The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is pleased to inform workers, youth, intellectuals and readers of the World Socialist Web Site that The Revolution Betrayed, Leon Trotsky’s seminal work, has been translated into Tamil and is now available to buy. The historic Tamil-language edition has been produced by SEP comrades in France in collaboration with members of other European sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The SEP will hold a series of public meetings to present the new book. The first meeting will be held in Hatton on February 11, with subsequent events held in Jaffna on February 26 and Colombo in early March.
The Revolution Betrayed, one of Trotsky’s most brilliant Marxist works, was written in 1936 during his forced political exile in Norway by the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy. Trotsky was co-leader with Vladimir Lenin of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 that founded the first socialist state on the planet.
In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in the midst of a working-class upsurge in many surrounding countries that sought to emulate Socialist Russia. The failure of revolutions in key capitalist countries, such as Germany, however, isolated the Soviet Union, paving the way for the emergence of a bureaucratic apparatus that systematically usurped political power from the working class. This bureaucracy was personified by Joseph Stalin who by the end of 1924 proclaimed his reactionary nationalist theory of “socialism in one country.”
Trotsky and his co-thinkers in the Bolshevik Party formed the Left Opposition in 1923 to deepen their political exposure of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its repudiation of the socialist internationalism on which the October Revolution was based. Stalin responded by exiling Trotsky to Alma-Ata and then deporting him from the Soviet Union, hounding him from country to country.
In this monumental work, Trotsky lays bare the laws governing the emergence, growth and inevitable destruction of the Soviet bureaucracy. He refused to attribute any progressive role to this bureaucracy.
The great revolutionary leader warned that if the working class did not overthrow the parasitic stratum that had emerged in the first workers state through a political revolution, the bureaucracy would prepare the ground for the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.
These warnings were confirmed in the capitalist restorationist measures undertaken by the Stalinist bureaucracy beginning with perestroika in 1985 leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. These developments powerfully vindicated Trotsky’s warnings.
The study of this great work is essential in the development of the revolutionary leadership necessary to fight for socialist revolution to defeat the counterrevolutionary preparations of the ruling classes internationally.
We invite workers, youth, and socialist-minded intellectuals to participate in these forthcoming historic public meetings.
Dates and Venues:
* February 11, at 10 a.m.
Hatton-Dick Oya Town Hall, Hatton
* February 26, at 3.30 p.m.
Y.M.C.A (Young Men’s Christian Association)
Near Jaffna Kachcheri
Chundikuli, Jaffna
* March 7, at 4 p.m.
Colombo Tamil Sangam Hall
No. 7, Sangam Lane, Colombo 06