Lenin and Trotsky

What They Really Stood For

Alan Woods, Ted Grant

Paperback

978-81-89833-19-0

Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2007

221 pages

INR 295.00

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The ideas of Lenin and Trotsky are without doubt the most distorted and slandered ideas in history. For more than eighty years, they have been subjected to an onslaught from the apologists of capitalism, who have attempted to present their ideas – Bolshevism – as both totalitarian and utopian. An entire industry was developed in an attempt to equate the crimes of Stalinism with the regime of worker's democracy that existed under Lenin and Trotsky.

On the other hand, ever since the invention of 'Trotskyism' in 1924, the Stalinist bureaucracy has systematically falsified the real relationship between these two leaders of the October Revolution.

Originally written as a reply to Monty Johnstone, a leading theoretician of the British Communist Party, it systematically demolishes all the arguments used to discredit Trotsky's ideas and his role in the Bolshevik Party. This book uncovers the real ideas of Lenin and Trotsky.

Alan Woods

Alan Woods (born 23 October 1944) is a Trotskyist political theorist and author. He is one of the leading members of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), as well as its British affiliate group Socialist Appeal. He is political editor of the IMT's In Defence of Marxism website. Woods was a leading supporter within the Militant tendency within the UK Labour Party and its parent group the Committee for a Workers' International until the early 1990s. A series of disagreements on tactics and theory led to the expulsion of Woods and Ted Grant from the tendency, who founded the Committee for a Marxist International (soon renamed International Marxist Tendency) in 1992. They continued with the policy of entryism into the Labour Party. Woods has been particularly vocal in his support for the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and repeatedly met with the socialist Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, leading to speculation he was a close political adviser.

See more books by Alan Woods

Ted Grant

Ted Grant was born in South Africa in 1913. Travelling to Britain in search of broader horizons, he stopped off in Paris to talk with Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son. With Ralph Lee he formed the Workers' International League (WIL), which subsequently fused with the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) to become the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in 1944.

After the war, he defended Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union in that it was a deformed workers' state – one in which private property and capitalism had been abolished, yet where the workers did not hold political power. He argued that the so-called 'communist' countries of Eastern Europe were in fact run on the same lines as the Soviet Union, and he used the term Proletarian Bonapartism to describe them.

During the 1960s he extended the analysis to the colonial countries that had become 'communist'. He argued that the intelligentsia of these countries looked towards Stalinism as a way to develop their economies and alleviate the desperate conditions; but since the masses had not been roused on a socialist programme, the bureaucratic nature of these regimes was inevitable.