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On 8/16/15 12:06 PM, Joseph Green via Marxism wrote:
Most activists are familiar with Stalinist hostility to Trotskyism, but in fact Stalinism and Trotskyism are twin sides of the same coin. If we examine Trotskyism and Stalinism in the light of the experience of the many revolutionary movements since the death of Lenin, it turns out that Trotskyism and Stalinism have a lot in common.
This is nonsense. Stalinism, except for the brief "Third Period", has had the same basic strategy as the Mensheviks. Instead of seeking common cause with the Cadets, it oriented to FDR, the bourgeois parties in Spain and France in the 1930s, etc.
The fatal flaw of Trotskyism was its assumption that by pointing out the errors of class collaboration, the scales would fall from the eyes of the masses and a new vanguard would emerge. This is fundamentally the illusion of Antarsya in Greece, which like the ineffectual Trotskyist movement in Spain during the Spanish Civil War was awfully good at pointing out the errors of the anarchists, the Stalinists et al, was just awful when it came to building a party.
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