Trotsky: Before and After Trotskyism

Too often it is said that the innate nature of American social life and political institutions have doomed a radical tradition to contradiction and failure, or worse that one has never existed. It is not surprising, then, to... [ view full abstract ]

Too often it is said that the innate nature of American social life and political institutions have doomed a radical tradition to contradiction and failure, or worse that one has never existed. It is not surprising, then, to find the dearth of scholarship on the key figures in American Trotskyism and their development working in tandem with the more global school of falsification and slander surrounding Trotsky as an individual. Returning the agency of these figures, the study of the American Trotskyists and their relationship to Trotsky, which changed drastically before and after his death in 1940, reveals much of the developments and failures of the Marxist tradition in the United States during the twentieth century. At the core of these developments and relationships is the blow Stalin delivered to International Marxism and radicalism with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939. The pact and the primacy of Stalinism with its connection to Trotskyism show much about the radical tradition in the United States, but also much of Trotsky. His relationship to the American Trotskyist party, of surprisingly little power, coupled with the attacks he suffered from those members who eventually left the party and radicalism altogether reflect a historical figure with much to teach a society in which the contradictions and failures of capitalism are more apparent than ever before.