Through a critical examination of the limits of SWP guru Tony Cliff's analysis, Marot demolishes the popular myth that Trotsky and his Left Opposition within the Bolshevik Party in Russia were, during the 1920s, a heroic attempt to defend working class interests against a Stalinist 'socialist construction' and repression that they disagreed with. An effective factual antidote to leftist and ICC-type left-communist apologetics for Trotsky and Trotskyism's anti-working class character in Soviet Russia.
Max Eastman was the US's most erudite and principled communist, who eventually became a champion of the free market. Here is his story in his own words. "I wanted to extend that freedom to all men; I wanted to see a society without distinctions of caste, class, race, money-power without exploitation."
Son of a worker, a worker himself from the age of 13, Leon Lesoil awakened to a political life during the First World War. Caught up by the wave of patriotism and chauvinism that swept over Belgium after the German invasion, he enlisted in August 1914 in the sincere belief that the war was in defense of Justice, a “war to end all wars.”
Sixty five years ago, on 20 August 1940 Leon Trotsky was struck with a fatal blow from an ice-pick by an agent sent by the CPU, Stalin’s secret police in the USSR. Here, Trotsky’s partner for four decades Natalia Sedov Trotsky tells the story of Trotsky’s death. The article was first published in the Fourth International in May 1947.