I first read Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky after buying the Pathfinder Press edition at the Miami chapter of the Socialist Workers Party in 2005. I’d started to gain an interest in Trotskyist politics, and the Communist movement that year as I’d grown disillusioned with what I saw as the lifestylism of the modern anti-globalization movement. At my invitation, Alyson Kennedy, the 2016 Socialist Workers Party Presidential candidate, visited the school that I worked at in 2008, when she was then the Vice-Presidential candidate. After she left the students shared that they thought her calls for class struggle and revolution were weird and they, a group whose family originated in a number of different places in the Caribbean and Latin America, openly questioned her sanity and my judgement for having her come speak to them.
Given that the Socialist Workers Party has recently chosen Manuel Castells to be a functionary in the coalition government, that he’s recently attended Oxford University to give some lectures, and that the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute – Dr. Philip N. Howard – has wrote a book praising Castells I thought it sensible to highlight some quotes of Trotsky’s – who founded the Socialist Workers Party – related to his advocacy of deception and lying in pursuit of revolution.
