Thursday, September 2, 2010

Trotsky Thursday:
Permanent Revolution, Baby!

Public meetings in Sri Lanka

Seventy years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky: The return of history and the strategy of the world revolution

By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) 
1 September 2010
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) will hold a series of public meetings in Sri Lanka on the historic legacy of Leon Trotsky and its relevance to today’s fight for world socialist revolution.

Trotsky was the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and led the Red Army that defended the first workers’ state. After Lenin’s death, he politically and theoretically led the struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet state. After Stalin’s betrayals allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933, Trotsky concluded that the Third International was dead and called for the building of the Fourth International, which he founded in 1938.
Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacan, Mexico on August 21, 1940 by a Stalinist agent. His murder was the culmination of Stalin’s purges that physically eliminated the finest representatives of the entire generation that had carried out the October Revolution.
Trotsky’s life and work has a profound contemporary significance. The global profit system is, once again, mired in a fundamental economic and political crisis. The lessons of Trotsky’s struggles provide the essential political weapons for uniting the working class to abolish capitalism and establish a world planned socialist economy.
In countries of a belated capitalist development, Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution has been repeatedly confirmed by the inability of the bourgeoisie to meet the aspirations of working people for democratic rights and a decent living standard. The quarter century of civil war in Sri Lanka is one tragic example.
We warmly invite workers, housewives, youth and intellectuals looking for a way to oppose war, oppression and poverty to attend our public meetings.
Colombo
Venue: New Town Hall
Date and Time: September 12, 3.00 p.m.
Kandy
Venue: Janamadura Hall
Date and Time: September 23, 3.00 p.m.
Jaffna
Venue: Co-operative Hall
Date and Time: September 26, 2.00 p.m.
Main speaker: SEP General Secretary Wije Dias

WSWS.

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