Review – Revolutionary History – Vol. 9 No. 4 – Pierre Broue

ps. you may also have noticed i've now provided a link to the Revolutionary History website in the Resources section (scroll down)

Several days ago I finished reading my way through the latest issue of Revolutionary History – which as you may guess from the title is dedicated to the French Trotskyist Historian Pierre Broue. But this wasn’t the reason why I got it (especially given that I hadn’t heard of him before). Instead I had had the obituary in the book for Ted Grant written by Tony Aitman recommended to me. And it is a rather good obituary too – looking at how Grant’s analysis of the post world war two world developed and traced out the antecedents of future developments in his thoughts. It is a pity that you have to buy to whole thing to get access to it.

Well, not that much of a pity. The main piece of the book is several translations of writings by Broue which particularly focus on the origins of the International Left Opposition and the Fourth International. After a rather long obituary for Broue, which has been translated as an introduction to his ideas (a much shorter piece would have been better). But his writings are really interesting – and after having read a few things published by others associated with this journal – I find they don’t suffer from what I think is a defect, that is a general tendency to analyse things separate from the circumstances they occurred in – Broue’s piece on the left opposition in Russia is a good example of this.

As for the other pieces in the journal, there are several obituaries for Sri Lankan Trotskyists – which have given be a desire to find out more about Trotskyism in that country. There are also several reviews at the end, but to an extent they suffer from the defect I described above (but not always – some were quite interesting).