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Author : Richard B. Day Publisher : Cambridge University Press Page : 236 pages File Size : 46,53 MB Release : 1973 Category : History ISBN : 9780521524360
A highly original and controversial examination of events in Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1927 in which Professor Day challenges both the standard Trotskyite and Stalinist interpretations of the period. At the same time he rejects the traditional emphasis on Trotsky's concept of Permanent Revolution and argues that a Marxist theorist is essential. Professor Day concentrates upon the economic implications of revolutionary Russia's isolation from Europe. How to build socialism - in a backward, war-ravaged society, without aid from the West: this problem lay behind many of the most important political conflicts of Soviet Russia's formative years.
"As its first and most daring theorist, and later its most penetrating left-wing critic, Leon Trotsky will for ever be associated with the fate of the Russian Revolution. Yet little of real substance has ever been written about his genuine but unfinished contribution to Marxist thought in the twentieth century. This volume seeks to fill that vacuum through a critical assessment of his views on political economy, the party, revolution, philosophy and culture. This book also contains a number of brief but incisive essays on the turbulent history of the Left Opposition, as well as a lively and iconoclastic discussion of the way his ideas have been interpreted - and misinterpreted - by both friends and enemies alike. The last section of the volume brings to the English-speaking world previously untranslated material by Trotsky on his mature reflections on the world economy in the interwar period. Neither crude polemic nor simple-minded hagiography, The Ideas of Leon Trotsky fills a major gap in our understanding of one of the most controversial thinkers of our age."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Written from a critical socialist standpoint, this book provides an analysis of Trotskyism which argues that it is increasingly irrelevant as a means of achieving socialism.
Leon Trotsky was the most important contributor to the development of revolutionary Marxism this century, after Lenin. As exiled militant or Soviet statesman, party organizer or public orator, as political analyst, soldier or commentator on cultural trends, he was centrally involved in the world-historic upheavals of his time and foremost among the interpreters of their significance for socialism. Yet the fate of his achievement was dramatically discrepant from Lenin's. At the latter's death in 1924, his revolutionary authority was at its zenith. In the Soviet Union his writings were consecrated as repository of a finished dogma, 'Leninism'. Abroad, his thought was interpreted in way much closer to its own original spirit by Georg Lukcs, whose remarkable Lenin sought to elicit its unity and actuality for a later revolutionary generation. In polar contrast, factional assault, official disgrace and proscription, anathema and slander, were the conditions of Trotsky's later life and activity-until his assassination in 1940-and the unvarying background of any reaffirmation of his heritage for decades afterwards. Systematic publication of his writings was beyond the means of his political followers-whose internal discussions of his ides were supplemented only by the attentions of liberal (where not reactionary) academics. In the last decade, however, with the resurgence of the political formations associated with his name, Trotsky's political role and ideas have again become topics of vigorous debate among socialists. Ernest Mandel's book makes possible a necessary extension of this debate by providing the first ever synthetic account of the development of Trotsky's Marxism in its successive encounters with the key problems and crises of the epoch. The Russian revolution and the theme of uneven development, the construction of revolutionary parties, the struggle against fascism and imperialism at large, the nature of Stalinism and the prospect of a full socialist democracy, are all discussed in a compact study that makes a fitting and long overdue counterpart to Lukcs's historic study of fifty years ago.
The theory of Permanent Revolution has been associated with Leon Trotsky for more than a century since the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Trotsky was the most brilliant proponent of Permanent Revolution but by no means its sole author. The documents in this volume, most of them translated into English for the first time, demonstrate that Trotsky was one of several participants in a debate from 1903-7 that involved numerous leading figures of Russian and European Marxism, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus and David Ryazanov. This volume reassembles that debate, assesses it with reference to Marx and Engels, and provides new evidence for interpreting the formative years of Russian revolutionary Marxism.
This new biography provides a full account of Leon Trotsky's political life, based upon a wealth of primary sources, including previously unpublished material. Ian D. Thatcher paints a new picture of Trotsky's standing in Russian and world history. Key myths about Trotsky's heroic work as a revolutionary, especially in Russia's first revolution of 1905 and the Russian Civil War, are thrown into question. Although Trotsky had a limited understanding of crucial contemporary events such as Hitler's rise to power, he was an important thinker and politician, not least as a trenchant critic of Stalin's version of communism.
Leon Trotsky's 1905—despite long being out of print—has remained the central point of reference for those looking to understand the rising of workers, peasants, and soldiers that nearly unseated the Tsar in 1905. Trotsky's elegant, beautifully written account draws on his experience as a key leader of the revolution.
This 3-part biography of Leon Trotsky was hailed by Graham Greene as one of “the greatest . . . in the English language”—a must read for those interested in the history of Soviet Russia and international communism. Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused such intensities of fierce admiration and reactionary fear as Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. His extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on the revolutionary consciousness. Yet there was once a danger that his life and influence would be relegated to the footnotes of history. Published over the course of ten years, beginning in 1954, Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography turned back the tide of Stalin’s propaganda, and has since been praised by everyone from Tony Blair to Graham Greene. In this definitive work, now reissued in a single volume, Trotsky’s true stature emerges as the most heroic, and ultimately tragic, character of the Russian Revolution.
Leon Trotsky has become one of the twentieth century’s most enduring political legends. Joining the Bolsheviks on the eve of the 1917 revolution he played a vital role as Lenin’s right-hand man in the insurrection and went on to lead the Red Army to victory in the ensuing civil war. Having lost to Stalin the struggle for power which followed Lenin’s death, he became an implacable opponent of the dictator over the next three decades—a stance which cost him his political career, his citizenship and ultimately his life. A charismatic orator, a prolific author and a political philosopher whose ideas continue to resonate in the wake of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe, Trotsky made an indelible mark on world history. Ernest Mandel, one of the foremost leaders of the international movement which Trotsky founded before the Second World War and an influential economist and political theorist, is uniquely placed to review the life and work of Trotsky. In Trotsky as Alternative he presents a portrait of his subject which is appreciative yet critical. He shows that Trotsky’s contribution to the history of the twentieth century was primarily political rather than sociological, and this in a practical as well as a theoretical sense. He locates Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development as a crucial tool whose explanatory power of the mechanisms of world imperialism is as relevant to the late capitalism of the 1990s as it was to the first three decades of the century when it was formulated. Ranging across Trotsky’s struggles against Stalin’s bureaucracy, his formulation of an alternative economic strategy, his theories relating to the Third World, fascism and the national question, his extensive literary criticism, and concluding with a moving assessment of an extraordinary life, this book is a fitting testimony to a man who, in Mandel’s words, “will be judged by history as the most important strategist for the socialist movement.”