Tuesday 8 March 2011

Tariq Ali & Phil Evans, "Introducing Trotsky and Marxism" (2000)

This book - if it can be called that (it's closer to a pamphlet or graphic novel) - hardly merits a review. It can be read in the duration of a long subway ride across Toronto.

That being said, I was a little disappointed. For a very short text loaded with slightly juvenile illustrations (imagine Monty Python meets a bathroom wall), it jumps off into questionable comparisons, such as oppression by Stalin and Peter the Great. The book is clearly and unabashedly pro-Trotsky, which in itself is not problematic, but does not evenly consider much of the non-Stalinist criticism of Trotsky's thought.

The book is, at best, the kind of introduction that best serves someone reading a novel or history book that briefly touches on Trotsky or ideological debates in the early years of the Soviet Union. It is something like an extended, visual encyclopedia entry.

That being said, I did take away an easy to remember difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (the former supported the concept of a socialist vanguard, while the latter supported the idea of a more democratic socialism that make room for the great mass of workers).

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