Trotsky in the Bronze Age: Why technology alone does not change society - Dominic Alexander

The history of all society is the history of class struggles. So said Marx and Engels, but we are still accustomed to looking at the past through successive waves of technological change, from stone, to bronze to iron. In this incisive and accessible analysis, Dominic Alexander shows how Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development illuminates how technology and society interact. Going back to the most ancient history of class societies, Trotsky can help us understand the centrality of class struggle, as true today as it was in the Bronze Age.

‘In recent years, Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development has garnered a remarkable amount of attention in a variety of different academic disciplines from International Relations and historical sociology to anthropology and world literature. Alexander’s Trotsky in the Bronze Age is a much welcome contribution to these ongoing debates. A wonderfully accessible work, Alexander weds rich empirical analysis with theoretical sophistication in extending the powerful intellectual insights of uneven and combined development to the very earliest epochs of human history. I highly recommend this work.’

Alexander Anievas, Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut