Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice

Participating in the revolutionary workers movement “with open eyes and an intense will, only this can give the highest moral satisfaction to a thinking being,” Trotsky writes. He explains how morality is rooted in the interests of contending social classes. With a reply by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey.

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was part of the central leadership forged by Bolshevik party leader V.I. Lenin that organized the revolutionary conquest of power by workers and peasants in Russia in October 1917. Trotsky commanded the Red Army, was a founding leader of the Communist International, and of communists in the Soviet Union and worldwide who fought to continue Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course. He continued that struggle from exile after being deported in 1929. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by Stalin’s secret police.

John Dewey (1859–1952) – Educator, author, and proponent of the philosophical school of pragmatism. A prominent political commentator, he was a standard-bearer of liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Widely respected for his personal integrity, Dewey served as chairman of the 1937 Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. In a major blow to Stalin’s frame-up, the Dewey Commission investigated and rejected the frame-up charges. Dewey’s writings include: