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Orange Juche
12th June 2008, 08:14
On Wikipedia (in the democratic centralism article) it says:

"The Mensheviks supported a looser party discipline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_discipline) within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSDLP) in 1903, as did Leon Trotsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky), in Our Political Tasks (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1904/1904-pt/), although Trotsky joined ranks with the Bolsheviks in 1917."


Does this mean he maintained support of his original beliefs of "looser party discipline" though still joined ranks with the Bolsheviks? Or when he joined the Bolsheviks, did he drop his original ideals on that matter?
dirtycommiebastard
12th June 2008, 15:51
He dropped it.
Afterwards, Trotsky always advocated Democratic Centralism, because he understood the importance of building the party. Hence, his joining the Bolsheviks.
Dros
12th June 2008, 20:22
Officially, he dropped it.

I don't want to cause a flame fest and I'm just putting foreward my view of history here and there is no malevolent intent, but I think Trotsky was always more in line with a Menshevik world view then a Leninist one for several reasons.
Led Zeppelin
12th June 2008, 20:57
Trotsky didn't belong to either side for the majority of the split, he was a conciliator, i.e., he believed that the class-struggle would eventually cause both sides to see common ground and join together again.

As for Trotsky always being more of a Menshevik than a "Leninist", that is quite an absurd accusation given the fact that Trotsky was, together with Lenin, one of the few Marxists who didn't believe in the vulgar stageist theory which dictated that Russia was not ready for a dictatorship of the proletariat because "it wasn't developed enough".

Stalin, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and practically all of the other Bolsheviks held that theory to be true up until Lenin's arrival in Petrograd in April 1917.

Ironically the Stalinists later took over this theory and through the Comintern forced Communist parties such as the one in China to take it over as well (a move which ended in disaster), disregarding the fact that it wasn't applied to Russia itself.