Writings of Leon Trotsky is a 14-volume set collection of the writings of Leon Trotsky between the years 1929 and 1940, published by Pathfinder Press. This collection was put together in the 1960s and 1970s by initiative of the Socialist Workers Party. Most volumes were edited by George Breitman. Many of the texts were translated to English for the first time.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as "Leon Trotsky", was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and establishment of the Soviet Union. Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered the two most prominent Soviet figures, and Trotsky was "de facto" second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic. Ideologically a Marxist and Leninist, his thought and writings inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg. His relations with Lenin have been a source of intense historical debate. However, on balance, scholarly opinion among a range of prominent historians and political scientists such as E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Moshe Lewin, Ronald Suny, Richard B. Day and W. Bruce Lincoln was that Lenin’s desired “heir” would have been a collective responsibility in which Trotsky was placed in "an important role and within which Stalin would be dramatically demoted ".
The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification was a Spanish communist party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War. It was formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain and the Workers and Peasants' Bloc against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom the former broke.
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany.
Snowball is a character in George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm. He is largely based on Leon Trotsky, who led the opposition against Joseph Stalin (Napoleon). Snowball is depicted as an intellectual white pig whose leadership, dedication, and feats for Animal Farm is unparallel to any others on the farm, however he is rivaled by Napoleon who has hatred for Snowball. In the 1954 film adaptation of Animal Farm, he was voiced by Maurice Denham, and was voiced by Kelsey Grammer in the 1999 television adaptation.
Jack Barnes is an American communist and the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Barnes was elected the party's national secretary in 1972, replacing the retiring Farrell Dobbs. He joined the SWP in the early 1960s as a student at Carleton College in Minnesota and quickly became a leading member of the party's youth wing. From the 1990s to the present, Barnes has directed his party to support the governments of North Korea and Equatorial Guinea; has instructed the party to abstain from antiwar or anti-racist activism; and in January 2016 lent his support to the occupation of federal lands, in Oregon, by militia movement members. Barnes was a key advocate of the party's "turn to industry" in the 1970s, its exit from the Fourth International in the 1980s and its orientation towards the Cuban Communist Party in the 1990s.
Raya Dunayevskaya, later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.
Victor Serge, born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, was a Russian writer, poet, Marxist revolutionary and historian. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He was a close supporter of the Left Opposition and associate of Leon Trotsky. According to William Giraldi, Serge's novels may be "read like an alloy of" George Orwell and Franz Kafka: "the uncommon political acuity of Orwell and the absurdist comedy of Kafka, a comedy with the damning squint of satire, except the satire is real." In his studies of Serge, Richard Greeman described him as a Modernist writer influenced by James Joyce, Andrei Bely and Freud; Greenman also believed that Serge, although writing in French, continued the experiments of such Russian Soviet writers as Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pilnyak and poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin. He is remembered as the author of novels and other prose works, memoirs and poetry. Among his novels chronicling the lives of Soviet people and revolutionaries and of the first half of the 20th century, the best-known is The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Nicholas Lezard calls the novel " of the great 20th-century Russian novels" that follows the traditions of "Gogolian absurdity".
The International Revolutionary Marxist Centre was an international association of left-socialist parties. The member-parties rejected both mainstream social democracy and the Third International.
Jack Soble was a Lithuanian who, together with his brother Robert Soblen, penetrated Leon Trotsky's entourage for Soviet intelligence in the 1920s. Later, in the United States, he was jailed, with his wife Myra, on espionage charges. He was born in Vilkaviskis, Lithuania as Abromas Sobolevicius and sometimes used the name Abraham Sobolevicius or Adolph Senin.
George Breitman was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and as a long-time editor of that organization's weekly paper, The Militant. Breitman also supervised and edited several important publishing projects as the head of the SWP's publishing house in the 1960s and 1970s.
Myra Tanner Weiss was an American Communist following Trotskyism, and a three time U.S. vice presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
The Marxist Group was an early Trotskyist group in the United Kingdom.
Paul Le Blanc is an American historian at La Roche University in Pittsburgh, as well as a labor and socialist activist. He has written and edited more than 30 books on topics such as Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg.
The Communist League of America (Opposition) was founded by James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern late in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism. The CLA(O) was the United States section of Leon Trotsky's International Left Opposition and initially positioned itself as not a rival party to the CPUSA but as a faction of it and the Comintern. The group was terminated in 1934 when it merged with the American Workers Party headed by A. J. Muste to establish the Workers Party of the United States.
James Patrick Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.
Joseph Leroy Hansen, was an American Trotskyist and leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. The SWP began as a group which, because it supported Leon Trotsky over Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was expelled from the Communist Party USA. Since the 1930s, it has published The Militant as a weekly newspaper. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.
The following is a chronological list of books by Leon Trotsky, a Marxist theoretician, including hardcover and paperback books and pamphlets published during his life and posthumously during the years immediately following his assassination in the northern summer of 1940. Included are the original Russian or German language titles and publication information, as well as the name and publication information of the first English language edition.
Prokopy Timofeevich Zubarev was a Soviet politician and statesman. He was purged and executed during the "anti-Trotskyist" repressions of Stalin.