The Socialist Equality Party (US) today continues publication of The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party. The document was discussed extensively and adopted unanimously at the Founding Congress of the SEP, held August 3-9, 2008. (See “Socialist Equality Party holds founding Congress”) The WSWS will serialize the publication over two weeks. (Click here for parts 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11)

The WSWS has published the Socialist Equality Party Statement of Principles, which was also adopted at the Founding Congress. Click here to download a PDF version of the Statement of Principles.

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Imperialist War and the Collapse of the Second International

20. The tensions building up in world capitalism erupted in the First World War, which, with all its horrors, announced the opening of the epoch of the “death agony of capitalism” and of the world socialist revolution. As early as the 1880s, Engels had warned of the consequences of capitalist militarism and the danger of war. Prior to 1914, at a series of Congresses, the Second International had issued manifestos calling on the working class to resist the outbreak of war, and, if a war broke out, to utilize the crisis to “rouse the people and hasten the downfall of capitalism.” However, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 - the spark that set off long-standing conflicts within the bourgeoisie of Europe - revealed overnight the implications of the growth of opportunism within the socialist movement. On August 4, 1914, the representatives of the SPD voted to financially support the war, and almost all the major parties of the International fell in line behind the war policies of their bourgeois governments.

21. In opposition to the capitulation of the Second International, the Bolshevik Party, under the leadership of Lenin, came out against the war. Within weeks of its outbreak, Lenin authored a resolution that defined the conflict as “a bourgeois, imperialist and dynastic war.” The resolution declared:

“The conduct of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party, the strongest and most influential in the Second International (1889-1914), a party which has voted for war credits and repeated the bourgeois-chauvinist phrases of the Prussian Junkers and the bourgeoisie, is sheer betrayal of socialism. Under no circumstances can the conduct of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party be condoned, even if we assume that the party was absolutely weak and had temporarily to bow to the will of the bourgeois majority of the nation. This party has in fact adopted a national-liberal policy.”[12]

22. The resolution condemned the actions of the French and Belgian socialist parties as “just as reprehensible.”[13] It proceeded to place the tragic events of August 1914 in the necessary political and historical context:

The betrayal of socialism by most leaders of the Second International (1889-1914) signifies the ideological and political bankruptcy of the International. This collapse has been mainly caused by the actual prevalence in it of petty-bourgeois opportunism, the bourgeois nature and danger of which have long been indicated by the finest representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of all countries. The opportunists had long been preparing to wreck the Second International by denying the socialist revolution and substituting bourgeois reformism in its stead, by rejecting the class struggle with its inevitable conversion at certain moments into civil war, and by preaching class collaboration; by preaching bourgeois chauvinism under the guise of patriotism and the defense of the fatherland, and ignoring or rejecting the fundamental truth of socialism, long ago set forth in the Communist Manifesto, that the workingmen have no country; by confining themselves, in the struggle against militarism, to a sentimental philistine point of view, instead of recognizing the need for a revolutionary war by the proletarians of all countries, against the bourgeoisie of all countries; by making a fetish of the necessary utilization of parliamentarianism and bourgeois legality, and forgetting that illegal forms of organization and agitation are imperative at times of crises.[14]

23. Lenin insisted that the capitulation of the Second International meant the political death of that organization as an instrument of revolutionary struggle. It was, therefore, necessary to proceed with the construction of a new, Third International. This new International had to be based on an uncompromising struggle against opportunism, which had revealed itself in August 1914 as an agency of imperialism within the international workers’ movement. Lenin rejected any explanation of the collapse of the Second International that trivialized the event by treating it as if it were the product of individual mistakes and weaknesses. “At all events,” Lenin wrote, “it is absurd to substitute the question of the role of individuals for the question of the struggle between trends and of the new period in the working class movement.”[15] As Lenin anticipated, the division between Marxism and opportunism precipitated a fundamental realignment of the workers movement, reflected in every country, between national chauvinist and international tendencies. It was out of this division that the new Communist Parties would later emerge.

24. World War I had deep roots in the development of capitalism, and in particular the contradiction between an increasingly global economy and the capitalist nation-state system. Trotsky wrote in 1915, “The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit...The War of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its own inherent contradictions.”[16] This meant at the same time that the old Social-Democratic Parties, which had developed in a period of stupendous growth of national economies, were shaken to their core by the breakdown of the familiar conditions that had shaped their political routines over several decades. The formal theoretical and rhetorical defense of the revolutionary perspective had been balanced with a practice that was of a predominantly reformist character. But the change of conditions made the continuation of political and theoretical double bookkeeping impossible. “In their historic crash the national states have pulled down with them the national Socialist parties also...As the national states have become a hindrance to the development of the forces of production, so the old Socialist parties have become the main hindrance to the revolutionary movement of the working class.”[17]

25. Seeking the source of opportunism within the Second International, Lenin analyzed the economic and social-political changes in the structure of world capitalism associated with the emergence of imperialism. Criticizing the formulations of Karl Kautsky, the theoretical leader of German Social Democracy who had capitulated to the opportunists in August 1914, Lenin rejected the latter’s claim that imperialism was merely a “preferred” policy. Rather, Lenin explained:

...Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: Imperialism is (1) monopoly capitalism; (2) parasitic, or decaying capitalism; (3) moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism.[18]

26. Lenin also rejected Kautsky’s theory of “ultra-imperialism,” which hypothesized the possibility of the peaceful, non-violent, non-imperialist regulation of world economy and the relations between the major capitalist powers:

...The essence of the matter [Lenin wrote] is that Kautsky detaches the politics of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy “preferred” by finance capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy which, he alleges, is possible on this very same basis of finance capital. It follows, then, that monopolies in the economy are compatible with non-monopolistic, non-violent, non-annexationist methods in politics. It follows, then, that the territorial division of the world, which was completed during this very epoch of finance capital, and which constitutes the basis of the present peculiar forms of rivalry between the biggest capitalist states, is compatible with a non-imperialist policy. The result is a slurring-over and a blunting of the most profound contradictions of the latest stage of capitalism, instead of an exposure of their depth; the result is bourgeois reformism instead of Marxism.[19]

The Russian Revolution and the Vindication of Permanent Revolution

27. Between 1914 and 1917 Lenin and Trotsky foresaw that the imperialist war would set the stage for revolutionary eruptions in Europe. This perspective was vindicated with the outbreak of the February Revolution, which arose out of the war and its extreme exacerbation of the crisis of Russian society. After the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the Tsar, the Mensheviks sided with the bourgeois Provisional Government and opposed a revolution of the working class. The Provisional Government defended capitalist property relations, continued to prosecute the war, and opposed the distribution of land to the peasantry. Lenin returned to Russia in April and, repudiating in practice the longstanding Bolshevik program of the democratic dictatorship, called for the working class to oppose the Provisional Government and take power through the Soviets. This position validated and endorsed, in all essentials, Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, which had, to an extraordinary degree, anticipated the actual course of revolutionary developments and laid the foundations, theoretically and politically, for Lenin’s decisive reorientation of the Bolshevik Party in April 1917. Lenin’s adoption of Trotsky’s perspective was bitterly opposed by many “Old Bolsheviks,” including Stalin. Prior to Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917, the position taken by Stalin, as editor of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper, was that critical support should be given to the Provisional government. He also advocated support for the continuation of the war effort.

28. In the months leading up to the overthrow of the bourgeois Provisional Government, Lenin undertook an extensive study of the writings of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state. This work answered the opportunists who were striving to portray the state as a supra-class institution, which existed to reconcile and arbitrate differences between classes. Lenin called attention to Engels’s definition of the state as a coercive instrument employed by the bourgeoisie to defend its rule, and to oppress and exploit the working class. This definition, Lenin argued, had lost none of its relevance in the twentieth century. On the contrary:

Imperialism - the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic capitalist monopolies, of the development of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism - has clearly shown an extraordinary strengthening of the “state machine” and an unprecedented growth in its bureaucratic and military apparatus in connection with the intensification of repressive measures against the proletariat both in the monarchical and in the freest, republican countries.[20]

29. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks, having won the majority in the Petrograd Soviet, organized an insurrection under the leadership of Trotsky, overthrew the Provisional Government and transferred power to the Soviets. Serious historical research has refuted claims that the October Revolution was a conspiratorial “putsch” undertaken by the Bolsheviks without mass support.[21] In fact, there existed overwhelming support in the working class of Petrograd, the Russian capital, for the overthrow of the bourgeois regime. However, within the Bolshevik leadership there was substantial opposition. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who were among Lenin’s closest collaborators, were convinced that an insurrection would meet with disaster. They anticipated insurmountable obstacles to the victory of the revolution. They stressed the still substantial military forces commanded by Kerensky, the leader of the Provisional Government, and the artillery that was deployed around the capital. As it turned out, the calculations of the Bolshevik opponents of insurrection were far off the mark. The overthrow of the Provisional Government was achieved with remarkable ease, and with very little bloodshed. Trotsky, commenting later on the significance of the struggle within the Bolshevik Party that preceded the insurrection, noted:

...there are two types of leaders who incline to drag the party back at the very moment when it must take a stupendous leap forward. Some among them generally tend to see mainly the difficulties and obstacles in the way of revolution, and to estimate each situation with a preconceived, though not always conscious, intention of avoiding any action. Marxism in their hands is turned into a method for establishing the impossibility of revolutionary action. The purest specimens of this type are the Russian Mensheviks. But this type as such is not confined to Menshevism, and at the most critical movement it suddenly manifests itself in responsible posts in the most revolutionary party.

The representatives of the second variety are distinguished by their superficial and agitational approach. They never see any obstacles or difficulties until they come into a head-on collision with them. The capacity for surmounting real obstacles by means of bombastic phrases, the tendency to evince lofty optimism on all questions (“the ocean is only knee deep”), is inevitably transformed into its polar opposite when the hour for decisive action strikes. To the first type of revolutionist, who makes mountains out of molehills, the problems of seizing power lie in heaping up and multiplying to the nth degree all the difficulties he has become accustomed to see in his way. To the second type, the superficial optimist, the difficulties of revolutionary action always come as a surprise. In the preparatory period the behavior of the two is different: the former is a skeptic, upon whom one cannot rely too much, that is, in a revolutionary sense; the latter, on the contrary, may seem a fanatic revolutionist. But at the decisive moment, the two march hand in hand; they both oppose the insurrection.[22]

30. The Russian Revolution provided an impulse for upheavals throughout the world. The revolutionary government called for an end to the war, released secret treaties exposing the imperialist designs of the belligerents, and urged workers to rise up against their governments. The Mensheviks remained intransigent in their opposition to the overthrow of the Provisional Government, despite the fact that the Bolshevik-led revolution clearly enjoyed mass support. Even after the overthrow, the Mensheviks rebuffed efforts of moderate Bolsheviks such as Kamenev to draw them into a socialist coalition government. The Mensheviks insisted that their price for any collaboration with the Bolsheviks was not only the removal of Lenin and Trotsky from any positions of power but also having them handed over to police authorities!

31. The failure of the Bolshevik Party to come to power could only have led to a counter-revolution, resulting in the restoration of the Tsar or the establishment of a military dictatorship. Once the bourgeoisie and its imperialist patrons recovered from their initial shock, they instigated a civil war with the aim of destroying the revolutionary regime. The Red Army was formed, under the leadership of Trotsky, to defend the Soviet regime against counterrevolution. Trotsky proved to be a military strategist and organizer of genius. His success as the leader of the Red Army reflected his incomparable understanding of the objective tasks confronting the working class and his ability to convey that understanding to the masses. In a speech delivered in April 1918, Trotsky explained:

History is no indulgent, soft mother who will protect the working class: she is a wicked stepmother who will teach the workers through bloody experience how they must attain their aims. The working people are readily inclined to forgive and forget: it is enough for the conditions of struggle to have become a little easier, enough for them to have won something, for it to seem to them that the main job has been done, and they are disposed to show magnanimity, to become passive, to stop fighting. In this lies the misfortune of the working people. But the possessing classes never give up the struggle. They have been educated to offer constant opposition to the pressure of the working masses, and any passivity, indecision, or wavering on our part results in our exposing our weak spot to blows of the possessing classes so that tomorrow or the next day they inevitably launch a new onslaught upon us. The working class needs not the universal forgiveness that Tolstoy preached, but hard tempering, intransigence, profound conviction that without struggle for every step, every inch of the road leading to betterment of its life, without constant, irreconcilable harsh struggle, and without organization of this struggle, there can be no salvation and liberation.[23]

32. The Bolsheviks were convinced that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended upon the extension of the revolution beyond the borders of Soviet Russia. This position was held by the finest representatives of international socialism. Defending the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: ‘I have dared!’” The Russian Revolution transformed the question of socialism from a purely theoretical into a practical question. However, Luxemburg insisted that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on the outcome of the class struggle beyond the borders of Russia. “In Russia the problem could only be posed,” she wrote. “It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism.’”[24] The bourgeoisie saw in the emerging revolutionary movements its most dangerous opponents. The combined forces of world imperialism organized an intervention in Russia in support of counter-revolution. In Germany, the forces of reaction, in league with the Social Democrats who had been raised to power by the working class uprising of November 1918, organized in January 1919 the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The assassination of these two revolutionary leaders was the political response of the German (and world) bourgeoisie to the Russian Revolution. The ruling classes had concluded from 1917 that the development of Marxist leadership in the working class had to be prevented at all costs. The bloody events of the 20th century would demonstrate the extent to which the ruling classes and their agents among the Social Democrats and Stalinists were guided by this lesson.

The Communist International

33. The Third International, or Communist International (Comintern), held its first Congress in Moscow in March 1919. The Soviet Republic was still defending itself against imperialist-backed counter-revolutionary forces. Under siege conditions, the Communist International elaborated the program, strategy and tactics for world revolution as a practical task confronting the international working class. Drawing on the tragic lessons of 1914, the Communist International was to be based on an uncompromising struggle against opportunism and revisionism, which had led to the demise of the Second International. On July 30, 1920, Trotsky introduced the Theses on the Conditions of Admission to the Communist International, which enumerated the so-called “21 Points” defining the terms of membership in the international revolutionary organization. Parties seeking membership in the Comintern would be obligated to “regularly and methodically remove reformists and centrists from every responsible post in the labor movement,” and recognize “the necessity of a complete break with reformism and ‘centrist’ politics...”[25]

34. Trotsky explained that the Comintern was established as a “school of revolutionary strategy” that would oversee the development of new Communist Parties around the world, based on an understanding of the objective situation, the elaboration of correct tactics, and the fight against opportunism. He wrote, “The task of the working class - in Europe and throughout the world - consists in counterposing to the thoroughly thought-out counter-revolutionary strategy of the bourgeoisie its own revolutionary strategy, likewise thought out to the end. For this it is first of all necessary to understand that it will not be possible to overthrow the bourgeoisie automatically, mechanically, merely because it is condemned by history.”[26]

35. At the end of World War I, the extension of revolution was an imminent possibility. In November 1918, the outbreak of revolution in Germany led quickly to the abdication of the Kaiser and the proclamation of a republic. Political power fell into the hands of the SPD, which did everything it could to strangle the revolution. In contradistinction to Russia 18 months earlier, there did not exist in Germany a developed political party tempered by years of intransigent struggle against revisionism and centrism. The left-wing opponents of the SPD had hesitated far too long in proceeding to a decisive organizational break with the Social-Democratic Party. A substantial faction of that opposition situated itself halfway between the SPD and Bolshevism. It was not until late December 1918 that the most revolutionary faction in Germany, the Spartacists, proceeded to found the Communist Party. Then, in January 1919, with little preparation and with no strategic plan, an insurrection broke out in Berlin. The SPD regime mobilized right-wing shock troops to suppress the uprising and sanctioned the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

36. Further defeats of the insurgent working class in Europe followed. In March 1921, a premature and ill-prepared insurrection was suppressed by the German state. At the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921, Lenin and Trotsky intervened decisively against “ultra-leftism.” Communist parties, they insisted, could not conquer power without first winning the support of the masses. A pamphlet written by Lenin, entitled “Left-Wing” Communism - An Infantile Disorder, was distributed to the Congress delegates. It pointed out that the Bolshevik Party developed in struggle not only against Menshevism, but also “against petty-bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism, or borrows something from the latter and, in all essential matters, does not measure up to the conditions and requirements of a consistently proletarian class struggle.”[27]

37. Lenin explained that the Bolshevik victory in October 1917 would not have been possible if the revolutionary party had not previously engaged in, and mastered, many forms of political struggle. He refuted radical shibboleths that rejected, under all conditions, political compromises, denied the legitimacy of engaging in electoral and parliamentary activity, and declared it impermissible to work inside reactionary trade unions. The Third Congress counseled Communist parties to prepare for a more prolonged period in which they would have to win over the allegiance of the working class. Among the tactical initiatives encouraged by Lenin and Trotsky was the utilization of the demand for a “united front” of mass working class organizations. The purpose of the “united front” was to organize the defense of the working class, or to undertake the struggle for important demands in a manner that demonstrated to the masses both the revolutionary initiative of the Communist parties and the perfidy of the Social Democrats. The aim of the united front was not to declare a political amnesty and refrain from criticizing political opponents. Rather, the tactic sought to realize the objective need of the working class for unity in struggle, while at the same time raising its political consciousness by exposing its opportunist leaderships.

38. The shift in political course implemented at the Third Congress brought substantial gains. Especially in Germany, the authority of the Communist Party increased significantly. But in early 1923, the political situation changed dramatically. The devastating collapse of the German economy in the early spring, followed by unprecedented inflation, set into motion a process that seemed to be leading inexorably to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state. The membership of the discredited SPD melted away, while that of the Communist Party (the KPD) grew rapidly. By October 1923 the conditions for a successful revolution appeared extraordinarily favorable. A date was set for the insurrection, October 25 - the sixth anniversary of the Soviet revolution. Then, at the last moment, Heinrich Brandler, the leader of the KPD, cancelled the scheduled insurrection. State forces quickly suppressed isolated insurgent activity in cities where local leaders had not learned of the decision to call the insurrection off. Instead of a socialist revolution, the German October ended in a political fiasco.

39. For Trotsky, the failure of the German Revolution in 1923 was a demonstration in the negative of the supreme political truth: given the existence of the necessary objective conditions for revolution, the subjective factor of leadership assumes decisive significance in the struggle for power. Moreover, he noted that historical experience had demonstrated that the transition to the struggle for power invariably provokes within the revolutionary party a severe political crisis. Such crises have immense significance; and how they are resolved is likely to determine the fate of the revolution for years, if not decades. Trotsky wrote:

A revolutionary party is subjected to the pressure of other political forces. At every given stage of its development the party elaborates its own methods of counteracting and resisting this pressure. During a tactical turn and the resulting internal regroupments and frictions, the party’s power of resistance becomes weakened. From this the possibility always arises that the internal groupings in the party, which originate from the necessity of a turn in tactics, may develop far beyond the original controversial points of departure and serve as a support for various class tendencies. To put the case more plainly: the party that does not keep step with the historical tasks of its own class becomes, or runs the risk of becoming, the indirect tool of other classes.[28]

The Origins of Stalinism and the Founding of the Left Opposition

40. The defeat of the German revolution of 1923 contributed to strengthening conservative tendencies in the Soviet state and Communist Party bureaucracies. These tendencies grew further after the Soviet regime implemented the New Economic Policy in the spring of 1921. The NEP sanctioned a revival of the capitalist market, and significant economic concessions to capitalist strata in the city and countryside. The aim of these concessions was to revive economic activity, which had been shattered by years of war and revolution. While Lenin and Trotsky had hoped that the NEP would be a relatively short-term policy - to buy time for the Soviet Union until a renewed upsurge of international revolutionary struggle - it strengthened conservative social forces and changed the economic and political dynamic of Soviet life. These processes were reflected in the Bolshevik Party and undermined Trotsky’s position in the leadership. Within the ruling strata and the rapidly expanding ranks of the party and state bureaucracy, moods of conservatism and complacency began to find ever-more open political expression. As Trotsky recalled in his autobiography:

...The sentiment of “Not all and always for the revolution, but something for oneself as well,” was translated as “Down with permanent revolution.” The revolt against the exacting theoretical demands of Marxism and the exacting political demands of the revolution gradually assumed, in the eyes of these people, the form of a struggle against “Trotskyism.” Under this banner, the liberation of the philistine in the Bolshevik was proceeding. It was because of this that I lost power, and it was this that determined the form which this loss took.[29]

41. The attacks on Leon Trotsky and the Theory of Permanent Revolution - initiated with the lie that “Trotsky underestimates the peasantry” - were the political reflection of the hostility of the state and party bureaucracy to the internationalist program of the October Revolution. The growing political power of Stalin, and the bureaucratic dictatorship with which his name is associated, was not an inevitable product of socialist revolution, but developed out of contradictions specific to a workers’ state established in a backward country and isolated by the defeats of the international revolution. The legacy of economic backwardness inherited from Tsarist Russia was compounded by the disastrous consequences of seven years of imperialist war (1914-17) and civil war (1918-21). These conditions imposed immense burdens on the effort of the Bolshevik regime to build the Soviet economy. Moreover, the civil war had exacted an enormous human toll on the working class and the Bolshevik Party itself. Tens of thousands of class-conscious workers, who had formed the basis of the popular support for the Bolshevik seizure of power, had been killed. Another major factor in the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party was the integration of a substantial portion of its cadre into the burgeoning state and party bureaucracy. Long-time revolutionists were transformed into administrators, and this change had, over time, an impact on their political orientation. Moreover, the demands of the new state for capable administrators required the recruitment of many people who had served before 1917 in the bureaucracy of the old regime. These cumulative changes in the state structure, the social function of many “Old” Bolsheviks, and the overall position of the working class ultimately found political expression.

42. As Trotsky explained, the Soviet state that emerged from revolution and civil war was a highly contradictory phenomenon. As the product of a genuine working class revolution, the new state rested upon, and defended, new property relations, based on state control of finances and ownership of the means of production. To this extent, the new regime created by the October Revolution of 1917 was a workers’ state. But there was another side. Given the low level of the productive forces and the conditions of “generalized want” that persisted in Soviet Russia, the new state presided over a bourgeois - i.e., unequal - mode of distribution. This basic contradiction between the socialist form of property ownership and the bourgeois form of distribution imparted to the Soviet regime its peculiar and increasingly repressive form.

43. Trotsky and his supporters - including many of the most important leaders of the Russian Revolution - formed the Left Opposition in 1923 to reform Communist Party policy in the Soviet Union and fight for a correct line in the Communist International. Supporters of the Left Opposition criticized the decay in inner-party democracy and advocated an economic policy that placed greater emphasis on the development of state industry, to strengthen socialist planning and bring down the prices of industrial goods. The Stalin faction pushed for greater market liberalization, an orientation to better-off sections of the peasantry (the kulaks), and limited development of the state sector and economic planning. The death of Lenin in January 1924 strengthened the faction led by Stalin. In his last writings, Lenin had warned of the increasing bureaucratization of the Communist Party and called for the removal of Stalin as general secretary.

To be continued

Notes:
12. “The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War,” in: V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 16.
13. Ibid., p. 16.
14. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
15. “The Collapse of the Second International,” Ibid., p. 250.
16. Leon Trotsky, War and the International (Young Socialist Publications, 1971), pp. vii-viii.
17. Ibid., pp. xii-xiii.
18. “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” in: V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 105.
19. “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 22, p. 270.
20. “The State and Revolution,” in: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 25, p. 410.
21. See Professor Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks in Power (Bloomfield: Indiana University Press, 2007).
22. “Lessons of October,” by Leon Trotsky, in The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2002), pp. 286-87.
23. How the Revolution Armed: The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, Volume 1: 1918, Translated by Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1979), p. 58.
24. The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 80.
25. Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International [London: Inks Links, 1980] pp. 93-94.
26. The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume Two (London: New Park, 1974), p. 7.
27. “Left-Wing” Communism - An Infantile Disorder, in: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), p. 32.
28. “Lessons of October,” in: Challenge of the Left Opposition, pp. 228-29.
29. Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), p. 505.