What Would Trotsky Do?

[btpound]

What exactly did Trotsky propose the USSR do in 1924? What I had read was he supported basically militarizing the economy and hoping for the best. Is that true?

[btpound]

no reply then? It's been a week and I would like some kind of answer. Can anyone at least tell me who to ask?

[Communist Theory]

Vladimir.

[Yehuda Stern]

"Militarizing the economy and hoping for the best" is a strange way to put it. Have you read the Platform of the Opposition? It outlines a very detailed plan for the Soviet state. Basically it argued for non-forced collectivization (encouraging collectivization by showing peasants that it gets better results than individual farming) and industrialization, including five year plans (before the Stalinists started a deformed version of that).

[FSL]

"Militarizing the economy and hoping for the best" is a strange way to put it. Have you read the Platform of the Opposition? It outlines a very detailed plan for the Soviet state. Basically it argued for non-forced collectivization (encouraging collectivization by showing peasants that it gets better results than individual farming) and industrialization, including five year plans (before the Stalinists started a deformed version of that).


"The Party must work systematically and perseveringly, whatever the sacrifice or labour, to accelerate this process, especially as regards the rapid restoration of heavy industry."

"The necessary means for circulation must be created by agriculture in the form of a surplus of agricultural products over and above the village consumption before industry will be able to make a decisive step forwards."

Can anyone guess who among the leaders of the russian revolution wrote these lines?

The thing with Trotsky is saying that "for the construction of a socialist society in our country, a victory of the proletarian revolution is necessary in one or more of the advanced capitalist countries".


This is why the 5-year plans are described as "deformed". The plan itself was in no way deformed. It expanded industrial production, erased unemployment, set the basis for the constant growth of the soviet economy just as a plan should. What was wrong with it, is that it happened.
In 1932, Trotsky was saying the soviet economy was in need of an immediate retreat. After the first 5 year plan was completed, he forsaw the coming economic "colapse". In the late 1930s when it was obvious that the soviet economy was expanding at a great rate, each year becoming more able to satisfy the people's needs, he called on the people to get rid of the bureaucracy while defending the advances made (from the policies the blood-sucking bureaucrats had argued for ofcourse but he fails to mention this).
In "The revolution betrayed" Trotsky clearly states that the conditions for such a change in the Soviet Union as the one brought by the first 5-year plan wouldn't have matured for another decade or two. And that only in the case there were favourable international conditions.
Too bad that the Soviet Union would have been a Nazi colony by that time. What a shame for the workers who 30 years after their revolution might have got the chance to see what social property is like.

[btpound]

At the risk of being killed with an icepick, I just don't get Trotskyism. It seems just like sectarian opportunism to me. And I have a very good friend who is a Trotskyist, who I talk to all the time. When I friend told me I should read Trotsky's article on Spain, I said, "I might as well read a bourgeois interpritation of the event." He got really offended at this, but why? Is it not true? Trotskyists have more in common with the bourgeoisie than they do with most communists. They hate almost every communist leader to every hold power, they deny the gains by communist countries, and they distort the facts of history to justify their world view. The only diffrence is people listen to the bourgeoisie. What is the point? What do they have to say? What is this sacred knowledge that Trotsky has shared with his disciples that makes him so revered? Okay, he maid some correct predictions. So did Nostradamus. It seems to be that Trotskyism only appeals to communists who find it too hard to defend what real communism is.