Appendix A – Trotsky: His Ideas¶
Core Argument¶
Leon Trotsky’s relationship with Lenin was marked by prolonged factional struggle before their eventual reconciliation. At the 1903 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party congress, Trotsky sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin’s conception of a centralised, disciplined party, accusing him of imposing a “state of siege” and an “iron fist”. In his 1904 booklet Our Political Tasks, Trotsky denounced Lenin’s organisational methods, predicting they would lead to the party apparatus substituting for the party, the Central Committee for the apparatus, and a dictator for the Central Committee. Between 1907 and 1914, Trotsky acted as a conciliator between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; Lenin dismissed him as representing “his own personal vacillations and nothing more.” Trotsky later acknowledged he had been “sick with the disease of conciliationism toward Menshevism.”
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution proved a lasting point of contention. In 1915, he argued that no revolutionary bourgeois democracy existed in Russia, so only the proletariat could seize power. Lenin replied that Trotsky ignored the revolutionary role of the peasantry. The February 1917 Revolution was a bourgeois revolution carried out by workers and peasants, not the proletarian seizure Trotsky foresaw. The text contends Trotsky inflated secondary factors, obscuring the essence: the transfer of state power from one class to another is the basic sign of a revolution. Trotsky’s claim that Lenin adopted his position is rejected; Lenin’s position changed because the objective situation had changed, not because he adopted Trotsky’s skipping of stages. Trotsky did not analyse his error but excused it, blaming the war for diverting the revolution.
In the trade union controversy of 1920-21, Trotsky clashed with Lenin by advocating the militarisation of labour and the replacement of democratic election with appointed leadership. Lenin accused him of “bureaucratically nagging the trade unions.” Trotsky’s faction was defeated at the Tenth Congress in 1921. On “socialism in one country”, Trotsky argued that completing socialist construction in the USSR was impossible without revolution in the West. Stalin insisted the USSR had the resources to build socialism. The success of the Five-Year Plans refuted Trotsky’s pessimism, but he refused to acknowledge this, instead claiming the USSR was moving towards fascism.
History has demolished the Trotskyist position if the issue is posed in Mandel’s terms, but Mandel’s definition of socialism as a society without classes, commodities, money and state is at variance with the Leninist conception. Lenin in The State and Revolution defined socialism as Marx’s first phase of communism, retaining bourgeois right in distribution. Russian communists understood socialism as Trotsky defined it in 1906: “co-operative production on a large scale.” Stalin could correctly say after 1935 that socialism had been built in the main. Trotsky was on stronger ground objecting to police terror and bureaucratic suppression of political freedom, but he failed to understand that a socialist economy can coexist with an undemocratic superstructure. His writings provide a useful corrective, but concluding that “socialism in one country” was the source of all evil is a windy generalisation.