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On Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed
In my opinion, there is no question today more important and simultaneously more difficult than understanding the degeneration of the workers state in the Soviet Union. Interest in socialism is...
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The Revolution Betrayed #1: Introduction by David North
David North, chairman of the editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, wrote this introduction in December of 1990. A quick google of events in that year shows the Dow Jones hitting a new record...
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TRB #2: Author’s Introduction
The introduction to The Revolution Betrayed was written in August of 1936—as mentioned before, just two weeks before the start of the Moscow frame-up trials. The United States is still in the middle of...
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TRB #3: Chapter One Part 1: The Law of Combined Development
I’ve tried to figure out a way to avoid this, but I just can’t. So much of the argument in the book is based on the opening paragraph of chapter one, and it contains such a vital concept, that I’m...
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TRB #4 Chapter One Part 2: Soviet Industrial Development: A Study In...
I think that as many people will read this, they will be asking: “Socialism failed in the Soviet Union, how did that happen?” My problems with the question as it is formulated are, for the moment,...
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TRB #5 Chapter Two Part 1: The State in a Planned Economy
I spoke before of bourgeois revolution, taking for examples the most classic cases: the English Civil War and the Great French Revolution. At this point, I want to make a couple of observations about...
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TRB #6 Chapter two Part 2: Planned Economy and Zig-Zags of the Leadership
The Left Opposition. Sitting: Serebryakov, Radek, Trotsky, Boguslavsky, Preobrazhensky. Standing: Rakovsky, Drobnis, Beloborodov, Sosnovsky In 1626, Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus commissioned a...
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TRB #7 Chapter Three Part 1: Inequality and the State
The storming of the Winter Palace, October, 1917 There is so much confusion, vagueness, and even mysticism regarding the State that, in discussing it, I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps one of the...
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TRB #9 Chapter Four: The Productivity of Labor
Trotsky, Lenin, and Kamenev at the Party Conference in 1919 At the end of the previous chapter, Trotsky writes, “…the ‘root’ of every social organization is the productive forces, and … the Soviet...
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TRB #10 Chapter Four Part 1: Conditions for Bonapartism
Poster advertising the NEP, 1921 I’m writing this on November 24th. Last night, at a Black Lives Matter protest here in Minneapolis, white supremacists shot and wounded several peaceful protesters....
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TRB #11 Chapter Four Part 2: The Attack on Party Democracy
Michael Kitchen as Trotsky, 1971 I just watched a BBC series from the ’70s called Fall of Eagles in which Patrick Stewart plays Lenin. The version of Lenin presented by the writers has him fighting...
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TRB #12: Sidebar on Revolution, Democracy, Repression, and Terror
Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka Reader Miramon made an interesting comment on my last post, raising some issues that I think are important to address, both for their own sake, and because it will...
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TRB # 13: Chapters 5 – 9: The Nature of the Soviet Union
The mutiny of the battleship Potemkin, 1905 One of the more interesting things I’ve realized as I’ve gone through the book is the degree to which Trotsky’s polemic was aimed in the opposite direction...
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