North
believes Trotsky’s greatest achievement was founding the Fourth International
(FI) in 1938 after the Third International under Stalin facilitated the coming
to power of Hitler in Germany without a fight by the multi-millioned working
class.
Trotsky
opposed Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” he wrote in the founding document
of the FI that “the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of
the revolutionary leadership.”
North’s
book covers forty years of revolutionary struggles. This collection of essays is
designed to remind the older reader of Trotsky’s rich heritage and “bring the
rich historical lessons to a new generation of workers and young people, to
resolve the “historical crisis of mankind.”
My
favourite essay is Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism, published in 1982.
It was written during the months when the sick Stalinist leader Leonid Brezhnev
passed power to Yuri Andropov, who died. Power was then transferred to Konstantin Chernenko—who, within two years,
joined their predecessor alongside the Kremlin Wall— and, finally, in March
1985, to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Reading
that essay was one of the reasons for my joining the Workers Revolutionary
Party in 1983. It had a profound effect on my political development. The essay is
written as a tribute to Tom Henehan, who was assassinated on October 16, 1977. The
four articles by David North, originally published in 1982 on the fifth
anniversary of the assassination of Tom Henehan, provide a remarkably concise
introduction to Trotskyism, the Marxism of today.
The
essay "Trotsky's Last Year" is extraordinarily good. Trotsky was at
the height of his powers before a Stalinist Agent murdered him. It contains an
appreciation of one of my favourite essays, “Trotsky’s Place in History,” by C.L.R.
James, the Caribbean socialist intellectual and historian, who wrote:
“During
his last decade he [Trotsky] was an exile, apparently powerless. During those
same ten years, Stalin, his rival, assumed power like no man in Europe since
Napoleon wielded. Hitler has shaken the world and bids fair to bestride it like
a colossus while he lasts. Roosevelt is the most powerful president who has
ever ruled in America, and America is the most powerful nation in the world.
Yet the Marxist judgment of Trotsky is as confident as Engels’s judgment of
Marx. Before his period of power, during it, and after his fall, Trotsky stood
second only to Lenin among contemporary men, and after Lenin died was the
greatest head of our times. That judgment we leave to history.”
Workers
and youth should carefully study this book to prepare for future struggles. It is
a vital guide and provides the strategy and tactics necessary for a successful
fight against capitalism.
