Trotsky as an Alternative

Considers Leon Trotsky's achievements both as a revolutionary and as a writer on politics, history, literature and philosophy. The book argues that Trotsky repeatedly produced convincing alternatives to the catastrophes of capitalism, Stalinism and fascism.

He shows that Trotsky's contribution to the history of the twentieth century was primarily political rather than sociological, and this in a practical as well as a theoretical sense. He locates Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development as a crucial tool whose explanatory power of the mechanisms of world imperialism is as relevant to the late capitalism of the 1990s as it was to the first three decades of the century when it was formulated. Ranging across Trotsky's struggles against Stalin's bureaucracy, his formulation of an alternative economic strategy, his theories relating to the Third World, fascism and the national question, his extensive literary criticism, and concluding with a moving assessment of an extraordinary life, this book is a fitting testimony to a man who, in Mandel's words, 'will be judged by history as the most important strategist for the socialist movement'.