From the Preface
Foreshadowing In Defense of Marxism: Trotsky's Philosophical Notebooks
Trotsky's Philosophical Notebooks is one of the most im****tant
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.
Trotsky had made mention of the material contained in these Notebooks
in his Diary in Exile, when he wrote in the entry dated May 16: "Today
I wrote a little about the interrelation****p between the physiological
determinism of brain processes and the 'autonomy' of thought, which is
subject to the laws of logic" (p. 119). Trotsky went on to complain
about not having sufficient knowledge or time to devote to "a big and
serious work" on the subject and it is clear that he abandoned the
project. However, neither in his own published writings nor in
research about him was there any further indication of what had become
of the notes he had already written, and the common assumption prior
to the opening of the archives was that they had been lost. Pomper
came across them while looking through some notebooks that previously
had been believed to contain only material for a biography of Lenin
that Trotsky had once planned to write.
Inevitably, comparisons will be made of Trotsky's Notebooks to the
more extensive Philosophical Notebooks of Lenin as well as to the
recently published Philosophical Notebooks of the chief theoretician
of the Bolsheviks, Nicolai Bukharin. We will not attempt any such
comparisons here. It is sufficient to note that whereas all these
works are worthy of study, Trotsky's Notebooks have been largely
neglected since they were first published in 1986. This situation
should be nothing less than a scandal among those who claim adherence
to Trotsky and Trotskyism. It is our hope that in publi****ng this
essay along with a few selections from the Notebooks, we will
encourage renewed interest in this work.
Read the rest at:
http://www.geocities.com/alexthe999/Trotsky_Notebooks_Comment.pdf
http://www.permanent-revolution.org/
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