Mehring Books is pleased to announce the reissue of the pamphlet Socialism, Historical Truth and the Crisis of Political Thought in the United States by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North.

This pamphlet, first published in 1996, contains the text of a lecture given by North at Michigan State University. The lecture was a response to a review published in the New York Times by Harvard professor Richard Pipes of a biography of Trotsky by the late Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov.

In particular North takes issue with Pipes’ attempt to rehabilitate the Moscow trials, the frame-up that inaugurated Stalin’s Great Terror. In the course of his lecture North reviews the work of the Dewey Commission, the tribunal headed by American philosopher John Dewey, which investigated the charges leveled against Leon Trotsky at the Moscow Trials.

North goes on to discuss the relationship of the Moscow Trials to the present political crisis in the United States. In particular he examines the causes for the lurch to the right by American liberalism in the aftermath of World War II, showing its theoretical roots in liberalism’s inability to understand the political and theoretical origins of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. This was bound up with the uncritical and false identification of Stalinism with genuine Marxism.

In conclusion North insists on the need for an understanding of the rise, decline and fall of the October Revolution, which can only be carried out through a careful study of the writings of Leon Trotsky.

Price $3.00

Title: Socialism, Historical Truth and the Crisis of Political Thought in the United States

Author: David North

Pages: 38

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