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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 36, 22 July 1933, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In the article of L.D. Trotsky, Historical Objectiveness translated by Max Eastman and reprinted in the last issue of the Militant from the magazine Contempo, a typographical error was responsible for the following sentence, “But the last thing that the author had in mind was to interpret in his book the verdict of the historical process.” Obviously this is a mistake.
Trotsky could never make such a statement. In fact he wrote just the contrary. The error originates in the proofreader’s mixing up two sentences of the original article which reads as follows, “But the last thing the author had in mind was to console anybody. He merely wished to interpret in his book the verdict of the historical process itself.”
Undue liberties were by the way taken, in the translation of the “bureaucratic stratum” (in the Russian mss.) as “the bureaucratic class.” We call the attention of the translator to the fact that in Marxist literature a fundamental distinction is made between “class and “stratum” (or “layer”) – the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union is not a class.
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Last updated: 25 October 2015