Why and in what context did Trotsky say this?

[SentimentalDisenchantment]

"We would be compelled to acknowledge that Stalinism was rooted not in the backwardness of the country, and not in the imperialist environment, but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to turn themselves into a ruling class."

[Stirnerian]

I haven't read any Trotsky, so it would be dishonest to suggest that I know exactly what he meant. However, taken in isolation, this quote suggests a pretty awful view of the proletariat through the use of "congenital", a term reserved for hereditary deformities. The "(w)e would be compelled to acknowledge..." suggests that it's not a point of view Trotsky is inherently advocating for, however.

Of course, on the face of it, Trotsky is correct in that the failure of the Soviet Union was the failure of the working class to transform itself into the ruling class. This might be described as "congenital" to the extent that the working class is reproduced socially as the individual is reproduced sexually; the hereditary failure of the working class of the Soviet Union to de-proletarianize itself was a failure of its genetic constitution, i.e. its social composition (as a minority of a minority within a backward nation still dominated to a large extent by feudal relations). It was stillborn.

All this is a pretentious way of saying that the Russian proletariat, as of 1917, was not developed enough to negate itself. That's my face value, totally uninformed, newbie opinion of that out-of-context quotation. With my luck, Trotsky probably thought in retrospect that the Russian working class was perfectly capable of turning itself into the ruling class at the time.

[Konikow]

Why don't you tell us what the context is, before we go jumping to uninformed and prejudiced conclusions? This is a sentence fragment. Is someone feeding you a sentence fragment and demanding that you interpret it in some tendentious way? Or are you doing that to us?

I don't know where this phrase comes from but I recall Trotsky writing something like that against the "new class" or "state capitalist" theories, I think in "The USSR and the War." He wrote that if a workers revolution took place in one or more advanced capitalist countries, and was not isolated like the Russian revolution was, and if the workers despite the lack of the specific historical problems faced by the Soviet state, handed political power over to a conservative, abusive bureaucracy like Stalin's, then we would be forced to conclude that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new class and "Stalinism" or "bureaucratic collectivism" or "state capitalism" or "statified capitalism" or whatever you will is a new form or class society and not a conjunctural deformation of a transitional, workers state. In other words, the opposite of the conclusion to which we seem to want to jump here.

Don't take anyone's word for anything. Read what you are being told to condemn or praise, not just a few words of it. Otherwise you are good for nothing in politics.

[Hit The North]

A secondary source which provides context for the quote can be found in Deutcher's biography on Trotsky, The Prophet Outcast. You can find it here

Evidently the inherent incapacity of the proletariat to constitute itself as a ruling class was a hypothesis he suggested but then quickly refuted within the same paragraph.

[Konikow]

So the OP took the citation from Deutscher, removed the ellipses and square brackets, and passed it off as an (un-sourced) quote from Trotsky. Sloppy and slimey, but that's what to be expected at Refleft.

[Luís Henrique]

"We would be compelled to acknowledge that Stalinism was rooted not in the backwardness of the country, and not in the imperialist environment, but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to turn themselves into a ruling class."

Complete paragraph would be:

An analogous result might occur in the event that the proletariat of advanced capitalist countries, having conquered power, should prove incapable of holding it and surrender it, as in the USSR, to a privileged bureaucracy. Then we would be compelled to acknowledge that the reason for the bureaucratic relapse is rooted not in the backwardness of the country and not in the imperialist environment but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become a ruling class. Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting régime on an international scale.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Link:
The USSR in War)

As we see, there is a conditional there, that was omitted in the OP.

Trotsky's thesis is that Stalinism was a result of Russia's backwardness and isolation. Evidently,

if similar results would ensue from revolutions in "advanced" (ie, imperialist) countries,

then it would have been proved that backwardness and isolation were not the cause of Stalinism, and that Pabloism was right in its idea of bureaucratic regimes as a structurally necessary part of the transition to socialism (or, worse, that the transition to socialism was impossible, and attempts at revolution would necessarily result in monstruosities such as the DDR).

else ...

endif

Luís Henrique

[SentimentalDisenchantment]

Why don't you tell us what the context is, before we go jumping to uninformed and prejudiced conclusions? This is a sentence fragment. Is someone feeding you a sentence fragment and demanding that you interpret it in some tendentious way? Or are you doing that to us?

I don't know where this phrase comes from but I recall Trotsky writing something like that against the "new class" or "state capitalist" theories, I think in "The USSR and the War." He wrote that if a workers revolution took place in one or more advanced capitalist countries, and was not isolated like the Russian revolution was, and if the workers despite the lack of the specific historical problems faced by the Soviet state, handed political power over to a conservative, abusive bureaucracy like Stalin's, then we would be forced to conclude that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new class and "Stalinism" or "bureaucratic collectivism" or "state capitalism" or "statified capitalism" or whatever you will is a new form or class society and not a conjunctural deformation of a transitional, workers state. In other words, the opposite of the conclusion to which we seem to want to jump here.

Don't take anyone's word for anything. Read what you are being told to condemn or praise, not just a few words of it. Otherwise you are good for nothing in politics.

Do you have some personal issues? First of all, this is a learning thread and I am entitled to ask questions. This is a simple question whose source happens to be a youtube where Hitchens (a former Trotskyist) is discussing Trotsky and his life. You may look it up, instead of "jumping to conclusions". Indeed, it is also mentioned in the video that he later retracted it. So, no I am not expecting any kind of "lapse" (which you're implicitly accusing me of) from Trotksy. I can see your answer adds no value whatsoever. I'd suggest stay away if you have nothing of value to say. By the way, I didn't take anyone's word for it. If I did, I wouldn't be asking this here on "sloppy and slimey" revleft, and dealing with trolls like you.

[Konikow]

Hitchens was never a Trotskyist, always a pro-imperialist, first a pro-imperialist "radical" and later a pro-imperialist professional anti-communist liberal. And it turns out I was right!

[SentimentalDisenchantment]

Hitchens was never a Trotskyist, always a pro-imperialist, first a pro-imperialist "radical" and later a pro-imperialist professional anti-communist liberal. And it turns out I was right!

Well, thats not worthy of an argument. Thats plain denial. Hitchens, when he was around 19 or 20, he was indeed a Trotkyist, in his Oxford years, although later he became a neocon imperialist (hence the word "former"). He was actually pretty committed, he went as far as Cuba to volunteer and work in the coffee plantations there. He has always regarded Lenin and Trotsky as great men, even when he shifted to the right. I don't know what you mean by "first a pro-imperialist radical" given the fact he left Labour's Student Union, while he was at Oxford, because he condemned Labour's pro-Vietnam war approach.

And whether or not he was a Trotskyist has nothing with what Trotsky said. Trotsky indeed said these words, although I didn't know the context. Hence, the question.

But, it's apparent that you like fantasies. So, carry on!