This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.Ĭhoose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. It discusses Marxism in Russia and its flawed notion of revolution, Karl Marx's theory of revolution, the connection between revolution and capitalism, Trotsky's “theory of permanent revolution” or “uninterrupted revolution,” Thermidor and the rise of postrevolutionary dictatorship in Russia, and Trotsky's view of the War Communism. This chapter explores Trotsky's conception of the process of revolution in the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

For Trotsky, revolution was a long but interconnected process of political and social struggle. Leon Trotsky articulated a broad theory of the nature of revolution, but the events which he tried to understand and in which he was involved actually led to his downfall. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.One reason why Russian radicals were interested in Marxism at the turn of the century was the attraction of its quasi-scientific laws of progress towards utopia, even though the doctrine was difficult to apply to a country that seemed unprepared for proletarian revolution and socialism. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. He argues, “More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. In opposition to the Stalinist leader cult, he envisioned a new man arising under socialism. Literature and Revolution was part of Trotsky’s contribution to the debate within the party on how this problem bequeathed by tsarism could be overcome.

Trotsky saw the lack of culture of the masses as an important factor contributing to the growth of bureaucratism in the young Soviet state. Trotsky’s attention to questions of literature and art, like his writings on technology and broader questions of social life and culture, was inseparably bound up with the early struggles against the degeneration of the October Revolution. The latter conceptions were soon made use of by the growing Stalinist bureaucracy as it moved to strangle genuinely revolutionary tendencies and tighten its grip on the first workers’ state.

Leon trotsky literature and revolution