LEON TROTSKY COLLECTED WORKS (Special NOOK Edition) Classics of Socialist Thought [Inspiration for Che Gueverra, Occupy Wall Street, We Are The 99%, and Other Social Justice Movements] LEON TROTSKY

by Leon Trotsky, Complete Works of Leon Trotsky, NOOKBook Leon Trotsky, Occupy Wall Street We Are the 99@ Press (Editor), Leon Trotsky Collection (Created by)

Overview

LEON TROTSKY COLLECTED WORKS (Special NOOK Edition)
Classics of Socialist Thought

[Inspiration for Che Gueverra, Occupy Wall Street, We Are The 99%, and Other Social Justice Movements] LEON TROTSKY

EXCERPT

In order to guarantee the triumph of their interests in big questions, the ruling classes are constrained to make concessions on secondary questions, naturally only so long as these concessions are reconciled in the bookkeeping. During the epoch of capitalistic upsurge especially in the last few decades before the World War these concessions, at least in relation to the top layers of the proletariat, were of a completely genuine nature. Industry at that time expanded almost uninterruptedly. The prosperity of the civilized nations, partially, too, that of the toiling masses increased. Democracy appeared solid. Workers’ organizations grew. At the same time reformist tendencies deepened. The relations between the classes softened, at least outwardly. Thus certain elementary moral precepts in social relations were established along with the norms of democracy and the habits of class collaboration. The impression was created of an ever more free, more just, and more humane society. The rising line of progress seemed infinite to “common sense.’
Instead, however, war broke out with a train of convulsions, crises, catastrophes, epidemics, and bestiality. The economic life of mankind landed in an impasse. The class antagonisms became sharp and naked. The safety valves of democracy began to explode one after the other. The elementary moral precepts seemed even more fragile than the democratic institutions and reformist illusions. Mendacity, slander, bribery, venality, coercion, murder grew to unprecedented dimensions. To a stunned simpleton all these vexations seem a temporary result of war. Actually they are manifestations of imperialist decline. The decay of capitalism denotes the decay of contemporary society with its right and its morals.


SELECTED TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE YEAR
THE WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL
OUR REVOLUTION
FROM OCTOBER TO BREST-LITOVSK
TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM
THE MILITARY WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY
THE FIRST FIVE YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
THE NEW COURSE
LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION
THE LESSONS OF OCTOBER
THE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
MY LIFE
IN DEFENCE OF OCTOBER
THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED WHAT IS THE SOVIET UNION AND WHERE IS IT GOING?
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION
THEIR MORALS AND OURS
THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM FOR SOCIALIST REVOLUTION
FASCISM WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO FIGHT IT
PROBLEMS OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014743044
Publisher:	Occupy Wall Street We Are The 99% Press
Publication date:	12/20/2012
Series:	Socialist Thought [Inspiration for Che Gueverra, Occupy Wall Street, We Are The 99%, and Other Movements LEON TROTSKY
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Leon Trotsky was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.

Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Party. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–20). He was also among the first members of the Politburo.

After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.

As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who was never rehabilitated by the government of Mikhail Gorbachev: he was finally rehabilitated in 2001.