My question for Trotskyists is why were Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky good but Jose

[tradeunionsupporter]

My question for Trotskyists is why were Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky good but Joseph Stalin bad ? Well I know why Joseph Stalin was bad but how were Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky good ?

[Kléber]

There is no such thing as good or bad, there is only what class interests you represent. Trotsky and Lenin represented the proletarian interests which brought about the revolution in a backwards country that was not ready to establish socialism on its own but whose proletariat had no other choice than to try and spark the world revolution; in such a complicated situation it was inevitable that revisionist and proto-capitalist elements would worm their way into the revolutionary government and try to undermine the immature Russian working class. This was due to the isolation of the revolution and the low economic culture which prevailed in Russia (for one thing, the working class was less than 20% of the country and had to exercise an effective dictatorship over the peasants), rather than to the revolutionary methods or principles of Lenin and Trotsky. They were generally committed to democratic centralism (although Party and soviet democracy had to be abridged during wartime) and proletarian internationalism. They both also insisted that the success of the Soviet revolution depended upon its spread to the industrialized world.

Under Stalin, however, any hope of democratization died when the people who had led the 1917 revolution were ruthlessly purged in 1937-38. All of Lenin's surviving Politburo members, most of the Society of Political Prisoners, 2/3 of the entire 17th Congress of the CPSU, the brightest Red Army generals and those recently distinguished in Spain, vast portions of national Communist Party leaderships, and anyone who had presented a serious critical opposition to the policies of Stalin and his immediate clique, were murdered on phony charges. Hundreds of thousands of good Communists, the flower of the Party, were killed, paving the way for revisionist gangsters like Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Even the purgers, like Yezhov, were themselves purged as the Party attempted to tie up loose ends after the deed had been done (Stalin himself was similarly shed by Khrushchev in the "Secret Speech;" the bureaucracy, like a snake, shed its old and ugly scales).

Through the 1930's and 40's the state also took a conservative turn and abolished many social gains of the 1917 revolution which had been enacted and/or defended by the Bolshevik regime under Lenin: the independence and religious freedom of national minorities was smashed through "ethnic operation" purges and brutally violent anti-religious campaigns, abortion and homosexuality were banned, women's freedom to divorce was limited. Science and the arts became politicized by the likes of Lysenko, who enforced unscientific Lamarckian theories, and scientists like Vavilov were purged and died merely for believing in Darwinism and Mendelian genetics. Stalin's leadership also ceased to advocate a world revolution and turned the Comintern into an arm of Soviet foreign policy, using it to press the Allies with the Popular Front from 1934 and then offer mild support to Hitler in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact from 1939, and then finally in 1943, Stalin abandoned the Comintern altogether, and soon the Orthodox Church was rehabilitated. He famously told an interviewer that the idea the Communists had ever supported a world revolution was a "tragi-comic misunderstanding" (source (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm)).

This doesn't mean Stalin was evil, he just represented the conservative bureaucracy that wanted to turn back the gains of the revolution and pave the way for the reintroduction of capitalism. Trotsky meanwhile, was not "good" he just tried to provide a Marxist analysis of the USSR and its policies for the benefit of the world working class, and he was stabbed in the back for it.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/index.htm

[whore]

i'm not a trot. but i just want to say, this whole bollocks about "no such thing as good or bad" is, well, shite. yes, objectively, there is no such thing as good or bad. but from a simple (dare i say it) moral position, certain things are more, or less, desirable.

anyway, it is certainly true that stalin was not a useful force for real revolution (one that would lead to a free society). but, it can hardly be said that trotsky would have been any better. the bureaucracy was in place before lenin died, and we all know that one person a revolution does not make! so, if the basis for the bureaucratic class system was in place anyway, what would it matter who was the figurehead?

in conclusion, from a class perspective (i should say "working class), the only reason trotsky is not considered "bad", is because he lost.

[Kléber]

this whole bollocks about "no such thing as good or bad" is, well, shite. yes, objectively, there is no such thing as good or bad. but from a simple (dare i say it) moral position, certain things are more, or less, desirable.
Their Morals and Ours (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm)


anyway, it is certainly true that stalin was not a useful force for real revolution (one that would lead to a free society). but, it can hardly be said that trotsky would have been any better. the bureaucracy was in place before lenin died, and we all know that one person a revolution does not make! so, if the basis for the bureaucratic class system was in place anyway, what would it matter who was the figurehead?
Yes, Trotsky said that he could easily have become another Stalin if he had wanted to be the one to pander to the conservative bureaucracy whose social position was strengthened by the failure of the European revolution. But instead he chose to try and rally the working class to preserve the gains of 1917 against the forces of reaction within the USSR.