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Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky Books

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The New Course

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“[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova] In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness. For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth. Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

LoveLifeHappinessDeathSufferingHopeBeautyWifeViolenceAtheismYouthTrue LoveAtheistOppressionCommunismEnjoymentMaterialismSovietTendernessMarxismMagnanimityRed ArmyDialectical MaterialismMaterialistProletarianRevolutionistIrreconcilable AtheismIrreconcilable Atheist
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“As a battle cry against feudalism, the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on, however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal democracy) began to show its reactionary side – the establishment of an ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and the revolutionary parties. If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation. Christianity told him, ”You have an immortal soul, although you resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the same Christianity said, "Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the oppressed masses. Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property qualification. But the longer it went on, the more if sent the consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation: for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the nation? Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name, sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as a trustee of the nation’s sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life, people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian, the minister, the bootblack – all are equal as "citizens" and as "legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven.”

ReligionConsciousnessChristianityHistoryDemocracyCapitalismSocialismInequalityNatural LawClass Struggle
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down through the mass and created, invisibly to a superficial glance but no less decisively, an inner mechanic of the revolutionary movement as a conscious process”

ProcessHistoryRevolutionOrganizationSociologyProletariatClass StruggleRussian Revolution
Book:The History of the Russian Revolution By Leon Trotsky - Volume Two
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“At the present time, it is of course still impossible to foresee to any precise degree just what sections of the field of history will be illuminated and just how much light will be cast by a materialist investigation which would proceed from a more concrete study of the capitalist curve and the interrelationship between the latter and all the aspects of social life. Conquests that may be attained on this road can be determined only as the result of such an investigation itself, which must be more systematic, more orderly than those historical materialist excursions hitherto undertaken. In any case, such an approach to modern history promises to enrich the theory of historical materialism with conquests far more precious than the extremely dubious speculative juggling with the concepts and terms of the materialist method that has, under the pens of some of our Marxists, transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic, and has led to reducing the task to rendering definitions and classifications more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; it has, in short, adulterated Marxism by means of the indecently elegant mannerisms of Kantian epigones. It is a silly thing indeed endlessly to sharpen and resharpen an instrument to chip away Marxist steel, when the task is to apply the instrument in working over the raw material!”

Historical Materialism
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“The law of combined development of backward countries – in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors – here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war – that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development – and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917.”

Russian RevolutionHistorical MaterialismPermanent Revolution
Book:History of the Russian Revolution
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“We seek to uncover behind the events changes in the collective consciousness. We reject wholesale references to the “spontaneity” of the movement, references which in most cases explain nothing and teach nobody. Revolutions take place according to certain laws. This does not mean that the masses in action are aware of the laws of revolution, but it does mean that the changes in mass consciousness are not accidental, but are subject to an objective necessity which is capable of theoretic explanation, and thus makes both prophecy and leadership possible.”

RevolutionProphecySpontaneityCollective ConsciousnessMass ConsciousnessLaws Of Revolution
Book:History of the Russian Revolution
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“...you must remember that the political development of the masses proceeds not in a direct line, but in a complicated curve. And is not this, after all, the essential movement of every material process? Objective conditions were powerfully impelling the workers, soldiers and peasants toward the banners of the Bolsheviks, but the masses were entering upon this path in a state of struggle with their own past, with their yesterday’s beliefs, and partly also with their beliefs of today. At a difficult turn, at a moment of failure and disappointment, the old prejudices not yet burnt out would flare up, and the enemy would naturally seize upon these as upon an anchor of salvation.”

IdeologyPolitical ConsciousnessPolitical Development
Book:History of the Russian Revolution
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“Wir revolutionnären Marxisten haben keine Veranlassung zum Verzweifeln. DIe Epoche, in die wir eingetreten sind, wird unsere Epoche sein. Der Marxismus ist nicht besiegt. Im Gegenteil: das Brüllen der Kanonen al allen Enden Europas verkündet den theoritischen Sieg des Marxismus. Was verbleibt denn nochy jetzt von den Hoffnungen auf "friedliche" Entwicklung auf Abstumpfung der kapitalistische Gegensätze, auf ein planmäßiges Hineinwachsen in den Sozialismus”

ImperialismKriegMarxismusSozialismusInternationale
Book:Der krieg und die Internationale
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“Stalinism in turn is not an abstraction of “dictatorship”, but an immense bureaucratic reaction against the proletarian dictatorship in a backward and isolated country. The October Revolution abolished privileges, waged war against social inequality, replaced the bureaucracy with self-government of the toilers, abolished secret diplomacy, strove to render all social relationship completely transparent. Stalinism reestablished the most offensive forms of privileges, imbued inequality with a provocative character, strangled mass self-activity under police absolutism, transformed administration into a monopoly of the Kremlin oligarchy and regenerated the fetishism of power in forms that absolute monarchy dared not dream of.”

HistorySocialismCommunismSoviet UnionUssrStalinTrotsky
Book:The New Course
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“The state built up by the Bolsheviks reflects not only the thought and will of Bolshevism, but also the cultural level of the country, social composition of the population, the pressure of a barbaric past, and no less barbaric world imperialism. To represent the process of degeneration of the Soviet state as the evolution of pure Bolshevism is to ignore the social reality in the name of only one of its elements, isolated by pure logic. One has only to call this elementary mistake by its real name to do away with every trace of it”

CommunismSoviet UnionMarxismBolshevismTrotsky
Book:Stalinism and Bolshevism: Concerning the Historical and Theoretical Roots of the Fourth International
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“Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.”

ThinkingWayDoeStillsLawSeriesPhotographRelatedVulgarOutlawMotion PicturesLaws Of Motion
Book:Problems of everyday life, and other writings on culture & science
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“The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.”

IfsDesireTurnsDifferencesPartyMassWeaknessTasksTestsInstitutionsRevolutionaryRegimesSubmitParliamentAnarchistParliamentaryBoycott
Book:History of the Russian Revolution
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“Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of "individuality" lost.”

PeopleCoursesLostPowerfulConditionsEventsRedOvercomingHotIndividualityBlowBoundariesResistanceIronSpheresMetalsSheetsHammersIdenticalSteamIrritationReflexesCubesInexorableRed Hot
Book:History of the Russian Revolution
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“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.”

KnowsWantLittlesLongEnoughOrderWaitingLinesPovertyStruggleObjectsBasesStartingStoresGoodsSovietConsumptionBureaucracyCompelledPolicemenStarting PointPurchasers
Book:The Revolution Betrayed
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“A program of "disarmament," while imperialist antagonisms survive, is the most pernicious of fictions. Even if it were realized by way of general agreement - an obviously fantastic assumption!- that would by no means prevent a new war. The imperialists do not make war because there are armaments; on the contrary, they forge arms when they need to fight.”

IfsWayNeedsMeanWarFightingFictionArmsProgramContraryFantasticAssumptionAgreementDisarmamentPerniciousAntagonismArmament
Book:The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and where is it Going?
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“With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.”

GivingDoeOrderClassDuesSupremeHidingSubmitDictatorshipProletariatPhilistines
Book:The defence of terrorism: terrorism and communism; a reply to Karl Kautsky
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“Terror, as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the intelligentsia, pacify the professional man of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the field of their specialties.”

MenAblePoliticalClassBreakFieldsAimTerrorVariousCategoriesWorking ClassJustifiedDemonstrationSubordinatesProletariatSpecialtyPolitical Will
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century, the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms . . . movie stars to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!”

PeopleMenBelieveStillsUseHomeStarsCitiesMillionsDarknessMagicCenturyIgnoranceGeniusHundredMediumsPilotsMechanismReservesElectricityMovie StarMiraculousTwentieth CenturyPeasantsSweatersSavagerySkyscraperAviatorExorcismAmuletsMagic Powers
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life." We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”

MenHumansFactsProblemOrderIndividualSocialExistenceBloodHe ManRedConcernedImportanceSacredTerrorHuman LifeRevolutionaryOppositionIronVegetarianSovietHistoricSanctionsSocial OrderSacrednessQuaker
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are sufficient - for this we have the testimony of the history of our revolution. For the definitive victory of Socialism, for the organization of Socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient - for that are required the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries.”

CountryEffortRevolutionVictoryOrganizationProductionsRussiaSocialismSufficientSocialistTestimonyPeasantsInsufficientBourgeoisie
Author:Leon Trotsky
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