GAUCHE: TROTKSKYISM TODAY

26 November 2004

TROTKSKYISM TODAY - 1

Neal Ascherson has a brilliant essay on Trotsky and his relevance today (or otherwise) not entirely camouflaged as a piece on Issac Deutscher's republished three-part Trotsky biography in the London Review of Books (click here). Jack Straw, who recommended the Deutscher trilogy along with Lenin's Left-Wing Communism in the bizarre letter he sent to the Independent last week (click here), should read it as a matter of urgency, as indeed should all defenders of the contemporary relevance of Leninism -- not least the crew at New Left Review, who republished the Deutscher trilogy but whose raison d'etre Ascherson pretty much destroys.

No comments:

'Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey is a fine little book you can read in a day. Anderson and Davey have taken advantage of the vast amount of research into communism since the end of the cold war. They wear it lightly, and refreshingly, are open about their political position. As members of the democratic left, they believe that communism was a disaster for left wing politics. It tied the left to tyranny and the lies and disillusion that went with it.'
NICK COHEN

COMMENTS POLICY

Comments are welcome, but I'm the editor, and I decide what is published. No comments will be published unless I think them worth publishing. Comments submitted anonymously or pseudonymously will be deleted unless I know the author's identity. Anything I consider racist, fatuous, boring, unoriginal, cretinous, abusive, cynical, otiose, weakly argued or irrelevant will not be published. In other words, this blog is edited for comments just like an old-fashioned newspaper letters page. If you want your comments published, they have to be succinct, well argued, grammatical and relevant. And they compete for publication with other comments. If you don't like it, you can go elsewhere.

Send email