The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first workers’ state in history. For roughly six weeks, from 18 March to 28 May, the workers of Paris ran the city democratically, whilst heroically resisting the onslaught of the old order, based at Versailles.

We are proud to announce a marxist.com exclusive! Here, we are making available online for the first time in English a brand new translation of a historic pamphlet written by Trotsky in 1904. Titled, Before the 9th of January, Trotsky shows how utterly reactionary the liberal bourgeoisie in Russia had become. He draws the important conclusion that the forthcoming revolution in Russia will find them in the camp of the enemy, and will instead be led by the revolutionary proletariat – a stunningly accurate prediction. As far as we are aware, this is available nowhere else in English online.

The theory of permanent revolution stands alongside Lenin’s theory of imperialism as one of the most important contributions to Marxism since the deaths of Marx and Engels. Accordingly, in this issue of In Defence of Marxism we are proud to publish a number of articles which explore this concept in some depth.

“Trotsky said long ago that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik.” Vladimir Lenin delivered this statement to the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee on 1 November 1917 (Old Style).

After Lenin had been incapacitated by a stroke in March 1923, Trotsky took up the struggle to rejuvenate the Bolshevik Party. Niklas Albin Svensson explains how the conflict between the future Left Opposition against the ‘Troika’ of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev first came out into the open, and draws out the valuable lessons it contains for communists today.

We are extremely proud to publish here a brand new English translation of a short 1922 article by Leon Trotsky, Attention to theory. First published in the monthly magazine Under the banner of Marxism, this article met with Lenin’s full approval and is referred to in a piece he wrote for the third edition of the magazine, On the significance of militant materialism. We are republishing the latter alongside this article.

On this day in 1940, Trotsky died of injuries inflicted by a Stalinist agent. Despite the lies of Stalin’s epigones, there is nothing in Trotsky’s ideas that cannot also be found in Lenin. The two men reached the same political conclusions and led the Russian Revolution to victory in 1917, at the head of the Bolshevik Party. Both understood the necessity of world revolution; and after Lenin died, Trotsky continued to defend his real ideas and legacy against Stalin’s bureaucratic counterrevolution. It was for this reason that he was marked for death.

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 175th anniversary of the publication of that founding document of the Marxist movement, the Communist Manifesto. Written in 1847 by Marx and Engels, and published the following year, the Manifesto retains an astonishing vitality today. Indeed, it is more relevant now than when it was written. We publish below an article by Trotsky written in 1937 on the occasion of the Manifesto's 90th anniversary.

Thousands tuned in for an online rally on 25 November to launch a Brazilian campaign in support of the Leon Trotsky House Museum in Mexico. The meeting was hosted and introduced by Roberto Robaina a PSOL (Party of Socialism and Freedom) councillor in Porto Alegre and leader of the MES tendency within the party, Serge Goulart (from the Esquerda Marxista, Brazilian section of the IMT) and Israel Dutra, the PSOL International Relations Officer. Speaking at the meeting were Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson, Gabriela Noriega, the Museum’s Director, Leonardo Padura, the renowned Cuban writer who wrote “The Man Who

We republish here the ‘Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International’, written by Leon Trotsky in June 1921. In this masterpiece of perspectives, which is highly relevant to the world situation to day, Trotsky analyses the nature of the organic, global crisis of capitalism, of a system being suffocated by its own mountains of debt, speculation and inflation.

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 the year 2000 we published this article by Leon Trotsky on capitalist development. The purpose then was to underline the fact that although capitalism was experiencing a boom, the period we had entered was actually one of overall capitalist decline. As we explained in the introduction “Rather than a new upswing, capitalism is heading for a new slump and a downward curve of development similar to the interwar period.” This was confirmed by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent events. We are republishing it as an aid to understanding the period we have been through and where we are going.

（编按：本文为《保卫马克思主义》网站主编艾伦·伍兹（Alan Woods）为国际马克思主义趋势(IMT）印尼支部出版发行的《过渡纲领》印尼文版所写的序言，原文于2012年5月15日发表）

（編按：本文為《保衛馬克思主義》網站主編艾倫·伍茲（Alan Woods）為國際馬克思主義趨勢(IMT）印尼支部出版發行的《過渡綱領》印尼文版所寫的序言，原文於2012年5月15日發表）