Today, 25 April, is a day of celebration in Italy. It is the anniversary of the final fall of the hated Fascist regime in 1945. The official history books tell us that the anti-fascist movement, the hundreds of thousands of armed partisans who fought in the resistance, were fighting for a democratic republic, which is what was finally established. This ignores the fact that what was taking place was a social revolution – not just for democracy, but for workers’ power. In this brilliant text written in 1930 – 15 years before these events – Leon Trotsky predicted that a “democratic republic”, i.e. a bourgeois-democratic regime, would only emerge from a defeat of the revolutionary

Today is the birthday of the grandson of Leon Trotsky, Esteban Volkov. Over the course of his life, Volkov has fought to preserve the historical truth about Trotsky’s life and work, against the smears of the Stalinists and bourgeois historians. In particular, Volkov has preserved a unique monument to Trotsky’s legacy: the Leon Trotsky House Museum in Coyoacán, Mexico, which was once home to Volkov and his grandparents, Natalia Sedova and Leon Trotsky. On the occasion of his birthday, the International Marxist Tendency would like to send revolutionary greetings to this lifelong champion of Trotsky’s legacy.

On 11 March 2021, the Leon Trotsky House Museum held an online event to celebrate the 95th birthday of Esteban Volkov, grandson of Leon Trotsky, and lifelong defender of the historical truth of the life and work of the great revolutionary. We provide our readers with a recording of the tribute to Esteban Volkov by Alan Woods, editor of In Defence of Marxism, at that event including English subtitles.

On 11 March 2021, the Leon Trotsky House Museum held an online event to celebrate the 95th birthday of Esteban Volkov, Leon Trotsky’s grandson and lifelong defender of the historical truth of the life and work of the great revolutionary. Hundreds of people from around the world followed the event, which consisted of three separate panels of individuals associated with Esteban Volkov and the Trotsky museum.

Since we launched our appeal to help save the Trotsky Museum last Thursday, we have raised no less than €7,700. This is a great achievement but we would like your help to raise even more.

In 1988 Alan Woods interviewed Esteban Volkov (Leon Trotsky's grandson) in a room in the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacan, of which he is the curator. On the night of 24 May 1940, Esteban Volkov, then only 14 years old, was wounded in a brutal machine-gun attack by Stalinist supporters, from which the Trotsky family miraculously escaped alive. Sixty-six years after the murder of Leon Trotsky (20 August 2006), we republished this interview dealing with the various assassination attempts on Trotsky and his family.

From May to August of 1934, Minneapolis was rocked by a strike that would forever change the course of U.S. labour history. This was the strike of Teamsters Local 574, a union led by Trotskyists. Many of the best techniques used by organised labour today find their origins in the Minneapolis Strike, in particular the flying picket. However, the strike's greatest conquest was in laying the foundations for industrial unionism in North America, leading to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the following years. Above all, the Minneapolis Strike demonstrated the role played by the young forces of American Trotskyism in obtaining gains for workers.

It is a well-known fact that accident can play a considerable role in both history and the lives of individuals. In the course of my life I have observed many accidents and extraordinary coincidences. But I have never experienced such a unique and unforeseeable concatenation of circumstances as that which I am about to relate here.

"The development of the International Left Opposition is proceeding amidst sharp crises that cast the fainthearted and the short-sighted into pessimism. In reality these crises are completely unavoidable. One has only to read the correspondence of Marx and Engels attentively, or to preoccupy oneself seriously with the history of the development of the Bolshevik Party to realise how complicated, how difficult, how full of contradictions the process of developing revolutionary cadres is."

The following are new translations of excerpts from Trois points c’est tout by Fred Zeller (1912-2003). Zeller, who, at the time, was the secretary of the Seine (Paris) Young Socialists and a sympathiser of the Trotskyist movement in the mid-1930s, visited Trotsky in Norway at the end of October 1935. This was at the time when the Socialist Party leaders were expelling the left from the Young Socialists as well as dissolving the Bolshevik Leninist tendency, whose members had joined the SFIO in late 1934.

Ted Grant was a well-known figure in the international Marxist movement. He had a significant impact on British politics. When he died all the most important newspapers carried extensive obituaries that recognised this fact. This is a remarkable work that comprehensively covers the development of Ted's life and ideas, starting from his early family background in Johannesburg right up to his death in London in 2006 at the age of 93.

In the fourth chapter of the book about Ted Grant, Alan Woods highlights Ted's defence of Marxism in the difficult years after World War Two.

The publication in English of The Man Who Loved Dogs by the Cuban author, Leonardo Padura is a major literary and political event. I read this remarkable novel when it came out in Spanish and it made a profound impression on me. I had intended to write a review then, but was prevented from doing it by a combination of circumstances. With the greatest pleasure I will now rectify this omission.

Today, 9th July, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ted Grant, the founder of the International Marxist Tendency. Rob Sewell, editor of the British Marxist paper Socialist Appeal, outlines the important role played by Ted in building the forces of Marxism during his lifetime and discusses the legacy of Ted for Marxists today.

This is a video recording of the book launch of Ted Grant: The Permanent Revolutionary. Alan Woods spoke and gave an account of Ted's struggle for and his contribution to the ideas of Marxism. In the speech he gives an account of the history of the 4th International and the role of the British Marxists, the rise of the Militant Tendency and its degeneration.