Frasi di Lev Trotsky (131 frasi, pagina 2)

Origine: Da un reportage di Georges Simenon, 1933; citato in Simenon: «Scusi Trotskij, permette tre domande?» https://web.archive.org/web/20160101000000/http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2003/novembre/28/Simenon_Scusi_Trotskij_permette_tre_co_0_031128057.shtml, Corriere della Sera, 28 novembre 2003.

Domanda

“La burocrazia sovietica si è posta al di sopra di una classe che usciva appena dalla miseria e dalle tenebre e non aveva tradizioni di comando e di egemonia.”

Lev Trotsky

Origine: Citato in Prima di morire – Appunti e note di lettura, Feltrinelli, 1998.

Lettura

“La fede senza lavoro è morta.”

Lev Trotsky

Origine: Citato in Max Eastman, Il giovane Trotsky (1925), traduzione di Roberto Cruciani, Massari, 2006, p. 64. ISBN 8845702316

Sulla fede

“La rivoluzione socialista comincia su basi nazionali, ma non può restare circoscritta entro questi confini.”

Lev Trotsky

citato in "Prima di morire – Appunti e note di lettura", Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1998

Lettura

“Per sei anni i bisogni teorici del partito, diretto dal blocco del centro con la destra, sono stati soddisfatti unicamente con l'antitrotskismo: era il solo prodotto che esistesse in quantità illimitata e si potesse distribuire gratuitamente.”

Lev Trotsky

da La rivoluzione permanente

Sui sogni

“Vladimir Ilic non ha lasciato nessun "testamento", e lo stesso carattere dei suoi rapporti col partito, come il carattere del partito stesso, escludevano la possibilità di un tale "testamento". La stampa dell'emigrazione, la stampa estera borghese e quella menscevica di solito ricordano come "testamento" una lettera di Vladimir Ilic (tanto alterata da essere irriconoscibile) contenente consigli di carattere organizzativo. Il XIII Congresso ha esaminato con grande attenzione anche questa lettera, come tutte le altre, e ne ha tratto le conclusioni conformi alle condizioni e alle circostanze del momento. Qualsiasi chiacchiera sull'occultamento o sulla violazione del "testamento" è una maligna invenzione ed è interamente diretta contro l'effettiva volontà di Vladimir Ilic e gli interessi del partito da lui creato.”

Lev Trotsky

dall'articolo A proposito del libro di Eastman – Dopo la morte di Lenin, Bolscevik, n. 16, 1° settembre 1925

Sulla morte , Volontà

“Non ho bisogno di confutare ancora una volta le stupide e vili calunnie di Stalin e dei suoi agenti: non v'è una macchia sul mio onore rivoluzionario. Né direttamente né indirettamente non sono mai sceso ad accordi, o anche solo a trattative dietro le quinte, coi nemici della classe operaia. Migliaia d'oppositori di Stalin sono cadute vittime d'accuse analoghe, e non meno false. Le nuove generazioni rivoluzionarie ne riabiliteranno l'onore politico e tratteranno i giustizieri del Cremlino come si meritano.”

Lev Trotsky

“L'idea umanitaria moraleggiante è la più sterile di fronte al processo della storia.”

Lev Trotsky

citato in Focus n. 110, p. 175
Citazioni di Lev Trotsky

Idea , Storia

“Dobbiamo porre fine una volta per tutte ai vaneggiamenti quacchero-papisti sulla santità della vita umana.”

Lev Trotsky

Origine: Citato in AA.VV., Il libro della politica, traduzione di Sonia Sferzi, Gribaudo, 2018, p. 244. ISBN 9788858019429

Sulla vita

“Che cosa significavano dunque le assicurazioni di Kornilov che affermava di avere forze sufficienti per schiacciare i sediziosi? Niente, dimostravano solo la stoltezza del rispettabile generale. La sua leggerezza si manifesterà con tutta chiarezza nel mese di agosto, quando il cospiratore Kornilov farà marciare contro Pietrogrado truppe inesistenti. Kornilov cercava ancora di giudicare i contingenti militari secondo la composizione del comando. Il corpo degli ufficiali, nella sua maggioranza, era indubbiamente con lui, cioè era pronto a spezzare la schiena ai soviet con il pretesto di difendere il governo provvisorio.”

Lev Trotsky

Origine: Storia della rivoluzione russa, p. 380

“Notevole propagandista, oratore, giornalista, non brillante ma riflessivo, Kamenev era particolarmente prezioso nelle trattative con altri partiti e anche come esploratore in altri ambienti sociali, anche se da simili escursioni ritornava sempre, per parte sua, con frammenti della mentalità propria di altri partiti. Queste caratteristiche di Kamenev erano così evidenti che quasi nessuno si sbagliava sulla sua fisionomia politica.”

Lev Trotsky

Origine: Storia della rivoluzione russa, p. 316

“Verklovsky, ministro della guerra di Kerensky, dichiarò più tardi a proposito di Kornilov che era un cuor di leone con una testa di montone.”

Lev Trotsky

Origine: Storia della rivoluzione russa, pp. 278-279

Sulla guerra

“Se manca una democrazia borghese in grado di porsi alla testa della rivoluzione? Allora bisogna inventarla. È quello che fanno i menscevichi. Creano la democrazia borghese, le sue qualità e la sua storia nella loro immaginazione.”

Lev Trotsky

Origine: Storia della rivoluzione russa, pp. 98-99

Storia , Democrazia , Immaginazione

“Estirpare senza pietà i controrivoluzionari, rinchiudere i sospetti nei campi di concentramento. Gli imboscati saranno uccisi, a prescindere dai servizi resi in passato.”

Lev Trotsky

Passato

Lev Trotsky: Frasi in inglese

“The owl of wisdom flies, as is well known, after sunset. Thus the theory of a "socialist" system of money and prices was developed only after twilight of inflationist illusions.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Revolution Betrayed

Origine: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 4, Section 3 : The Rehabilitation of the Ruble

“A sledgehammer breaks glass but forges steel.”

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Leon Trotsky

"We do not change our course" (1938)

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Permanent Revolution

Origine: The Permanent Revolution (1929), Ch. 10

“The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie. In italy, it has a very large base -- the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, and the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for fascism….”

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Leon Trotsky

Origine: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 1

“The economically powerful big bourgeoisie, in itself, represents an infintesimal minority of the nation. To enforce its domination, it must ensure a definite mutual relationship with the petty bourgeoisie and, through its mediation, with the proletariat.”

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Leon Trotsky

Origine: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 5

“The concrete is a combination of abstractions — not an arbitrary or subjective combination but one that corresponds to the laws of the movement of a given phenomenon.”

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Leon Trotsky

Origine: In Defense of Marxism (1942), p. 147

“Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain — at least in a poor country like Russia — and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.”

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Leon Trotsky

The Russian Revolution (1930)

“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Permanent Revolution

Origine: The Permanent Revolution (1929), Ch. 10

“In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.”

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Leon Trotsky

The Russian Revolution (1930)

“It is only possible to safeguard the supremacy of the working class by forcing the bourgeoisie accustomed to rule, to realize that it is too dangerous an undertaking for it to revolt against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to undermine it by conspiracies, sabotage, insurrections, or the calling in foreign troops.”

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Leon Trotsky libro Terrorism and Communism

Origine: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 2

“I will say in a few words why the anarchist doctrine is wrong. The anarchists say that the working class does not need a government: what is needs is to organize production. Government, they say, is a bourgeois invention, a bourgeois machine of compulsion, and the working class does not need to take governmental power. This is wrong from beginning to end.”

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Leon Trotsky

Order by the commissar for military affairs - on the murder of count Mirbach
How the Revolution Armed (1923)

“Independent character is like independent thought, it cannot be developed without criticism.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Revolution Betrayed

Origine: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 7

“The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Permanent Revolution

The Permanent Revolution (1929)

“The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this ground. Only force can be the deciding factor.”

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Leon Trotsky libro Terrorism and Communism

Origine: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 2

“If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves “Christian,” patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the “sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”

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Leon Trotsky libro Terrorism and Communism

Origine: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 4

“The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A 'neutral' position is tantamount to support of imperialism.”

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Leon Trotsky

"Resolution on the Antiwar Congress of the London Bureau" (July 1936)

“The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means by its very essence strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason epochs of revolution have never been directly favorable to cultural creation: they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Revolution Betrayed

The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

“Every revolutionary party finds its chief support in the younger generation of the rising class. Political decay expresses itself in a loss of ability to attract youth.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Revolution Betrayed

Origine: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 7

“Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism in incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Revolution Betrayed

Origine: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 8

“The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to this concept, means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to Socialist measures and to war against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in the complete liquidation of class society.”

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Leon Trotsky libro The Permanent Revolution

The Permanent Revolution (1929)

“I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all.
However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.”

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Leon Trotsky

Trotsky's Testament (1940)

“Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat the difference between the types of reaction is meaningless.”

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Leon Trotsky

What Next? (1932)

“In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhuman, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity.”

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Leon Trotsky libro Terrorism and Communism

Origine: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 3

“In case of actual danger, the social democracy banks not on the "Iron Front" but on the Prussian police. It is reckoning without its host! The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among social-democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker. Of late years, these policemen have had to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi students. Such training does not fail to leave its effects. And above all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the police remains.”

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Leon Trotsky

Origine: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 4

“We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right… And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.”

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Leon Trotsky

Speech at the XIIIth Party Congress (May 1924)

“In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.”

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Leon Trotsky

Why Marxists oppose Individual Terrorism http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm, article published in the Austrian Social Democratic paper Der Kampf (1909)

“This book was written in 1920 in the car of a military train and amid the flames of the civil war. The circumstance the reader must keep before his eyes if he wishes rightly to understand not only the basic material of the book, but also its harsh allusion, and particularly the tone in which it is written.”

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Leon Trotsky libro Terrorism and Communism

Introduction to the Second English Edition
Terrorism and Communism (1920)

“The bourgeoisie today is a falling class. … By its imperialist methods of appropriation [it] is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds to power, and does not wish to abandon it. Thereby it threatens to drag after it into the abyss the whole of society. We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie.”

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Leon Trotsky libro Terrorism and Communism

Origine: Terrorism and Communism (1920), p. 83

“As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!”

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Leon Trotsky

"On Optimism and Pessimism, on the Twentieth Century, and on Many Other Things" (1901), as quoted in The Prophet Armed : Trotsky, 1879-1921 (2003) by Isaac Deutscher , p. 45