In Defence of Marxism (book)

[1] More broadly, the development of American Trotskyism in this period was confronted with a number of challenges including the preceding defeats of revolutionary movements on the international plane, the Moscow trials and the impending Second World War.

[1] Trotsky was critical of these presupposions due to the wider implications of their arguments in asserting that the potentialities of the "world proletariat are exhausted", socialism is universally discredited and capitalism has been reconstructed as a "bureaucratic collectivism" with a new exploiting class.

[1] Trotsky aligned himself with the majority faction led by James P.Cannon which adhered to the tradition positions of the party including a defence of the USSR whilst calling for a political revolution to displace the Stalinist regime with soviet rule based on a regenerated worker's democracy.

He would also argue that it was a historical trend that figures that rejected the dialectic elements of Marxist philosophy such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Peter Struve eventually rescinded into revisionism and "petty-bourgeois opportunism".

Trotsky opposed the Stalinist invasion of Finland as a Bonapartist, tendency of the bureaucracy but also urged an independent defence of the USSR for its potentiality as a bulwark against imperialism and social foundation for cultural progress.

[4] Conversely, political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz found his arguments neither convincing or original, asserting that Trotsky had exemplified a dogmatic strain in Marxist outlook with crude, dubious comparisons between dialectical materialism and scientific methods.

Notably, Knei-Paz had attributed Trotsky's motives for writing these philosophical polemics to the period of ideological crisis with tenets of Marxism such as the failure of the revolution in the West and the seeming stability of the capitalist economic system.