A special reference supplement What we mean when we say: Why do we use Marxist

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Socialist Press is a newspaper which presents a Marxist analysis of the events and topics that it covers.

Within the limited space available to us we present the most detailed possible examination of the class struggle both in Britain and on a world scale.

We attempt to bring into today's struggles lessons from the historical experiences of the working class movement and the long struggle for revolutionary politics.

But in doing so we are often obliged to use terminology which might strike the reader as unnecessarily complex and daunting.

Many words are used Leon Trotsky was, with Lenin, co-leader of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, and prominent in the founding and the first four congresses of the Communist International.

For his opposition to the growing bureaucratic power of the Stalinist clique in the Soviet Union and his outspoken criticism of their policies both within Russia and abroad, Trotsky, along with his supporters, was slandered, vilified, driven from leading positions in the government and the Party and eventually expelled and driven into exile. the pages of our press in a specific way, which may well appear to bear little or no relation to everyday language.

The reason for this is simple. Marxism is a science. Like any science, it needs a vocabulary to describe the forces, the processes and the changes it is analysing.

And, again like any science, it can only avoid using such a vocabulary and substitute more everyday words or phrases at the expense of brevity and precision.

We do not make a virtue out of using such terminology-which we know must present itself as a problem to many readers-and we keep it to a minimum in our articles.

But to help even more we have taken the opportunity of this Christmas holiday issue to present a pull-out supplement offering brief explanations of some of the terms which you won't find explained in a dictionary.

The brevity of some of our explanations will mean that certain aspects of the terms defined will be left out. But the length of them compared to the term being defined will show why the use of a certain degree of scientific "jargon' is necessary if we are to offer any serious analysis of the international class struggle!

Trotsky Lenin COMMUNISM A communist society is one in which class antagonisms have disappeared after the overthrow of capitalism by the working class.

Communism will be reached after the dictatorship of the proletariat where the bourgeois family unit has been replaced, and the wages system, the state machinery and the distinction between town and countryside have withered away.

Scientifically, then, communism would be a society where social relations are based not on exploition but on true principles of progress that conform to the conditions of human nature." Lenin.

"The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence. Abolition of private property. By this is meant not the personal property of the wage labourer or even the petty artisan and peasantry, but bourgeois private property which exploits the many by the few." Communist Manifesto. PERMANENT The theory developed by