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In a work of encyclopedic scope, International Trotskyism, 1929-1985 is sure to become the definitive reference work on a movement that has had a significant impact on the political culture of countries in every part of the world for more than half a century. Renowned scholar Robert J. Alexander has amassed, from disparate sources, an unprecedented amount of primary and secondary material to provide a documentary history of the origins, development, and nature of the Trotskyist movement around the world. Drawing on interviews and correspondence with Trotskyists, newspaper reports and pamphlets, historical writings including the annotated writings of Trotsky in both English and French, historical memoirs of Trotskyist leaders, and documents of the Fourth International, Alexander recounts the history of the movement since Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union in 1929. Organized alphabetically in a double-column, country-by-country format this book charts the formation and growth of Trotskyism in more than sixty-five countries, providing biographic information about its most influential leaders, detailed accounts of Trotsky's personal involvement in the development of the movement in each country, and thorough reports of its various factions and splits. Multiple chapters are reserved for countries where the movement was more active or fully developed and various chapters are organized around crucial thematic issues, such as the Fourth International. The chapters are followed by extensive name, organization, publication, and subject indexes, which provide optimal access to the wealth of information contained in the main body of the work.
The Twilight of World Trotskyism analyzes the reasons behind the historic failure of the Trotskyist movement around the world. The book begins this assessment by briefly recapitulating the origins of Trotskyism, as a political current within the communist movement, and elaborating its major elements, before describing the historical development of Trotskyism in the four countries where it has sunk the deepest roots and which house the clear majority of the world’s Fourth Internationals: Argentina, Britain, France and the USA. It then proceeds to map the current state of the global Trotskyist movement. Whatever their current size and status, Trotskyist organizations aspire to become mass political parties and lead revolutionary seizures of power. It is therefore appropriate to examine them through the metrics applied to mainstream parties, namely organization, membership and political influence. The author looks at the dynamics of the Trotskyist movement, focusing in particular on the supposedly harmful effects of the communist movement before then turning to examine the role of Trotskyist organizations in the many revolutionary situations that have appeared since the 1920s and in the various ‘cycles of protest’ that have occurred in the latter half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century. The final section examines the two success stories frequently cited in Trotskyist literature, namely the cases of Bolivia and Sri Lanka. The book concludes by setting out and examining a wide variety of explanations for the chronic and sustained weaknesses of the Trotskyist movement, including its flawed appraisals of contemporary politics and economics, ultra-radical programmes and policies, failures in understanding the dynamics of protest and the baleful legacy of Soviet communism. It is argued that these weaknesses are rooted in Trotskyist doctrine and are therefore integral, not peripheral, features of world Trotskyism. This volume will be essential reading for activists and scholars interested in the transnational history and politics of the radical left.
U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part I: Emergence -- Left Opposition in the United States is the first of a documentary trilogy on a revolutionary socialist split-off from the U.S. Communist Party, reflecting Leon Trotsky’s confrontation with Stalinism in the global Communist movement. Spanning 1928 to 1940, this volume surveys important U.S. labor struggles in the 1930s, early efforts to comprehend the so-called “Negro Question,” and substantial contributions to the study history and the development of Marxist theory. Also covered are confrontations and convergences with other currents on the Left, internal debates and splits among Trotskyists themselves, and repressive efforts by the U.S. government in the first Smith Act Trial. Scholars and activists will find much of interest in these primary sources.
A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The present volume is a sequel to Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'. It begins with the end of the Great War, depicting the colorful intellectual landscape of the interwar period and the increasing political and ideological radicalization culminating in the Second World War. Taking the war experience both as a breaking point but in many ways also a transmitter of previous intellectual traditions, it maps the intellectual paradigms and debates of the immediate postwar years, marked by a negotiation between the democratic and communist agendas, as well as the subsequent processes of political and cultural Stalinization. Subsequently, the post-Stalinist period is analyzed with a special focus on the various attempts of de-Stalinization and the rise of revisionist Marxism and other critical projects culminating in the carnivalesque but also extremely dramatic year of 1968. This volume is followed by Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' and Beyond, Part II: 1968-2018.
In the first historical account of international NGOs, from the French Revolution to the present, Thomas Davies places the contemporary debate on transnational civil society in context. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, which sees transnational civil society as a recent development taking place along a linear trajectory, he explores the long history of international NGOs in terms of a cyclical process characterized by three major waves: the era to 1914, the inter-war years, and the period since the Second World War. The breadth of transnational civil society activities explored is unprecedented in its diversity, from business associations to humanitarian organizations, peace groups to socialist movements, feminist organizations to pan-nationalist groups. The geographical scope covered is also extensive, and the analysis is richly supported with reference to a diverse array of previously unexplored sources. By revealing the role of civil society rather than governmental actors in the major trans- formations of the past two-and-a-half centuries, this book is for anyone interested in obtaining a new perspective on world history. The analysis concludes in the second decade of the twenty-first century, providing insights into the trajectory of transnational civil society in the post-9/11 and post-financial crisis eras.
The story of the friends and allies of the Chinese Revolution China’s resistance to Imperial Japan was the other great internationalist cause of the ‘red 1930s’, along with the Spanish Civil War. These desperate and bloody struggles were personified in the lives of Norman Bethune and others who volunteered in both conflicts. The story of Red Friends starts in the 1920s when, encouraged by the newly formed Communist International, Chinese nationalists and leftists united to fight warlords and foreign domination. John Sexton has unearthearthed the histories of foreigners who joined the Chinese revolution. He follows Comintern militants, journalists, spies, adventurers, Trotskyists, and mission kids whose involvement helped, and sometimes hindered, China’s revolutionaries. Most were internationalists who, while strongly identifying with China’s struggle, saw it as just one theatre in a world revolution. The present rulers in Beijing, however, buoyed by China’s powerhouse economy, commemorate them as ‘foreign friends’ who aided China’s ‘peaceful rise’ to great power status. Founded on original research, it is a stirring story of idealists struggling against the odds to found a better future. The author’s interviews with survivors and descendants add colour and humanity to lives both heroic and tragic.
Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), was one of the most prominent anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals of his time. A political theorist and economist, his worldview was shaped by experiences in the Second World War as an underground political activist in Occupied Belgium and during his subsequent internment in a Nazi prison camp. Mandel's faith in human nature and in the working classes survived Nazi oppression and the murder of much of his family in the concentration camps. He retained his connection to his Jewish roots throughout his life, but believed that security and liberation for the Jewish people was best achieved through world revolution and universal emancipation rather than nationalism. A brilliant orator in several languages, Mandel was an indefatigable revolutionary militant and a key leader in the Fourth International, and he had an enormous impact on the thought and practice of the 1968 generation. His writings range from innovative economic and political theory to a study of the Second World War and have been published in over forty languages. His last major work, Late Capitalism, had an influence that reached from the social sciences into the humanities. Biographer Jan Willem Stutje, the first writer with access to Mandel's archives, has interviewed many of the leading figures in the story and unearthed a wealth of new material, detailing Mandel's arrest by the Nazis and his role in Latin American guerrilla warfare. He recounts Mandel's interactions with both scholars-Sartre, Ernst Bloch, Perry Anderson-and comrades-in-arms such as Che Guevara, Rudi Dutschke and Tariq Ali. The book also yields fascinating details of the man's sometimes tragic private life.
In the new edition of this definitive work on the history of the revolutionary socialist current in the United States that came to be identified as "American Trotskyism," Paul Le Blanc offers fresh reflections on this history for scholars and activists in the twenty-first century. Includes a preface written especially for the new edition of this distinctive work. Paul Le Blanc is a professor of History at La Roche College and author of Choice Award–winning book A Freedom Budget for All Americans.
We are witnessing the birth of a new politics -- anti-capitalist, libertarian and anti-war. But where do today's dissidents come from? Dissident Marxism argues that their roots can be found in the life and work of an earlier generation of socialist revolutionaries, including such inspiring figures as the Soviet poet Mayakovsky, the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, Communist historians Edward Thompson and Dona Torr, the Egyptian surrealist Georges Henein, American New Left economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, advocates of Third World liberation including Walter Rodney and Samir Amin, Harry Braverman, the author of Labor and Monopoly Capital, and David Widgery, the journalist of the May '68 revolts. What these writers shared was a commitment to the values of socialism-from-below, the idea that change must be driven by the mass movements of the oppressed. In a world dominated by slump, fascism and war, they retained a commitment to total democracy. Dissident Marxism describes the left in history. Some readers will enjoy it as a history of revolutionary socialism in the years between Stalin's rise and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others will find here a challenging thesis -- that the most enduring of left-wing traditions, and highly relevant to the times we live in today, were located in a space between the New Left and Trotskyism. Dissident Marxism explores the lives and thinking of some of the most creative and striking members of the twentieth century left, and asks if the new anti-capitalist movement might provide an opportunity for just such another left-wing generation to emerge?
From the Occupy protests to the Black Lives Matter movement and school strikes for climate action, the twenty-first century has been rife with activism. Although very different from one another, each of these movements has created alliances across borders, with activists stressing that their concerns are not confined to individual nation states. In this book, Daniel Laqua shows that global efforts of this kind are not a recent phenomenon, and that as long as there have been borders, activists have sought to cross them. Activism Across Borders since 1870 explores how individuals, groups and organisations have fostered bonds in their quest for political and social change, and considers the impact of national and ideological boundaries on their efforts. Focusing on Europe but with a global outlook, the book acknowledges the importance of imperial and postcolonial settings for groups and individuals that expressed far-reaching ambitions. From feminism and socialism to anti-war campaigns and green politics, this book approaches transnational activism with an emphasis on four features: connectedness, ambivalence, transience and marginality. In doing so, it demonstrates the intertwined nature of different movements, problematizes transnational action, discusses the temporary nature of some alliances, and shows how transnationalism has been used by those marginalized at the national level. With a broad chronological perspective and thematic chapters, it provides historical context, clarifies terms and concepts, and offers an alternative history of modern Europe through the lens of activists, movements and campaigns.