What is the problem with Trotsky? Would the USSR have been better off with him instead of Stalin?
I was asked this recently on another website, and wrote a whole-ass wall of text addressing it. I figure it might be a good idea to post it here too, for all you comrades out there (and Trots who are hopefully willing to listen):
So, for starters, Stalin wasn't authoritarian. Lets get that out of the way right now. Democracy very much existed in the Soviet Union and would have been even more expansive if Stalin had his way. I'd go so far as to argue that the Soviet Union was more Democratic, even during its decline after Brezhnev, than the United States has ever been. If you doubt this, then I encourage you to read the literature I just linked, because if you want to debunk me, youโll have to debunk them.
When it comes to Trotsky, the problems with him and his ideas run a lot deeper than being simply "domineering" or โaggressiveโ. He had a nasty tendency to hold no real solid positions on anything, with Lenin once exclaiming:
"The obliging Trotsky is more dangerous than an enemy! ... Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. At the present moment he is in the company of the Bundists and the liquidators."
One moment Trotsky would be calling Social Democrats "fascist" allies of the Communist International, and then next he would be criticizing the Comintern for not forming a united front with them. One moment he'd say "Comrade Lenin has not left any โTestamentโ... All talk with regard to a concealed or mutilated โTestamentโ is nothing but a despicable lie, directed against the real will of Comrade Lenin" and the next he'd be saying "Stalinist censorship had placed a ban on Leninโs Testament as well as upon hundreds of his other works". The dude was all over the place, to put it mildly, and really couldnโt be said to be a trustworthy ally of any revolutionary group.
But wait, it gets worse. In his book Black Bolshevik, Harry Haywood sums up the issues with Trotsky's theories themselves, from the perspective of someone who was physically present to witness the power struggle between him and Stalin:
"Trotsky's theories were thoroughly defeatist and class-collaborationist...
At the base of this defeatism was Trotsky's view that the peasantry would be hostile to socialism, since the proletariat would "have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations." Thus Trotksy contended that the working class would:
"... come into hostile collision not only with all the bourgeois groupings which supported the proletariat during the first stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses of the peasantry with whose assistance it came into power. The contradictions in the position of a workers' government in a backward country with an overwhelmingly peasant population could be solved only ...in the arena of the world proletarian revolution."
Therefore, it would not be possible to build socialism in a backward, peasant country like Russia. The mass of peasants would exhaust their revolutionary potential even before the revolution had completed its bourgeois democratic tasks-the breakup of the feudal landed estates and the redistribution of the land among the peasantry. This line, which underestimated the role of the peasantry, had been put forward by Trotsky as early as l 915 in his article "The Struggle for Power." There he claimed that imperialism was causing the revolutionary role of the peasantry to decline and downgraded the importance of the slogan "Confiscate the Landed Estates."
Trotsky portrayed the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass. He made no distinction between the masses of peasants who worked their own land (the muzhiks) and the exploiting strata who hired labor (the kulaks). His conclusions openly contradicted the strategy of the Bolsheviks, developed by Lenin, of building the worker-peasant alliance as the basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Further, they were at complete variance with any realistic economic or social analysis.
Trotsky's entire position reflected a lack of faith in the strength and resources of the Soviet people, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Since it denied the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the success of the revolution could not come from internal forces, but had to depend on the success of proletarian revolutions in the advanced nations of Western Europe. In the absence of such revolutions, the revolutionary process within the Soviet Union itself would have to be held in abeyance, and the proletariat, which had seized power with the help of the peasantry, would have to hold state power in conflict, with all other classes.
Behind Trotsky's revolutionary rhetoric was a simplistic social democratic view which regarded the class struggle for socialism as solely labor against capital. This concept of class struggle did not regard the struggle of peasant against landlord, or peasant against the Czar, as a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. This was reflected as early as 1905, in Trotsky's slogan, "No Czar, but a Workers' Government" which, as Stalin had said, was "the slogan of revolution without the peasantry."
So basically, Trotsky believed that it would be impossible for socialism to be achieved in a "backwards" nation and instead it had to arise specifically within Western Europe or the United States before spreading to other "less developed" nations. As Haywood states this is inherently defeatist, as he's literally saying that the entire revolution that the Soviet people had just fought for was essentially for nothing so long as western Europeans remained capitalist and didn't come to fight their battles for them. This idea of "We need white developed nations to come fight the revolution for us and give us socialism" is especially problematic when applied to colonized nations and oppressed peoples. It's dangerously close to the "white man's burden" ideology that dominated western Europe and North America at the time. As Haywood later says in this chapter:
"Trotsky's scheme of permanent revolution downgraded not only the peasantry as a revolutionary force, but also the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples"
Knowing this, it's not surprising to learn that Trotsky was a massive racist, looking down on Stalin as "of Mongolian blood", basically calling him the equivalent of "white trash" in his 1940 biography of Stalin. Like seriously, the first thing he does in that book is go out of his way to paint Stalin as anything but white, or at least not European. Thing is, he considered all of Europe to be a unified "nation", both racially and culturally, similarly to today's European "identitarians". Yet, despite this, he mysteriously doesn't consider Black people in the Americas or Africa to have the same nationhood, expecting Black people in the United States to develop leaders for Africa:
"The Negroes are a race and not a nation. Nations grow out of racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not yet a nation but they are in the process of forming a nation. The American Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But since they are under the pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one can say with certainty, and that in turn will influence the development of political consciousness in America."
This is an incredibly eurocentric (or at least ignorant) view of Africa, as there are and have been countless African nations that were all either destroyed or attacked by Europeans. Many parts of Africa had established cultural identities that were systematically destroyed. His view completely lacks any kind of consideration for Africans as historical actors, instead clearly seeing them as a people for whom "civilization" is just beginning, and who aren't ready to have their own indigenous leadership, instead having to import it from the moreย โculturally advancedโ Black people in the US. Also "Nations grow out of racial material under definite conditions" seems to imply that national and cultural identities cannot cross racial lines, and I hope I don't have to explain why that's a really scary and problematic view.
Now, to be clear, that last quote is the view of Trotsky himself, and not all Trotskyists. So I am not calling all Trotskyists racist, I'm simply saying that Trotsky was a racist, chauvinistic ass-hat, and his supporters need to be doubly vigilant of that attitude persisting within their ranks. Trotskyists do have a history of promoting problematic people and views (See: Marcyism), and had Trotsky and Trotskyists risen to power in the USSR instead of Stalin, it's doubtful that the USSR would have remained socialist for so long. Trotsky's thinly-veiled bourgeois and social democratic ideas, and the contradictions therein, would have inevitably led to a capitalist resurgence and the eventual collapse of the entire Soviet bloc. Should it really be any surprise then, that this is exactly what happened when Soviet leaders such as Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and to a lesser extent Khrushchev started parroting his ideas again? (See: Khrushchev Lied)
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