Joanna
----- Original Message -----
Just a few points on comments that have been made:
1) Trotsky in 1903 sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He subsequently split from the Mensheviks to found his own faction, which advocated Bolshevik-Menshevik reconciliation. During the pre-1917 period, Lenin and Trotsky had some very harsh things to say about one another. Lenin's remark that Trotsky was a "windbag" dates from this period. The acrimony ceased whenTrotsky went over to the Bolsheviks in 1917.
2) I have read "Black Jacobins" and other things by C. L. R. James. He writes passionately and is very much worth reading. He cannot, however, hold a candle to Trotsky as a historian, theoretician or writer of prose (and I am only able to read Trotsky in translation!). He doesn't even come close! Trotsky was one of the towering figures of the twentieth century. He should not be judged by the idiocy and narrowness of his epigones in contemporary sects..
3) To compare the multiple and superficial affiliations of someone like Leo Panitch to the adhesion of Lenin and Trotsky to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party is fankly ludicrous and lacking in any historical sense. These associations are secondary, at best. Today's Marxist professors are academics, first and foremost. The entire lives of Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, revolved around the mass parties they belonged to, which were rooted in the working class. They were profoundly political figures in a way the left journalists and academics of the present are not and cannot be. The society we live in doesn't afford them such an opportunity.
Jim Creegan ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk