"The twentieth century can be legitimately described as the Age of Permanent Revolution. This is appropriate as both a definition of the objective social logic of the great revolutionary upheavals of the last century and as the central theoretical and strategic issue underlying all the political struggles over revolutionary strategy in the international workers’ movement. In an essay recalling his encounters with Trotsky during the hearings of the Dewey Commission in April 1937 in Coyóacan, on the outskirts of Mexico City, the American novelist James T. Farrell described the great revolutionary as “a man of history in the sense that most of us are not, and cannot be.” This description—or, more correctly, definition—of Trotsky contained a profound insight. In what sense was Trotsky “a man of history”? Of course, he was a major figure in many of the greatest events of the twentieth century. Trotsky was the principal strategist and organizer of the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Bolshevik Party to power and led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state in history. He became in 1918 the commander of the Red Army, which he led to victory over the forces of counterrevolution in the course of a three-year-long civil war. In 1923, Trotsky initiated the political struggle within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that led first to the formation of the Left Opposition and, later, to the Fourth International. Trotsky was, without question, one of the towering figures of the last century. I would argue that he was the greatest political figure of the twentieth century, and that his influence on history will prove to be the most enduring. The new mass socialist movement of the working class that will develop in this century will be based, to a great extent, on the theoretical and political conceptions of Leon Trotsky"
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 06:27:02 +0000
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