Leon TrotskyThe Socialist Equality Party will be holding a meeting in Montreal on Wednesday, November 10 to mark 70 years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky by a Stalinist assailant.
The murder of Trotsky was the climax of a campaign of political genocide directed by Joseph Stalin and his henchmen against the generation of workers, intellectuals and revolutionists that had prepared and led the October 1917 Russian Revolution, establishing the first workers’ state in history.
The co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky was also the supreme strategist of the perspective of world socialist revolution upon which the revolution was based. In 1938, he founded the Fourth International to carry forward the struggle for this perspective.
The life and legacy of Leon Trotsky has the most profound contemporary significance. The entire course of historical development since his assassination 70 years ago has vindicated the ideas, principles and program for which he fought and died.
Today, all the old nationalist and bureaucratic organizations that dominated the workers’ movement for decades—the social-democratic and Stalinist parties and the trade unions—have either collapsed or function as open agents of the capitalist ruling elites. At the same time, the breakdown of the international capitalist system signifies that the working class in every country stands on the brink of revolutionary struggles. Never before have the ideas, program and perspective of Leon Trotsky, embodied today in the International Committee of the Fourth International, had greater significance.
The SEP urges all those interested in the socialist alternative to militarism and war, austerity and social inequality, and the ever-deepening assault on democratic rights to attend this important meeting.
Keith Jones, the national secretary of the SEP (Canada), will be the principal speaker.
Wednesday, Nov. 10, 7 pm
Centre St-Pierre, Room 203
1212 Rue Panet
Montréal
(near the Beaudry Métro station)