In the final analysis, Trotsky is always right

I have the 1976 Militant edition of this booklet, "Lenin and Trotsky: What they really stood for". I readily admit that I only read half of it.

The authors, Ted Grant and Alan Woods, consider themselves to be Trotskyists. When the pamphlet was published, they were leaders of the so-called Militant Tendency in Britain. Today, Woods heads a group called Socialist Appeal. It's mostly known for its support to Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. Grant is deceased, but is still considered an important theoretician by this particular Trotskyist current. Internationally, Grant's and Woods' supporters are known as the International Marxist Tendency.

"Lenin and Trotsky" is Grant's and Wood's response to Monty Johnstone, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Johnstone had apparently published an article attacking Trotsky, to which Grant and Woods took strong exception. So why did I stop reading the pamphlet, then? The primary reason is the unregenerate Trotskyist dogmatics of the two authors, who even claim that Trotsky was right against Lenin on the question of permanent revolution. Personally, I couldn't care less, but - strictly speaking - it was *Lenin* who was right, not Trotsky. What actually happened after the October revolution? First, the Bolsheviks allied with *all* the peasants against the landlords by taking over the agrarian program of their opponents, the SRs. Then, the Bolsheviks formed a (short lived) coalition government with the Left SRs, who represented the middle peasants. Only in 1918 did the Bolsheviks start to support (or pretend to support) the poor peasants against both kulaks and middle peasants. This policy had to be abandoned after a couple of years, since it proved disastrous to the new regime. This fits Lenin's algebraic formula "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" excellently. It doesn't fit Trotsky's formula "permanent revolution" at all.

To save the day, Grant and Woods claim that the exclusive Bolshevik alliance with the poor peasants took place already in October 1917!

Grant and Woods even attempt to circumvent the fact that Trotsky was against a vanguard party before 1917, wondering what on earth the point was to build such a party, when most of it turned out to support the provisional government after the February revolution (!).

What indeed?

What a shame I'm not a Communist. I would have these Trotskyite saboteurs shot on the spot! :D

Ante Ciliga, in his book "The Russian Enigma", write that there was a Trotskyist faction in Stalin's labour camps which claimed that Trotsky was right on all issues where he and Lenin had had a disagreement. It seems this faction is alive and well in modern Britain.

And yes, I'm writing this in a somewhat flippant mood...

The Workers' Opposition has raised dangerous slogans. In the final analysis, Trotsky is always right.

Written in 2010, hence the anachronisms about Venezuela and so on.