Difference between Lenin and Trotsky in a nutshell - please add

[MonsterMan]

Lenin - the real deal
Trotsky - the real deal without accounting for reality

seems about it to me.

How about that, or perhaps Trotsky was simply a more liberal version of Lenin?

[Atsumari]

Ask ten Trots for an answer and you will get ten different answers, probably contradicting one another.

[Zanters]

That is a very simplistic, albeit mostly incorrect, summation of Trotsky vs Lenin. It sounds very much like you are heavily influenced by ML take of Trotsky.

One must remember that Trotsky was also a Leninist, as in he adopted the ideas of Lenin. The differences are what Trotsky added post-Lenin. His ideas and concepts aren't seen as something opposing Leninism, but rather the extension of Leninism. Imagine Lenin being accepting of Trotsky's contributions.

The differences are what Trotsky contributed to Lenin, he is Lenin's continuation. So a thing like Permanent Revolution, why not Lenin's work, does not conflict with Leninist thought. This also is a very Trotskyist answer.

But to say that Trotsky had not dealt with reality is really skewed in itself, and smells of biased opinions.

But don't let me speak for Trotskyists, as I am not one.

[Illegalitarian]

Lenin couldn't kill the Kautskyist in his head and Trotsky couldn't kill the Lenin in his.


The trots will roll their eyes but let them try and refute it

[BIXX]

Lenin couldn't kill the Kautskyist in his head and Trotsky couldn't kill the Lenin in his.


The trots will roll their eyes but let them try and refute it
I'm not entirely sure what this means. You mean that they couldn't move past their predecessors really?

[The Idler]

One was premier of the Soviet Union the other was only in charge of the military.

[Dave B]

Lenin was opposed to Trotsky’s permanent revolution eg;

Economic Dislocation and the Proletariat’s Struggle Against It

First published in Pravda No. 73, June 1917



The point is that people who have turned Marxism into a kind of stiffly bourgeois doctrine evade the specific issues posed by reality, which in Russia has in practice produced a combination of the syndicates in industry and the small- peasant farms in the countryside. They evade these specific issues by advancing pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless, arguments about a "permanent revolution", about “introducing” socialism, and other nonsense.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm


On the Two Lines in the Revolution



Sotsial-Demokrat No. 48, November 20, 1915.



This task is being wrongly tackled in Nashe Slovo by Trotsky, who is repeating his “original” 1905 theory and refuses to give some thought to the reason why, in the course of ten years, life has been bypassing this splendid theory.


From the Bolsheviks Trotsky’s original theory has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks it has borrowed “repudiation” of the peasantry’s role. The peasantry, he asserts, are divided into strata, have become differentiated; their potential revolutionary role has dwindled more and more; in Russia a “national” revolution is impossible; “we are living in the era of imperialism,” says Trotsky, and “imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation.”

Here we have an amusing example of playing with the word “imperialism”. If, in Russia, the proletariat already stands contraposed to the “bourgeois nation”, then Russia is facing a socialist revolution (!), and the slogan “Confiscate the landed estates” (repeated by Trotsky in 1915, following the January Conference of 1912), is incorrect; in that case we must speak, not of a “revolutionary workers’” government, but of a “workers’ socialist” government!



The length Trotsky’s muddled thinking goes to is evident from his phrase that by their resoluteness the proletariat will attract the “non-proletarian [!] popular masses” as well (No. 217)! Trotsky has not realised that if the proletariat induce the non-proletarian masses to confiscate the landed estates and overthrow the monarchy, then that will be the consummation of the “national bourgeois revolution” in Russia; it will be a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry!

A whole decade—the great decade of 1905-15—has shown the existence of two and only two class lines in the Russian revolution. The differentiation of the peasantry has enhanced the class struggle within them; it has aroused very many hitherto politically dormant elements. It has drawn the rural proletariat closer to the urban proletariat (the Bolsheviks have insisted ever since 1906 that the former should be separately organised, and they included this demand in the resolution of the Menshevik congress in Stockholm).



However, the antagonism between the peasantry, on the one hand, and the Markovs, Romanovs and Khvostovs, on the other, has become stronger and more acute. This is such an obvious truth that not even the thousands of phrases in scores of Trotsky’s Paris articles will “refute” it. Trotsky is in fact helping the liberal-labour politicians in Russia, who by “repudiation” of the role of the peasantry understand a refusal to raise up the peasants for the revolution!

That is the crux of the matter today. The proletariat are fighting, and will fight valiantly, to win power, for a republic, for the confiscation of the land, i.e. to win over the peasantry, make full use of their revolutionary powers, and get the “non-proletarian masses of the people” to take part in liberating bourgeois Russia from military-feudal “imperialism” (tsarism). The proletariat will at once utilise this ridding of bourgeois Russia of tsarism and the rule of the landowners, not to aid the rich peasants in their struggle against the rural workers, but to bring about the socialist revolution in alliance with the proletarians of Europe.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/nov/20.htm

[Geiseric]

By 1917 there was no difference. Their program was identical despite disagreements about the timing of which to institute their policies such as the NEP.

[Illegalitarian]

I'm not entirely sure what this means. You mean that they couldn't move past their predecessors really?

Something like that

[Hit The North]

Lenin was opposed to Trotsky’s permanent revolution eg;

Economic Dislocation and the Proletariat’s Struggle Against It

First published in Pravda No. 73, June 1917


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm


On the Two Lines in the Revolution



Sotsial-Demokrat No. 48, November 20, 1915.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/nov/20.htm


Well, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and you quoting Lenin before October, before events had given the truth to Trotsky's view, is judging the pudding before its even gone in the oven.

Must do better.

...

[Dave B]

Yes but was Lenin’s state capitalism the fruition of Trotsky’s own permanent revolution and what Trotsky meant by it all along?



……….this is explicable in part by an incomprehension of an expression frequently used by us, that we now have state capitalism. I shall not enter into an evaluation of this term; for in any case we need only to qualify what we understand by it. By state capitalism we all understood property belonging to the state which itself was in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which exploited the working class. Our state undertakings operate along commercial lines based on the market. But who stands in power here? The working class. Herein lies the principled distinction of our state ‘capitalism’ in inverted commas from state capitalism without inverted commas.


What does this mean in perspective? Just this. The more state capitalism say, in Hohenzollern Germany, as it was, developed, the more powerfully the class of junkers and capitalists of Germany could hold down the working class. The more our ‘state capitalism’ develops the richer the work ing class will become, that is the firmer will become the foundation of socialism


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm