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Alex Callinicos

Trotskyism

Preface and Acknowledgements

As the manuscript of this book was readied for publication in the autumn and winter of 1989, a succession of regimes installed in power in Eastern Europe by Stalin’s armies at the end of the Second World War began to collapse under the pressure of popular revolt. This episode, surely one of the most dramatic and moving developments of the century, suggests that the decline of Stalinism as, a political and economic system is irreversible. It is, therefore, an appropriate moment to reconsider the socialist tradition founded by Leon Trotsky, which since its inception in 1923 has defined itself in opposition to Stalinism. In writing this book I have accumulated various debts. I am in the first place grateful to Frank Parkin, the editor of the series in which this book appears, and to Ray Cunningham at the Open University Press. My understanding of Trotsky’s thought and of the various traditions to which it has given rise owes a great deal to Duncan Hallas’s writings; my discussions over the years with Chris Bambery have also been very helpful. Both read and commented on the manuscript, as did Tony Cliff and Chris Harman. I thank them all for their often searching criticisms, even though I have not always followed their advice. While working on this book, I was fortunate enough to meet in Moscow Nadezhda Joffe, daughter of one of the leaders of the Left Opposition and a survivor of Stalin’s Gulags. I would like, therefore, to dedicate this book to the memory of those Left Oppositionists who perished in the labour camps, fighting, like the participants in the strike at Vorkuta in 1936-7, for a socialism very different from the regimes currently disintegrating in the East.

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Last updated on 13.3.2001