Leon Trotsky

Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It – Mehring edition

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New pamphlet of Trotsky’s selected writings, including an Introduction “What is Fascism?” by David North, and an extensive timeline.

Following the 1929 Wall Street crash, Trotsky fights to orient and unite the working class against the rise of fascism in Germany. He examines the political and social origins of fascism and elaborates the strategical and tactical methods to defend the working class against this deadly menace, including the “United Front” and the arming of the working class for self defense.

Throughout, he stresses that a revolutionary orientation by the working class is the only basis for winning vacillating elements of the middle class to the side of socialism.

 

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New pamphlet of Trotsky’s selected writings, including an Introduction “What is Fascism?” by David North, and an extensive timeline.

Following the 1929 Wall Street crash, Trotsky fights to orient and unite the working class against the rise of fascism in Germany. In essays from 1932, especially What Next? and The Only Road for Germany, he examines the political and social origins of fascism and elaborates the strategical and tactical methods to defend the working class against this deadly menace, including the “United Front” and the arming of the working class for self defense.

After Hitler and the Nazi party come to power in 1933, Trotsky strives to orient the French working class in its struggle against the emergence of armed fascist bands, essays published as Whither France? in 1934.

His final essay, published posthumously in October 1940, addresses the American working class.

Throughout, he stresses that a revolutionary orientation by the working class is the only basis for winning vacillating elements of the middle class to the side of socialism.

 

 

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was born on November 7, 1879 in the village of Yanovka, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire and is now within the borders of Ukraine. Along with Vladimir Lenin, he was one of the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. Trotsky, who was head of the Red Army during the years immediately following the revolution, led the Soviet Union to victory in the Civil War from 1918-1921.

Trotsky founded the Left Opposition in 1923, which was established to oppose the growth of bureaucratism, nationalism, and inequality in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership. He was an outspoken defender of the perspective of internationalism against the program of “socialism in one country”, which the Stalinist bureaucracy advanced as part of the defense of its own power and privileges.

Because of his intransigent opposition to Stalinism, he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, sent into exile in Central Asia in 1928, and ultimately banished from the Soviet Union in 1929. In 1933, Trotsky warned that the policies pursued by the Stalinist Communist Party in Germany, if not changed, would pave the way for the coming to power of Hitler by politically disorienting and organizationally disarming the working class in the face of the fascist threat. After his warnings were proven correct, Trotsky concluded that Stalin’s betrayal of the German working class meant that the Third International could not be reformed. In 1938, he founded the Fourth International. Trotsky was murdered in 1940 in Mexico, where he had been given asylum, by a Stalinist agent.

In addition to his political work, Trotsky was a major Marxist theoretician. He elaborated the theory of “permanent revolution”, which explained why an economically backward country like Russia was driven onto the path of socialist revolution despite the fact that it had a comparatively low level of capitalist development. Trotsky’s theory ultimately formed the basis for the October 1917 revolution.

His letters and articles explaining the class nature of the Soviet state, written in the context of an inner-party debate that took place in 1939-1940 within the Trotskyist movement and collected in the volume In Defense of Marxism, are a brilliant example of the application of the dialectical materialist method to the analysis of contemporary political questions and problems of party program and perspective.

Trotsky’s prediction, outlined most explicitly in The Revolution Betrayed, that unless the working class in the USSR regained power through a political revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy would bring about the restoration of capitalism, was proven correct by the events of 1989-1991.

Additional information about Trotsky’s political biography, his role in Soviet and world history, and his treatment at the hands of modern historians can be found here: Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism

Books by Leon Trotsky

David North has played a leading role in the international socialist movement for forty-five years, and is presently the chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party (US). His many published works include The Heritage We Defend; The Crisis of American Democracy; In Defense of Leon Trotsky; The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century; The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left and A Quarter Century of War.

Books by David North

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