The cover of Time magazine; Nov. 21, 1927.
Trotsky (centre) inspecting the Red Army at a parade for the Third Congress of the Comintern, 1921.
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The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.
Leon Trotsky (via we-are-revolting)
FUCK YEAH PERMANENT REVOLUTION
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To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives — these are the rules of the Fourth International.
Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938)
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Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935
Trotsky depicted as St. George slaying the dragon of capitalism, 1918.
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Marxism is internationalism or it is nothing.
Lal Khan, “Bolshevism and the capitalist crisis today.” (The Daily Times, Pakistan)
Monday, the day this blog was created, marked the 94th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. (Russia was still using the Julian calendar in 1917, which means Russian calendars read October 25, 1917 when Gregorian ones read Nov. 7, 1917.)
Fittingly, Nov. 7 is Trotsky’s birthday.
The above is a photo of Trotsky saluting a parade in Red Square in 1919. Vladimir Lenin is to his right (left in the photo). In the lower photo, you can see Trotsky is missing; Stalin had him “erased” from the photo after Trotsky was exiled in 1929.
(It was a common practice in the Stalinist USSR to remove Trotsky from photos, films and alter history involving Trotsky, because Trotsky opposed Stalinism. Trotsky was accused, during the 1936 Moscow Show Trials, of plotting to kill Stalin and was sentenced to death in absentia.)
