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Trotsky and counter-hegemony in Western Europe in the interwar period
| Before and during his last exile, Trotsky busied himself, at various times and circunstances, with the practical task of developing a revolutionary socialist movement in Western Europe in conditions far different from those that had prevailed in pre-revolutionary Russia, having to face at the same time the existence of an long existing bourgeois hegemony and an established socialist movement, both social-democratic and communist, therefore his necessity of developing a counter-hegemonic strategy that could, firstly, reach beyond the already existing workers' constituencies and, secondly, appeal to society at large in a revolutionary sense. This paper aims at establishing, from an analysis of Trotsky's 1920s and 1930s writings on Western European politics, to strike a comparative analysis between the Gramscian concept of counter-hegemony, and Trotsky's more practical blueprints for the building of a such a counterhegemonic movement in opposition to a developed capitalist socio-political environment.
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