Paul Blackledge
Introduction
Despite being widely referred to by his interlocutors, it is a peculiarity of Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development that it has received little by way of systematic consideration in the century since its first formulation in 1906. The initial lack of impact of Trotsky’s thesis can largely be explained by the combined consequences of censorship alongside an unfortunately timed publication. The selection of Trotsky’s writings, Our Revolution, which included ‘Results and Prospects’, was quickly seized by the tsarist police, and those few copies which escaped detection found their target audience dispersed across Europe and America in the wake of the post-revolutionary reaction. Trotsky’s misfortune was further compounded by the fact that the book was in the main a collection of previously published pieces, which meant that Russian socialists tended not to go out of their way to find a copy. Consequently, few of Trotsky’s contemporaries actually read his argument before the October Revolution. This is almost certainly true of Lenin, whose critical comments on Trotsky’s theory before 1917 seem to have been made against quotations taken from works of others (Deutscher 1954:162; Carr 1950:71).
If Trotsky was hard done by in this respect before the Revolution, it
was as nothing compared to the virulence of the attacks made upon him
generally, and his strategy of permanent revolution[2]
specifically, as part of Stalin’s struggle for power from the mid-1920s onwards.
It was not until the rebirth of an anti-Stalinist Marxism after 1956 that
Trotsky’s contribution to historical materialism began to be taken seriously,
and even this impetus has not proved to be enough to salvage his reputation
within the academy. If Jon Elster is unrepresentative in so far as he actually
engages with the theory of uneven and combined development, his argument that
this theory was ‘rather vapid’ and did ‘not make any positive contribution’ is
typical of academic assessments of Trotsky’s Marxism (Elster 1986:55).
Elsewhere I have argued that Trotsky did make a powerful contribution to
historical materialism, which acted as a theoretical corollary to his political
break with Second International fatalism without succumbing to political
voluntarism (Blackledge 2005, cf 2006a, 2006b). In this essay, I argue that
those of Trotsky’s interlocutors who have taken his ideas seriously, have
concluded, either implicitly or explicitly, that his characterisation of
Stalinism contradicts his model of uneven and combined development, such that
one or other of these must be jettisoned if his contribution to Marxism is not
to fall into incoherence. Concretely, the medium to long-term survival of the
Soviet Union as, in Trotsky’s analysis, a ‘degenerate workers’ state’, was
incompatible with the theory of uneven and combined development, so long as the
Soviet state remained isolated from successful socialist revolutions in the West.
Debating Trotsky’s Marxism
The events of 1956 opened up a space within which Trotsky’s ideas began, in narrow circles, to attain a fair hearing; and amongst the first to reassess the concepts of uneven and combined development was George Novack. Novack argued, in an essay first published in 1957, that uneven and combined development is a universally valid model of progress ‘rooted in features common to all processes of growth in nature as well as society’ (Novack 1980:85). Thus, whereas Trotsky developed the theory of uneven and combined development to explain the concrete mechanisms at play in Russia and internationally at the beginning of the twentieth century, and from which, in the context of a failed revolution, he derived the strategy of permanent revolution, Novack naturalised the concept of uneven and combined development and deployed it as a theoretical prop for a fatalistic model of revolutionary change. Specifically, he argued that Trotsky’s theory could explain both the degeneration of Soviet Communism after the revolution, and the underlying causes of ‘the process of de-Stalinisation’ (Novack 1980:112). Novack argued that Stalinism combined ‘socialist … economic foundations’ alongside ‘a political superstructure showing the most malignant traits of the class dictatorships of the past’ (Novack 1980:101). However despotic its nature, Novak expected this peculiar structure to reform itself in the direction of ‘socialist democracy’ in response to the ‘extension of the revolution to Eastern Europe and Asia after the Second World War, the expansion of Soviet industry, and the rise in numbers and cultural level of the Soviet workers’ (Novack 1980:111). While history falsified this prediction, Novack’s use of the concept of uneven and combined development also appears to evacuate the content of Trotsky’s Marxism. For whereas Trotsky was adamant that socialism was on the agenda in Russia in 1917 only because the proletariat would be in the forefront of the revolution (Trotsky 1907:307-311; Knei-Paz 1978:47-57), the social transformations in Eastern Europe and China after the Second World War, which Novack described as socialist, involved at best only a minor role for the proletariat. Moreover, on the basis of the theory of uneven and combined development, Trotsky had imagined the survival of the Soviet Union for years, not decades, before international revolutions saved it, and certainly not against an onslaught from the Wehrmacht. Thus, in 1928, he approvingly quoted Lenin’s earlier statement that ‘without timely aid from the international revolution, we shall be unable to hold out’ (Trotsky 1928:13). Indeed, while the events of 1917 confirmed the power of Trotsky’s analysis of the tsarist state, the continuing vitality of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, during the War, and in the post-war years, seemed to falsify its basic predictions. This was one of the key criticisms of Trotsky’s Marxism made by Nicolas Krasso in a famous exchange with Novack’s collaborator Ernest Mandel in the late 1960s.
In an article first published in New Left Review in 1967, Krasso argued that ‘Results and Prospects’ was ‘undoubtedly a brilliant prefiguration of the main characteristics of the October Revolution of 1917’ (Krasso 1971a:15). However, while Trotsky had accurately predicted the class dynamic of the coming revolution, Krasso commented that his discussion of the ‘role of political organisation in the socialist struggle’ was as inept as his discussion of the class struggle was profound (Krasso 1971a:16). This weakness was no mere error that was overcome once Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, but rather reflected a deep-seated tendency on Trotsky’s part towards ‘sociologism’; a concept which Krasso explained by reference to that of economism (Krasso 1971a:22). Whereas economistic Marxism tended to reduce politics to an epiphenomenon of the economy, sociologistic Marxism reduced politics to class structure: ‘Here it is not the economy, but social classes, which are extracted from the complex historical totality and hypostatised in an idealist fashion as the demiurges of a given political situation’ (Krasso 1971a:22). This weakness in Trotsky’s Marxism was not overcome in 1917, but rather remained as a consistent feature of his thought up until his murder in 1940. Moreover, or so Krasso maintained, this flaw in Trotsky’s method resulted in a general lacuna in his political perspectives: he consistently ‘underestimated … the autonomous power of political institutions’ (Krasso 1971a:29). Indeed, Krasso explained both Trotsky’s defeat at the hands of Stalin after Lenin’s death, and his misunderstanding of the prospects for revolution in the West after 1917, in relation to this basic failing.
With reference to the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, Krasso claimed that the dialectical unity of hope and realism that was a characteristic of Lenin’s thought was split asunder within the Communist Party after his death. On the one hand, the realistic Stalin dismissed the perspectives for world revolution to concentrate on socialist construction in Russia, while, on the other hand, the naively optimistic Trotsky dismissed the hopes of socialist construction at home without the success of revolutions abroad. The relative power of Stalin’s position in this debate was proved not only by his success in constructing socialism in the Soviet Union, but also by the failure of Trotsky’s predictions for a Western revolution. In fact, Krasso claimed that by contrast with Stalin’s realistic appraisal of the prospects for world revolution, there was no ‘substance in Trotsky’s thesis that socialism in one country was doomed to annihilation’ (Krasso 1971a:34). Finally, Trotsky’s attempt to form the Fourth International in the late 1930s was ‘destined to failure’ as he understood Lenin’s conception of socialist organisation only in ‘caricature’. Therefore, while he ‘brilliantly’ analysed the class dynamic of the October Revolution in his History of the Russian Revolution, his lack of an adequate model of the autonomy of politics precluded him from making a sufficiently scientific analyses of the requirements of Western revolutionary organisations. Consequently, despite the ‘prescience’ of his analysis of German fascism, in light of his general inability to comprehend the specifics of national politics in the West his conceptualisation of political leadership was too voluntaristic to offer a viable alternative to Stalin’s Comintern.
Krasso’s article sparked a debate on the nature of Trotsky’s Marxism on the pages of New Left Review. In his first contribution to this debate, Mandel argued, quite reasonably, that Krasso’s praise of Trotsky’s analysis of German fascism sat uneasily with his overarching dismissal of Trotsky’s conceptualisation of the national specificities of politics. ‘How could Trotsky succeed’ in correctly analysing German politics in the period between 1929 and 1933, he asked, ‘without a minute examination and understanding not only of social classes and groupings but also of parties?’ (Mandel 1971a:49-50).
On the question of political organisation, Mandel suggested that the ‘rational kernel’ of Trotsky’s rejection of Lenin’s approach to this question before 1917, ‘was based upon’ a reasonable ‘distrust of Western social democratic apparatus’ (Mandel 1971a:45). Moreover, Mandel pointed out that Lenin, for whom the epoch of imperialism was one of wars and revolutions, shared with Trotsky the basic assumption, as Lukacs argued, that politics in the present period should start from ‘the actuality of the revolution’ (Lukacs quoted in Mandel 1971a:64). Developing this claim in a rejoinder to Krasso’s reply to his first essay, Mandel pointed out that to reject Trotsky’s assessment of the epoch implied the rejection of Lenin’s account of the same (Mandel 1971b:116). Irrespective of the validity of the claim that Trotsky and Lenin were at one on this issue, Mandel’s argument highlights the fact that the debate on Trotsky’s conceptualisation of the nature of socialist organisation was premised on a prior analysis of the prospects for revolution in the West. Against Krasso’s dismissal of this perspective, Mandel argued three points: first, that in Germany, Spain, France, and Italy, amongst other countries, there had developed revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations on several occasions between 1917 and 1945; second, that in all but the earliest of these conjunctures Stalin’s Comintern acted to suppress the revolutionary energy of the workers’ movements, and; third, in contrast the misrepresentation of Trotsky as an ultra-leftist, in the early 1920s he was at the forefront, with Lenin, of those within the Comintern who argued that Western capitalism had gained a breathing space after the immediate post-war upheavals (Mandel 1971a:64-7). Mandel thus pointed out that to label Stalin’s perspective as pragmatic or realistic, as did Krasso, involved both caricaturing Trotsky’s position and eliding over Stalin’s role in the failure of the Russian Revolution to spread from the early-mid 1920s. Further, Mandel insisted that Krasso obscured the mechanism by which Stalin’s successful rise to power was premised, not upon his more realistic analysis of the international conjuncture in the 1920s, but on the way his policies reflected the interests of an emerging ‘special social grouping inside Soviet society: the Soviet bureaucracy’ (Mandel 1971a:68).
Despite the power of this argument, a fault-line ran through Mandel’s defence of Trotsky. Because Trotsky’s perspectives regarding the long-term viability of socialism in Russia were, as Krasso correctly pointed out, predicated upon the success of a revolution in the West, Trotsky insisted that without one or more such revolutions the Soviet regime was bound to collapse. ‘His whole discussion’ of world system, in The Permanent Revolution, ‘assumes that the capitalist world market is the economic system rendering socialism impossible in one country’ (Krasso 1971b:83). Returning to his critique of Trotsky’s supposed ‘sociologism’ in a rejoinder to Mandel, Krasso maintained that Trotsky’s underestimation of ‘the autonomy of the political institution of the nation state’ led to a lacuna in his Marxism regarding the continuing vitality of the Soviet regime (Krasso 1971b:88). In a second reply, Mandel argued that Trotsky did not exhibit one ‘atom of the historical pessimism’ attributed to him by Krasso, and that there is ‘no foundation’ within The Permanent Revolution ‘of any conception of “inevitable collapse” of the Soviet Union’ (Mandel 1971b:110).
Unfortunately, despite the general power of Mandel’s critique of Krasso, this argument is somewhat disingenuous; for by narrowing his discussion of Trotsky’s analysis of the prospects for the Soviet system to comments made in The Permanent Revolution, Mandel elided over a flaw in Trotsky’s analysis that Krasso had justifiably highlighted. The continued existence of the Soviet Union as some form of workers’ state appeared to negate Trotsky’s claim that socialism in one country was an impossible dream. This was the thrust of Monty Johnstone’s contribution to this debate: ‘A serious examination of what Trotsky actually said about building socialism in Russia reveals a fundamental and unresolved contradiction in his position’. Johnstone went on to suggest that Trotsky, from the perspective of the theory of uneven and combined development, was unable to account for the vitality of the Soviet state from the 1920s to the 1960s (Johnstone 1971:129-130). From a diametrically opposed position, Duncan Hallas similarly pointed out that in the late 1930s Trotsky predicted that ‘the bureaucracy was ‘becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state’ and, either it ‘will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism’. ‘Each day added to its domination helps to rot the foundations of the socialist elements of economy and increases the chances for capitalist restoration’ (Hallas 1971:8). Commenting on these arguments, Hallas suggested that Trotsky’s characterisation of the Soviet regime as both exceptional and unstable had become indefensible in the wake of, first, its victory over the Wehrmacht, and, second, its imperial expansion, including the reproduction of its social structure, across Eastern Europe after 1945. ‘Trotsky’s analysis of the class struggle in the USSR after 1927 has clearly been shown to be erroneous. The point is important. No ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist tendency today in fact defends Trotsky’s analysis – they substitute a label for the analysis. And this label covers a confused and shifting content’ (Hallas 1971:8).
Mandel’s reply to Krasso failed, therefore, to recognise that the resilience of the Soviet regime for half-century after the 1930s, and against incredible external pressures, posed testing problems for Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism. Further, Mandel’s denial of Trotsky’s ‘pessimism’ vis-à-vis the long-term future of the Soviet Union in the absence of European socialist revolutions does not bear scrutiny. As Michael Burawoy has suggested, a model of the Soviet Regime’s terminal degeneration, in the context of failed revolutions elsewhere in Europe, was anticipated in ‘Results and Prospects’ (Burawoy 1989:785). More generally, Burawoy has argued that the strength of Trotsky’s analysis of the pre-Revolutionary Russia is evidenced in the power of the novel predictions that his analysis suggested. In a comparison of Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution with that offered by Theda Skocpol, Burawoy argues that whereas Skocpol maintained an explicit attachment to induction, Trotsky’s deductive approach foreshadowed the theory of research programmes as developed by Imre Lakatos. In addition, while Trotsky sometimes ‘sunk below’ his method and Skocpol often rose above the limitations of hers, ‘Trotsky still makes the greater scientific advance, underscoring the superiority of research programs over induction’ (Burawoy 1989:763).
Lakatos argued that any ‘research programme’ could be differentiated between its ‘hard core’ and its ‘protective belt’. Hypotheses contained within the protective belt could be falsified without necessarily undermining the hard core; however, if hard core hypotheses were falsified then the research program as a whole would be falsified. Thus, Lakatos differentiated his version of falsification theory from a version that he believed was sometimes present in Popper’s work, which he called ‘dogmatic falsification’ (Lakatos 1970:95). For where, in dogmatic falsification, the falsification of any hypothesis could lead to the rejection of the general scientific framework from which it originated, in his sophisticated falsificationist model, a research programme could survive the falsification of many of the hypotheses that it generated. Lakatos argued that ‘the main difference from Popper’s original version is, I think, that in my conception criticism does not – and must not – kill as fast as Popper imagined’ (Lakatos 1970:179). Lakatos argued that a scientific theory should contain both a positive and a negative heuristic. The positive heuristic would be that element of the theory which suggested further areas for research. The negative heuristic, meanwhile, was that element of the research programme that could not be challenged. A strong scientific research programme would, Lakatos argued, generate a positive heuristic through which novel facts would be predicted (Lakatos 1970:155).
Whereas Stinchcombe argued that Trotsky had followed the inductive method in the formulation of his theory uneven and combined development (Stinchcombe 1978:53), Burawoy suggests that Trotsky elaborated this theory as an implicit response to the generation of anomalies within the Marxist research programme. Against Second International orthodoxy, socialist revolutions seemed to be on the agenda in relatively backward sectors of the world system, and Trotsky’s method aimed at both accounting for this anomaly and underpinning a realistic strategic orientation for the Russian socialist movement. According to Burawoy, Trotsky takes Marxism’s hard core to include the statement, made in Marx’s famous 1859 preface to The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that revolutions occur in epochs when the further development of the forces of production come into conflict with the existing relations of production, and that no social order perishes before it has fostered all the development of the forces of production of which it is capable. For Burawoy, Trotsky’s analysis of the prospects for the Russian revolution ‘aimed to protect the hard core of Marxism from refutation by the failure of revolution in the most advanced capitalist countries’ (Burawoy 1989:781). The power of Trotsky’s analysis of world history, when compared to Skocpol’s, lay in the way that whereas she ‘freezes history, for Trotsky: “History does not repeat itself. However much one may compare the Russian Revolution with the Great [French] Revolution, the former cannot be transformed into the latter. The 19th century has not passed in vain”’ (Burawoy 1989:782; cf Trotsky 1906:52). Hence, in contrast to Skocpol’s static comparisons of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, Trotsky was aware of the degree of change, alongside continuity, between the contexts within which the first of these two great social upheavals were played out. Accordingly, whereas the theory of uneven development explained the temporal, but not social, variation in world history, the theory of combined development explained both temporal and social historical divergences.
Nevertheless, Burawoy argues that of the two novel predictions made by Trotsky in ‘Results and Prospects’, only one was realised. For whereas Russia’s industrial proletariat did lead the revolution in 1917, and while the bourgeois revolution did therefore spill over into a proletarian revolution placing a mass revolutionary workers party, the Bolsheviks, in power, Trotsky’s hoped for Western revolution failed to materialise. Accordingly, if Trotsky ‘is successful in anticipating the Russian Revolution, he is wide of the mark in his anticipation of revolution in Western Europe’ (Burawoy 1989:788).
Paralleling Novack’s similar claims, and explicitly following Deutscher, Burawoy extends this argument to suggest that once the Russian Revolution was isolated, ‘the permanent revolution’ was forced ‘inwards, where it took the form of Stalin’s revolution from above’ (Burawoy 1989:785). Burawoy thus praises the power of Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development, and its parallel strategy of permanent revolution – even going so far as to recruit Stalin as a closet Trotskyist. However, Burawoy combines this praise for on element of Trotsky’s theory with a dismissal of another: Trotsky’s perspectives for the West in the inter-war years were, he argues, mistaken. Indeed, he uses the same example as did Krasso: Trotsky understood, as did no one else, the ‘true significance’ of the events in Germany in the years running up to 1933, but his ‘faith that the German working class would rise up against Hitler’ was misplaced (Burawoy 1989:789).
Burawoy’s critique of Trotsky’s European perspectives is open to the charge made by Mandel against Krasso: that his approach is fatalistic and therefore implicitly apologetic of the role of the Stalinist parties in consistently undermining European revolutionary movements from the early-mid 1920s onwards. In contrast to this approach, the great lesson that Trotsky learnt in 1917 was of the importance of political leadership within the class struggle (Geras 1986:162). This is the thrust of his discussion of the crucial role played by Lenin in 1917. He argued that without the political reorientation led by Lenin, the Bolsheviks would not have seized the revolutionary opportunity in October; and, as the alternative to their rule was a military coup, fascism would have had a Russian precursor (Trotsky 1931-3:343, 1940:205). Similarly, he argued that the crucial role of political leadership had been negatively evidenced through the loss of a number of revolutionary opportunities in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of the Comintern’s increasingly ‘counter-revolutionary role’ after 1923 (Trotsky 1939:25).
The irony of Burawoy’s defence of Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development is therefore that, whereas he praises Trotsky’s break with the fatalistic Marxism of the Second International, his discussion of Western Europe’s missing revolutions, like Krasso’s before him, betrays an implicit retreat back towards just the form of mechanical fatalism from which Trotsky had broken between 1906 and 1917. While Mandel and Novack shared neither Krasso’s nor Burawoy’s dismissal of both the revolutionary events of the 1920s in Western Europe, and the conservative role played by the Comintern therein, their own discussions of Trotsky’s Marxism are no less problematic. In the case of Novack, this weakness takes the form of fatalistic hopes for the regeneration of Soviet Communism after 1953, whereas Mandel’s defence of Trotsky’s characterisation of Stalinism in a context explicitly precluded by Trotsky tends to preserve the form of Trotsky’s mature thought at the expense of its content. Consequently, whereas the theory of uneven and combined development was premised upon the insight that capitalism tended to unify the global labour process (Harman 1983:67-8; 75), a dogmatic attachment to Trotsky’s characterisation of Stalinism opens the door to the theory of socialism in one country, and therefore involves a tacit rejection of this assumption. Similarly, in contrast to Trotsky’s commitment to the idea of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class, Mandel’s defence of Trotsky’s classification of the Soviet Union lead him to describe Maoist China, and other similar states, as examples of the dictatorship of the proletariat, despite the fact that the proletariat played little or no active role in the social transformations through which these states were formed (Mandel 1995:102, cf Lowy 1981:213ff). Therefore, both analytically and politically, Trotsky’s model of Stalinism tends to negate the power of his theory of uneven and combined development.
Conclusion
The related weaknesses of all of these criticisms appear to confirm Hallas’s opinion that Trotskyism found itself at an impasse after the war. Russia’s victory over Germany negated the content of Trotsky’s characterisation of the Soviet regime as a degenerate workers’ state, whilst, simultaneously, the resilience of the Soviet state seemed to negate the implications of the theory of uneven and combined development: that socialism in one country is impossible. Interestingly, one prominent intellectual who took the falsification of Trotsky’s predictions seriously was Alasdair MacIntyre, who explicitly linked his break with Marxism to this fact (MacIntyre 1985:262). Nevertheless, as MacIntyre had previously suggested, there did exist a way out of this conundrum. The problem with Trotsky’s key predictions after 1906 lay not in a failure of the Western working class to act as prescribed in the 1920s, but rather in a failure of the Soviet state, in the 1940s and beyond, to react to severe external pressure as Trotsky had expected (MacIntyre 1971). The power of the theory of uneven and combined development, suitably deepened with Trotsky’s post-1917 embrace of Bolshevism, was demonstrated in the period after 1917, when revolutions occurred not only in Russia but also across Europe; and the fact that most of these revolutionary movements were defeated confirms only the importance of revolutionary leadership in such situations. Conversely, the weakness of Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism was confirmed by the successes of the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1948. Chris Arthur engaged with this problem from a different angle when, in his contribution to the debate occasioned by Krasso’s essay, he argued that Trotsky’s claim that the coming Russian revolution would be political rather than social in nature skirted over the fact that a socialist revolution in Stalinist Russia would be forced to confront the social basis of the Soviet bureaucracy (Arthur 1971:154-5). Unfortunately, Arthur rejected the logic of his own argument, that Trotsky’s characterisation of the Soviet state was of little help to our understanding of the course of its development after his death.
Paralleling Burawoy’s discussion of Trotsky’s Lakatosian problem shift in 1906, Alex Callinicos argues that Tony Cliff made a similar contribution to Marxism in 1948, when, building on Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development, he rejected Trotsky’s characterisation of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state (Callinicos 1989:79ff). Cliff argued that Stalin’s forced industrialisation programme marked not the deepening inwards of the permanent revolution, but rather the counter-revolutionary negation of that project. While this process confirmed Trotsky’s pessimistic prognosis of the perspectives for the Soviet regime given the failure of supporting revolutions abroad, it did so at the expense of his model of Stalinism (Cliff 1948:1). By contrast with Trotsky, Cliff characterised the Soviet state that emerged from Stalin’s counter-revolution as a form of ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’. According to Callinicos, this theory not only provided a more powerful model of the Soviet system, it also entailed the novel prediction of the post-war boom. Moreover, one of the effects of this boom was to mediate against the emergence of revolutionary workers’ movements in the West in the two decades after the war. Therefore, just as Trotsky’s method allowed him to predict novel facts by breaking with the degeneration of Marxism, so too did Cliff by breaking with the degeneration of Trotskyism. By disassociating Trotsky’s powerful analysis of uneven and combined development from his weak characterisation of Stalinism, Cliff reconfirmed the power of Trotsky’s key contribution to historical materialism.
References
Arthur, C. (1971) ‘The Coming Soviet Revolution’ in Krasso, N. ed. Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed (St. Louis: New Critics Press).
Blackledge, P. (2005) ‘Leon Trotsky’s Contribution to the Marxist Theory of History’ Studies in East European Thought Vol. 57
—- (2006a) Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press)
—- (2006b) ‘Karl Kautsky and Marxist Historiography’ Science and Society 2006
Burawoy, M. (1989) ‘Two Methods in Social Science: Skocpol versus Trotsky’ Theory and Society 18
Callinicos, A. (1989) Trotskyism (Buckingham: Open University Press)
Carr, E. H. (1950) The Bolshevik Revolution Vol. 1 (London: Penguin)
Cliff, T. (2003 [1948]) ‘The Nature of Stalinist Russia’ in Cliff, T. Marxist Theory after Trotsky (London: Bookmarks)
Deutscher, I. (1954) Trotsky: The Prophet Armed (London: Oxford University Press)
Elster, J. ‘The Theory of Combined and Uneven Development: A Critique’ in Roemer, J. ed. Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1986)
Geras, N. (1986) Literature of Revolution (London: Verso)
Hallas, D. (1971) ‘Introduction’ in Hallas, D. et al The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialists (London: Pluto Press)
Harman, C. (1983) ‘Philosophy and Revolution’ International Socialism 21
Johnstone, M. (1971) ‘Trotsky and the Debate on Socialism in One Country’ in Krasso, N. ed. Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed (St. Louis: New Critics Press). First Published in New Left Review 50, 1968
Knei-Paz, B. (1978) The Social and Political thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Krasso, N. (1971a) ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’ in Krasso, N. ed. Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed (St. Louis: New Critics Press). First Published in New Left Review 44, 1967
—- (1971b) ‘Reply to Ernest Mandel’ in Krasso, N. ed. Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed (St. Louis: New Critics Press). First Published in New Left Review 48, 1968
Lakatos, I. (1970) ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’ in Lakatos & Musgrave eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Lowy, M. (1981) The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development (London, Verso)
MacIntyre, A. (1971) ‘Trotsky in Exile’ in MacIntyre, A. Against the Self-Images of the Age (London: Duckworth)
—- (1985) After Virtue (London: Duckworth)
Mandel, E. (1971a [1968]) ‘Trotsky’s Marxism: An Anti-Critique’ in Krasso, N. ed. Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed (St. Louis: New Critics Press).
—- (1971b [1969]) ‘Trotsky’s Marxism: A Rejoinder’ in Krasso, N. ed. Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed (St. Louis: New Critics Press).
—- (1979) Revolutionary Marxism Today (London: Verso)
—- (1995) Trotsky as Alternative (London: Verso)
Molyneux, J. Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution (Brighton: Harvester 1981)
Novack, G. (1980) ‘Uneven and Combined Development in World History’ in Novack, G. Understanding History: Marxist Essays (New York: Pathfinder 1980)
Stinchcombe, A. (1978) Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York: Academic Press)
Trotsky, L. (1969 [1906]) ‘Results and Prospects’ in Trotsky, L. The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder)
—- (1973 [1907]) 1905 (London: Penguin)
—- (1974 [1928]) The Third International after Lenin (London: New Park)
—- (1977 [1931-3]) The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto)
—- (1990 [1939]) ‘Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR’ in Trotsky, L. In Defence of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder)
—- (1947 [1940]) Stalin
(London: Hollis and Carter)
[1] Thanks to Bill Dunn and Kristyn Gorton for their comments on this essay in draft.
[2] Permanent revolution is perhaps best understood, as Ernest Mandel has suggested, as the strategic counterpart to Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development (Mandel 1979:84).