Tag Archives: Trotsky

John Marot: “Assessing Trotsky”

Posted on August 22, 2017 by

Trotsky’s perspectives on the Russian Revolution were unique.  No one else shared them — not Marx, not Lenin, not Luxemburg, not Kautsky, not Parvus, not Riazanov, not Mehring — even though all were intimately familiar with Marxist methodology.  Though Le Blanc [in his biography] argues otherwise, there was only one version of permanent revolution — Trotsky’s. No one else adhered to Trotsky’s analysis of the coming Russian Revolution: that only workers could overthrow Tsarism and that as a result the democratic revolution in Russia would have to be a proletarian-socialist one, not a “bourgeois-democratic” one.

Posted in governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution, terror, tragic politics

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Alexander Reznik interviewed on “Trotsky: The Prickly Lion of the Revolution”

Posted on March 6, 2017 by

“Insurrection of the masses does not require a justification. And what took place was indeed an insurrection and not a conspiracy. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection… To those who left from here and who are proposing other courses of action, we have only this to say: You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!” Thus spoke Leon Trotsky addressing the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets on the day of the October coup of 1917, directing his remarks against those delegates who objected to the Bolshevik seizure of power, of which he was one of the main organizers.  Roughly ten years after he made this speech, it was Trotsky himself together with his allies in the intra-party opposition who would end up in the “dustbin of history,” put there by the victorious group of Stalin.

Posted in founding, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution, tragic politics, Uncategorized, violence

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