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In this article we identify the ways in which Leon Trotsky's ideas constitute a powerful resource to understand the contemporary crisis of international relations and its historical roots in the 20th century. Trotsky's concept of uneven and combined development has already been highlighted as a signal contribution by an established scholarship in and around the discipline of International Relations. While this is a welcome development, we contend that it has come at a significant cost, detaching Trotsky's theoretical insights from his revolutionary politics. We employ a different mode of engagement with Trotsky's ideas, focusing on the theory of Permanent Revolution as an expression of an original analysis of the dialectic between the national and the international. Far from being a theoretically detachable and politically erroneous appendage to the more fundamental and applicable concept of uneven and combined development, we argue that Permanent Revolution constitutes its necessary culmination, as well as Trotsky's most significant contribution to classical Marxism. We then elucidate how, writing in the first half of the 20th century and applying his theory of Permanent Revolution, Trotsky was able to diagnose certain essential lines of political development – the rise and ongoing breakdown of American hegemony, the political degeneration and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence and failure of the postcolonial independent nation states – tracing the long and crisis-ridden trajectory of international relations from the second half of the 20th century down to today.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

After the 1927/28 upheaval in the communist movement, a complex relationship evolved between Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). To date little has been written about this relationship in the west. The relationship between Chen and Trotsky, however, deserves treatment in its own right for various reasons. First, an elucidation of the contacts between them should close a significant gap in the respective biographies of the two Opposition leaders. The intention is not only to define Trotsky's role as seen from Chen's perspective, but also to emphasize the Far Eastern component hitherto underestimated in biographies of Trotsky. Secondly, the reconstruction of the relationship between Chen and Trotsky constitutes an important, correcting supplement to our knowledge of the developments ( = Wirkungsgeschichte) of "Trotskyism" in China, as it has been described as a concrete phenomenon as well as an ideological-political undercurrent. Thirdly, a study of the relationship between Chen and Trotsky should provide a better understanding of relations between the Communists of China and of the Soviet Union.

Intro -- Copyright -- Contents -- Part I: The Young Lenin -- Foreword by Max Eastman -- Foreword by Maurice Friedberg -- 1 Homeland -- 2 The Family -- 3 The Revolutionary Path of the Intelligentsia -- 4 The Elder Brother -- 5 The 1880s -- 6 The First of March, 1887 -- 7 Childhood and School Years -- 8 The Stricken Family -- 9 The Father and His Two Sons -- 10 The Preparations Begin -- 11 Under the Cover of Reaction -- 12 In Samara -- 13 A Year of Famine. Law Practice -- 14 Landmarks of Growth -- 15 The Young Lenin -- Part II: On Lenin -- Introduction -- Publishing History -- Foreword -- 1 Lenin and the Old Iskra -- 2 On the Eve -- 3 The Uprising -- 4 Brest-Litovsk -- 5 The Dispersal of the Constituent Assembly -- 6 The Business of Government -- 7 The Czechoslovaks and the Left Social Revolutionaries -- 8 Lenin on the Rostrum -- 9 Lenin's National Characteristics -- 10 The Philistine and the Revolutionary -- 11 The True and the False -- 12 Children on Lenin -- 13 Lenin Wounded -- 14 Lenin Ill -- 15 Lenin Is Dead -- Notes -- Index -- Back Cover.