[Classics] ABC of Materialist Dialectics Trotsky's 'ABC of Materialist Dialectics' is a brilliant short explanation of Marxist philosophy. It was written as part of a defence of Marxism against a middle class revisionist tendency in the American Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s, which attempted to challenge its basic principles. As opposed to pragmatism and empiricism, Trotsky defended dialectical materialism as a richer, fuller, more comprehensive view of society and life in general. Originally published 8 December 1939.
Stalin – The Temporary Holder of the Ukraine The following is a translation of a statement by Leon Trotsky given to the press about the time of the Stalinist invasion of Poland.
Once Again on the "Crisis of Marxism" In the good old days when people referred to the crisis of Marxism they had in mind some specific proposition of Marx which had allegedly failed to withstand the test of facts, namely: the theory of the sharpening of the class struggle, the so-called "theory of impoverishment" and the so-called theory of "catastrophic collapse" of capitalism. These three principal points served as the target for bourgeois and reformist criticism. Today it is simply impossible to engage in a controversy over these issues. Who will undertake to prove that social contradictions are not sharpening but rather softening? In the United States, Mr. Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, and other high dignitaries are compelled to speak openly in their speeches about the fact that "60 families" control the economic life of the nation; on the other hand, the number of unemployed oscillates between ten millions in years of "prosperity" and twenty millions in years of crisis. Those lines in Das Kapital where Marx speaks of the polarisation of capitalist society, the accumulation of wealth at one pole and of poverty at the other — these lines which have been indicted as "demagogic" now simply prove to be a picture of reality.
