this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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That said, I struggled to understand Marx at first because I didn't know who anyone was. It was all words and concepts. Then I read the first book in Isaac Deutscher's trilogy on Trotsky and the first Fear of Mirrors novel by Tariq Ali. After that, I could picture a young Hegelian not as an abstract theoretician but as someone who thought a certain way and lived at a certain time. Made it all much easier and things flowed from there.
Is Deutscher's trilogy on Trotsky still a good read for non-trot?
I always figured it was very trotty.
Hmmm… it's been a long time since I read it. I wasn't a Marxist at the time. Only interested. I knew very little truth about anything Marxism or Soviet Revolution/USSR. By the time I finished, I came away thinking that Trotsky was praiseworthy.
I confess to only reading the first book. The other two could paint a different picture.
Then again, it really was enough to get me to question everything I thought I knew about communism, the Soviets, and Marx/Marxism. So it didn't leave me so enthralled to Trotsky that I couldn't easily accept Marxism-Leninism once I read a broader range of texts.
Read as part of a balanced diet, I could still recommend it. If you're already opposed to Trotskyism, try it out and put it down if it's too sycophantic?
I'd still recommend it for those who need the characters to come alive to make the theoretical works more accessible. I guess it depends on the other influences on a person's development. Left to think for themselves after sampling enough texts, it could work out well. Pushed into reading this or that by one of the myriad Trotsky orgs, they might be more easily led down some problematic paths.