For the skeptics.
First of all track down this link and listen to Marwan Bishara. Of course listen to his analysis, but also watch his manner and the breathless quality of his mind and sense of hope and reflection on an historic interlude.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/304501-1
Consider his metaphor of a flight, a thing beyond the rational check off list.
I've studied several periods of history trying to understand my own experiences roughly between 1960 at 17 and about 1972 when I was thirty and knew beyond a doubt it was over and more profoundly dead than I ever could imagine,yet somehow I carried something. Meanwhile between about 1968 to about 1979 I worked in various capacities within the Disability Rights movement here. By 1979 the informal social institutions of a civil rights movement were in place... I got another view of history. I had been very lucky to have lived these.
During the next 39 years without a shread of hope, I would occasionally start reading on some of my favorite periods, mostly motivated by art, those decades around the French Revolution and Weimar. So this History of Trotsky is another great find. It's okay if it is wrong headed or there were mistakes, or whatever. This isn't scholarly analysis. What is important is that Trotsky was living within the grip of history and its collective motions. It's literature in some deep sense.
Over on my other desk is Golo Mann's Reminiscences and Reflections, A Youth in Germany. At the beginning, GM was in boarding school and just getting out to go to university. By the end of Weimar and 1933 he was working his way through a PhD in history. His thesis adviser was Karl Jaspers. I've read some Jaspers, including the correspondence with Hannah Arendt. Jasper's is too heavy into the spiritual side, but then so were a lot of that generation.
Whatever GM thought would be the future was gone. These are really terrible things to live through. There are at the moment millions of people in this desparation. When and if they go radical and which direction, you never know.
I very dimmly remember in high school reading Thomas Payne's famous essay that begins, These are the times that try men's souls. I had no idea what he was talking about. It sounded like a meaningless pep speech. It does sound that way even now, but now I seem to have a much better grip on such a state of mind.
Another historical moment. In the early morning hours of October 14, 1806, Hegel collected his notes for the introduction to Phenomenology of Mind and was desparately trying to find carriage out Jenna. Napoleon's arm had arrived and opened the battle with cannonaid... When Hegel wrote about history, well he certainly had some sense of the ocean of events.
So, I am going back to Trotsky and see.
CG