas Calas (1907-88) may be the most visionary poet, art critic, museum curator, cultural historian, and lifelong Trotskyist of whom you have never heard. Writing decades before Fredric Jameson’s classic The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) declared, “Always (...)
Paul Le Blanc is the author of Leon Trotsky (London: Reaktion, 2015). Alan Wald’s review appeared in our previous issue, ATC 178 (“Between the Power and the Dream,” . MY THANKS TO Alan Wald for his generous and thoughtful review of Leon Trotsky. He raises important questions about violence, terror (...)
Leon Trotsky. Paul Le Blanc. London: Reaktion Books, 2015, 224 pages, 35 halftones. Paper: $16.95. A Volume in the “Critical Lives” series, distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press.
Review by Alan Wald in Against the Current #178 (September 2015). A reply by Paul Le (...)
This new intellectual and political biography of Lev Davidovitch doesn’t pretend to bring sensational new discoveries from the archives in Moscow, but it gives us a wonderful introduction to the ideas and struggles of the founder of the Red Army. Sympathetic but even-handed, it emphasizes the (...)
In response to my critical review of Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky , a reader of the journal Links wrote the following response, with a question and suggestion:
“As usual, a very good article by Paul. I would describe myself as a socialist (or communist) and I think all the usual (...)
Review of:
The Marxism of Leon Trotsky. By Kunal Chattopadhyay. Kolkata: Progress Publishers, 2006, 672 pages, including index, $25 paperback.
Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. By Marcel van der Linden. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, 379 pages, including index, $20 paperback. KARL MARX (...)
The Conference on the Legacy of Leon Trotsky and U.S. Trotskyism took place on July 25-27 at the Bronx campus of New York City’s Fordham University. As one of the people who helped plan and organize the conference, I would like to offer a few reflections. In what follows I will avoid critical (...)
“Results and Prospects”, from Leon Trotsky, was published for the first time in 1906 after the major experiment of the 1905 Russian revolution [ESSF].
The historical context
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, as sketched for the first time in his essay Results and Prospects (1906), was (...)
This year we commemorate the deaths of three leading figures of our movement. Daniel Bensaïd Marxist activist and philosopher, emerging from the May 1968 movement in France, who died too early in 2010 after a life as leader of the French section and the Fourth International. Ernest Mandel whose (...)
Trotsky made an inestimable contribution to the preservation and development of revolutionary Marxism in the first half of the 20th century, both by his militant activity and by his analyses.
This contribution embraces a vast terrain stretching from the comprehension of particular societies (...)
Taken from the Introduction to the First (Russian) Edition
Vulgar ‘Marxism’ has worked out a pattern of historical development according to which every bourgeois society sooner or later secures a democratic regime, after which the proletariat, under conditions of democracy, is gradually (...)
I HAVE RECEIVED, COMRADES, from the bureau of your cell, documents outlining your university’s work over three years. At my request the comrades marked out all the most essential points with a red pencil thereby considerably easing my task of becoming familiar with the documents for, and I do (...)
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