Re: Cahiers Léon Trotsky

[Richard Fidler <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Cahiers Léon Trotsky were mentioned in a recent posting
on this List. Today I checked out some recent issues at the
University of Ottawa library. The U of O has only the last
four issues (numbers 65 to 68), but appears to have taken
out a subscription. It is an interesting publication,
republishing in French a lot of materials from Trotsky
previously unavailable in languages other than Russian
(including from the archives at Harvard that were "closed"
until 1980), but also many items of interest from the
international communist movement of the twentieth century. A
couple of the issues I consulted published French
translations of documents from the U.S. Socialist Workers
Party and the International Secretariat of the Fourth
International during the Second World War, some of which I
had never seen before.

Unfortunately, the publication does not appear to be well
edited. For example, an article by Pierre Broué, its editor,
has a footnote on Jack Barnes which reads as follows (my
translation):

"Jack Barnes (born 1920), joined the SWP's youth
organization while he was a student, in 1940. A national
leader by 1965, he became national secretary of the SWP in
1972 and made it into a Castro-oriented party that
conceiveably would have embraced Stalinism had it not been
for perestroika, and from which he expelled virtually every
member of the Old Guard in an attempt to dispose of the
embarrassing legacy of Trotsky and Trotskyism."

In addition to adding about 20 years to Barnes's age and
membership in the SWP, this statement, in its abbreviated
summary of the evolution of Barnes and the SWP, simply
misrepresents and confuses a rather complex series of
developments that obviously merit a serious discussion in
any journal that purports, as this does, to "promote the
work of Léon Trotsky in its various aspects..." (as the
publisher, the Institut Léon Trotsky, states in its
statutes).

The factual errors abound: another one that struck me was
the listing of James P. Cannon's birth and death as 1885 and
1973 (in fact, 1890 and 1974).

This is disappointing because the publication is not just
another sectarian tract but a serious academic review,
published quarterly. Its editor, Broué, was for many years
(he broke with them in the 1980s) a leading member of Pierre
Lambert's Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, one of
the major Trotskyist groupings in France, but more
importantly a leading Marxist scholar based in Grenoble who
has influenced many young students of Marxism in the
Francophone world and has been prominently involved in
recent years in reviving the ideas and program of Trotsky,
the Left Opposition and the Bolsheviks in Russia since the
Gorbachev years.