Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky on Engels and Kautsky

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Three articles by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky wrote the first two essays in 1935, on the 40th anniversary of the death of Friedrich Engels, the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx.

In the first essay, Trotsky reviews Karl Kautsky’s recently published book of Engels correspondence with Kautsky, which shed light on the tensions between “The General” and his pupil. The second essay from 1935 exposes the lies as well as the “ignorance, heedlessness and irresponsibility” of Stalinist hacks writing on Engels life and work in Pravda. The final essay is a short obituary of Kautsky, who died in 1938.

The Appendix includes Engels’ 1889 notes on the French Revolution of 1789.

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Three articles by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky wrote the first two essays in 1935, on the 40th anniversary of the death of Friedrich Engels, the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx.

In the first essay, Trotsky reviews Karl Kautsky’s recently published book of Engels correspondence with Kautsky, which shed light on the tensions between “The General” and his pupil. The second essay from 1935 exposes the lies as well as the “ignorance, heedlessness and irresponsibility” of Stalinist hacks writing on Engels’ life and work in Pravda. The final essay is a short obituary of Kautsky, who died in 1938.

The Appendix includes Engels’ 1889 notes on the French Revolution of 1789. Engels demanded “better secondary sources, and a whole lot of primary sources” for Kautsky’s series on class antagonisms in the French Revolution. Engels provides detailed examples on the life of the peasants from his own reading.

 

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

Frederick Engels (1820-1895) was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Karl Marx. Together with Marx he elaborated the theory and program of scientific socialism.

Engels was born in Bremen in the Rhine Province of the kingdom of Prussia, the son of a textile manufacturer. In 1838, due to family circumstances, he quit his studies and went to work as a clerk at a commercial house in the town of his birth. At this time he began studying Hegel and started literary and journalistic work. In 1842 he settled in Manchester, England, working in a commercial firm in which his father was a shareholder. Based on his observations of social realities in Manchester at the time, he wrote his famous Conditions of the Working Class in England.

In 1844 Engels met Marx for the first time in Paris. He assisted Marx in writing the Holy Family, which outlined the foundations of materialism and socialism. It would be the start of a friendship that lasted until Marx’s death. From 1845-1847 Engels lived in Paris and in Brussels. At that time Marx and Engels were approached by the German Communist League to write a pamphlet explaining the principles of communism; the result was the Communist Manifesto.

Together with Marx, Engels participated in the revolution in Germany in 1848. In 1849 Engels took part in an armed uprising in South Germany. After the defeat of the rebels he escaped to England via Switzerland, where he rejoined Marx. Until 1870 he worked in a manufacturing firm where his father was a shareholder. He provided essential financial support to Marx, who was engaged in writing Capital at the time.

Engels returned to London in 1870 and continued his close collaboration with Marx until the latter’s death in 1883. In addition to assisting in the publication of all three volumes of Capital both before and after Marx’s death, he wrote many works during this period dealing with philosophical, political, and scientific questions, including Anti-Duhring, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

He continued to play an active role in the affairs of the European workers’ movement until his death on August 5, 1895 in London.

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