Leon Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of Josef Stalin in August 1940. The fiftieth anniversary of his death takes place in the aftermath of a wave of popular revolutions that overturned the regimes established by Stalin in Eastern Europe. It is therefore an appropriate moment to reconsider the socialist tradition founded, in opposition to STalinism, by Trotsky. Trotsky argued that Stalinism represented a conservative betrayal of the Russian Revolution that Lenin and he had led in October 1917, a revolution based on the idea that socialism could only come from below, through the independent activity of the working class, and depended on the global overthrow of capitalism. He sought to build a movement capable of rescuing the Marxist tradition from the distortions of of Stalinism. Alex Callinicos traces the intellectual history of this movement, first examining its origins in Trotsky's own thought, and then exploring the crisis into which the Trotskyist Fourth International was thrown at the end of the Second World War, when its founder's predictions were apparently refuted by the strength and stability of both Western capitalism and Stalinism. Callinicos distinguishes between three strands in the continuation of Trotskyism, identifying their common ground but also the reasons for their sharp disagreements. At its best the Trotskyist tradition has developed a social analysis of the Eastern bloc that remains faithful to classical Marxism in rejecting the market as well as bureaucratic command economies and in affirming socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. -- from back cover.