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Fourth International, August 1948

 

Leon Trotsky

Socialism or Barbarism

 

From Fourth International, Vol.9 No.6, August 1948, p.186.
Transcription & mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The present slaughter shows that Europe has reached the point of capitalist saturation,that it can no longer live and grow on the basis of the private ownership of the means of production. This chaos of blood and ruin is a savage insurrection of the mute and sullen powers of production, it is the mutiny of iron and steel against the dominion of profit, against wage slavery, against the miserable deadlock of our human relations. Capitalism, enveloped in the flames of a war of its own making, shouts from the mouths of its cannons to humanity: ‘Either conquer over me, or I will bury you in my ruins when I fall!’

All the evolution of the past, the thousands of years of human history, of class struggle, of cultural accumulations, are concentrated now in the sole problem of the proletarian revolution. There is no other answer and no other escape.

— Leon Trotsky, Sept. 1917

 
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