By Paul Buhle   Review first published in “Socialism and Democracy” # 70, http://sdonline.org Not so many decades ago, Susan Sontag pronounced Communism to be “Successful Fascism,” presumably a system that would endure in the East Bloc for generations if not centuries. Back in the 1950s, in her cold war classic “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, […]

By Gemma Short Steve Bloom has written an interesting and thoughtful review of The Two Trotskyisms confront Stalinism (here). It is interesting to hear from someone who identifies with the Cannon tradition where they feel that tradition went wrong. There is one point in Bloom’s review which is not expanded upon much. Bloom describes it […]

By David Finkel This review first appears in Against the Current #182 The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism. The fate of the Russian Revolution, Volume 2. Edited and with an introduction by Sean Matgamna. London, UK: Workers’ Liberty, 2015. 790 pages. $30 paperback. Order from http://www.workersliberty/org/books. ON JULY 23, 1939 the foreign ministers of the Soviet […]

By Steve Bloom Review of The Fate of the Russian Revolution, volume 2: The two Trotskyisms confront Stalinism — Debates, essays and confrontations, Edited and with an introduction by Sean Matgamna (798 pp., Workers’ Liberty, London). An examination of Trotskyism as a historical current during World War II, in particular how its appreciation of Stalinism […]

By Robert Fine (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/robertfine/) Review of Sean Matgamna: The two Trotskyisms confront Stalinism: The fate of the Russian Revolution volume 2 (London: Workers Liberty, 2015) Faced with the slaughterhouse that Russia had become under Stalin’s rule, faced with the Pact that Stalin forged with Hitler to divide up Poland between them (and hand the largest […]

Herman Benson was a founding member, along with Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, and others, of the Workers Party, which broke from the US Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the British group of the same name) in 1940 following a debate about how to understand the Stalinist state in Russia. While the SWP majority maintained […]

Raising Atlantis? By Andrew Coates. First published on Andrew’s blog at: https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2016/02/06/raising-atlantis-review-the-two-trotskyisms-confront-stalinism-edited-sean-matgamna-workers-liberty-2015/ Review: The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism. Edited Sean Matgamna. Workers’  Liberty. 2015. “Les bruits lointains d’une atlantide disparue, de cette ville d’Ys engloutie que chacun porte en soi.” The distant sounds of a vanished Atlantis, of that sunken city that everybody carries inside. Ernest […]

By Ed Maltby Paul Le Blanc’s review of The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 2 (Solidarity388) is a thoughtful and detailed piece. Le Blanc defends The Two Trotskyisms against some on the left who deride the book as pointless obsessing over long-ago spats. He is right to do it: such […]

Ed Strauss* reviews The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism The book is an amazing textbook. As a young student in the 1950s, I was reading some of the documents which are in the collection, I was coming in at the tail-end of some of these debates; but we had nothing like this. We could read a […]

With the publication of two fat volumes of documents under the heading “The Fate of the Russian Revolution,” under the editorship of Sean Matgamna, the Workers’ Liberty current in Britain has performed a genuine service for scholars and activists. Something of Value In a sense, we are presented with three books in the guise of […]