Trotsky as a Marxist Theoretician: The Evidence in the Notebooks

Abstract

Trotsky’s Philosophical Notebooks is one of the most important discoveries to emerge out of the wealth of material included in the Trotsky archives at Harvard. They were accidentally discovered by Philip Pomper while he was embarked on a project for a book about Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Pomper, a historian affiliated with Wesleyan University, had previously written several books on Russian revolutionary history. The Notebooks were translated and eventually published by Columbia University Press in 1986, with a lengthy introduction by Pomper and annotations in Russian by Yuri Felshtinsky. The volume is entitled Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933–1935: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism. While Trotsky is today widely recognized as a great revolutionary practitioner, his standing as a Marxist theoretician has been called into question. Indeed, he has often been falsely labelled as a vulgar Marxist. This paper will argue that a close examination of Trotsky’s unpublished Notebooks, interpreted in the context of his other writings, offers a unique insight into the range and the depth of his philosophical concerns. As such Trotsky should be considered a major Marxist theoretician of the 20th century.