Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record

DAY, RICHARD B.; GAIDO, DANIEL

Brill Academic Publishers

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2009 p. 684

978-9004167704

Before the publication of this volume there was a gap of more than half a century in the historiography of the theory of permanent revolution, between Karl Marx and Frederick Engels´s "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League," delivered in March 1850, and Leon Trotsky´s book "Results and Prospects," written in the early months of 1906. Trotsky was the most brilliant proponent of Permanent Revolution since the first Russian Revolution in 1905, but by no means its sole author. The documents in this volume, most of them translated into English for the first time, demonstrate that Trotsky was one of several participants in a debate from 1903-1907 that involved numerous leading figures of Russian and European Marxism, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus and David Ryazanov. This volume reassembles that debate, assesses it with reference to Marx and Engels, and provides new evidence for interpreting the formative years of Russian revolutionary Marxism.