Leon Trotsky: Writings in Exile

257 Pages·2012·2.614 MB·English

by  Chattopadhyay, Kunal, Trotsky, Leon, Blanc, Paul le

Writings in Exile
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writings
in
exile
LEON TROTSKY
Edited by
Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc
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First published 2012 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
This collection copyright © Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc 2012
The right of Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc to be identified as
the authors of the introductions to this work has been asserted by them
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3144 7 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3148 5 Paperback
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from
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Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and
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ContEnts
Acknowledgements vii
PARt onE: IntRoDUCtoRY EssAY
by Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc
1. Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Liberation 3
Before the Russian Revolution 7
Russian Revolution and Civil War 10
Struggle against Bureaucracy 14
Communist International 16
Exile, Opposition and Death 17
Trotsky’s Legacy 19
PARt tWo: tRotsKY’s WRItInGs In EXILE
2. From Workers’ Revolution to Bureaucratic
Dictatorship 31
In Defence of October 36
Degeneration of the Soviet Regime 62
Stalinism and Bolshevism 67
Letter to the Workers of the USSR 83
3. Workers’ United Front: Against Fascism and
Reformism 88
The United Front for Defence: A Letter to a Social
Democratic Worker 94
What is National Socialism? 116
The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning 126
4. Imperialism and Global Revolution 147
Closer to the Proletarians of the Coloured Races 154
The Chinese Revolution 156
An Open Letter to the Workers of India 171
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vi TROTSKY – wRiTiNgS iN ExiLE
Mexico and British Imperialism 178
Nationalised Industry and Workers’ Management 183
On Black Nationalism 186
5. Bracing for the Storm 202
The Transitional Programme: The Death Agony of
Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International 204
Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay 211
Trotsky’s Testament 220
Further Reading and References 223
Index 229
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ACKnoWLEDGEMEnts
From both editors: This volume could not have been composed
without the marvellous efforts and accomplishments of the
Marxist Internet Archive and the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism
On-Line – those who have created and sustained these resources
deserve a global embrace for their immense achievement and
contribution. We salute them.
From Paul Le Blanc: My first thanks go to my dearest friend
Nancy Ferrari, who was gently but tenaciously insistent that I
would not expire before this book saw the light of day.
I must acknowledge teachers, comrades, and mentors who
helped me comprehend, through their own lives, the meaning
of Trotsky’s contributions. There are many, but among those
who gave me special inspiration and encouragement are George
Breitman, Frank and Sarah Lovell, Evelyn Sell, Morris Lewit,
Ernest Mandel, Pierre Broué, and Dennis Brutus. My contact with,
and the example of, Esteban Volkov has also been important to me.
I have benefited over the years from the insights of my dear friend
and intellectual soul-mate Tom Twiss. Pierre Rousset and Michael
Löwy (and for that matter, my co-editor Kunal Chattopadhyay)
have also helped shape my thinking on Trotsky’s perspectives.
Of course, today’s revolutionary socialists and activists – mostly
younger than me (thank God) – have impacted powerfully on my
ongoing development (with those in the International Socialist
Organization, especially in Pittsburgh, deserving special mention).
The global occupation and resistance movements are giving an
especially vibrant confirmation of the continuing relevance of
the revolutionary who told us about uneven and combined
development, permanent revolution, and the masses of people
who, uninvited, crash onto the stage of history.
vii
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viii TROTSKY – wRiTiNgS iN ExiLE
From Kunal Chattopadhyay: My thanks go, first of all, to Soma
Marik, with whom I have shared much of my life, my political
and personal goals, and whose research has alerted me to what
the reception of classical Marxism in today’s world needs to
be like.
I owe political and intellectual thanks to a wide range of people.
My political development, in a country where revolutionary-
democratic socialism has had a very limited exposure, was
due in the first place to my father, the late professor Gautam
Chattopadhyay, a CPI member who after the Twentieth CPSU
Congress, in his own words, refused to accept any more that
there was an infallible leader or a god for communists. My ideas
about Trotsky’s position in the history of Marxism have evolved
in exchanges with the late Professor A. R. Desai, engagements
both verbal and written with Paul Le Blanc and Michael Löwy,
and with Sipra Sarkar, Sumit and Tanika Sarkar. Comrades of
the Communist League/Inquilabi Communist Sangathan, the
former Section of the Fourth International in India, to which I
belonged between 1980 and 2003, notably Amar Jesani, Vibhuti
Patel, Achin Vanaik, Rohit Prajapati, Trupti Shah and comrades
of the organisation Radical Socialist, the organisation in which I
am currently involved, have been very important for the context
of my understanding of Trotsky, and for my writing about the
contemporary meaning of his work.
A group of comrades with whom I have had sustained
engagement and which has been entirely to my benefit are activists
in the US organisation Solidarity, most of them Michigan-based,
notably Peter Solenberger, Ron Lare, and Matt Siegfried. Without
their constant encouragement my earlier work on Trotsky might
not have been completed and published.
Countless activists, from my days as a student involved in
the Democratic Students’ Front, to activists in the anti-nuclear
movement, the anti-globalisation/anti-Special Economic Zones
struggles, and others who are fighting for independent peoples’
movements against capitalism and all exploitative hierarchies,
have shown the continued relevance of the revolutionary and
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ACKNOwLEDgEMENTS ix
democratic traditions of classical Marxism, especially of Trotsky’s
struggles for combined revolution, for opposition to fascism
and to Stalinism and any other bureaucratic excrescence in the
workers’ movement, and have thereby made my own engagement
with Trotsky more meaningful.
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