From: Godenas-AT-aol.com
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 10:53:17 -0500
Subject: Re: On Trotsky


Down, Louis.  Lyov Davidovich Bronstein was Trotsky's real name was it not,
just as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was Stalin's.  To construe that as
anti-semitic is, to me, a form of moral blackmail, much the same as smearing
anyone who has a good word to say about the Soviet Union after 1925.  Was not
Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" borrowed from Marx's Address of
the General Council to the Communist League (1850)?  Trotsky, in my view,
failed to pay sufficient attention to the conditions necessary (particularly
in the "advanced" countries) for concomitant revolutions.  Permanent
revolution, or its near replication, occurred in Germany in 1919, in Hungary
a few years later, potentially in England during the 1926 General Strike,
etc.  None of these revolutions were successful.  Trotsky's version of
permanent revolution presupposed the winning of  power by the proletariat on
the "commanding heights" of the world economy, something that was not
achieved, and perhaps could not be achieved in the 1920s.  Under the rubric
of "socialism in one country," Trotsky criticized what he saw as the
premature collectivization of agriculture in Russia, and, later, the
evolution of the Comintern into a mere tool of non-revolutionary Russian
foreign policy.   At the time, though, "socialism in one country" was the
only feasible alternative to the failed revolutions of 1919-1923.  If Trotsky
had prevailed, I beleive that not only would revolution in Europe still have
failed, thus hastening the rise to power of fascism, the Soviet Union itself
would have been destroyed, either in the 1920s, or certainly by the time of
the Nazi invasion.  I sometimes wonder if the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded
not in spite of a lack of a large industrial proletariat, but because of it.
 The same is true of China and Cuba.  I think Trotsky, in light of history,
seriously misjudged both the nature and the capabilities of the western
working class in that period.  Of course, like every school of thought,
Trotskyism has been subject to diverse interpretations, with different
features being highlighted at different historical periods.  With groups as
diverse as the Sparticist League, SWP, Pablo, etc., Trotskyism today bears
few similarities to its 1930s antecedents.  That I guess is part of the
problem, which leads me to ask you, what do you see as the main outlines of
Trotskyism, and why are you attracted to it?


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