[MIM comments: These notes from Kostas Mavrakis are part of a
flyer that MIM distributed before it was called MIM in 1984.]

ON TROTSKYISM:  PROBLEMS OF THEORY AND HISTORY
   
   The Spartacist League, Socialist Workers Party and other 
groups including youth organizations and various front groups 
that have descended from the Fourth International all openly 
uphold Trotsky.  Kostas Mavrakis, who teaches philosophy at 
the University of Paris VIII, exposes Trotsky, Troskyism and 
Trotskyists in On Trotskyism for:
   
   *opposing guerrilla warfare and a major role for peasants 
    in revolution;
   *falsely claiming to be Leninist;
   *dogmatism;
   *spewing out anti-communist and anti-Soviet literature;
   *sloganeering without a firm understanding of socialism;
   *never accomplishing revolution anywhere in the world.
   
   Trotsky's most well-known defense of himself is that he 
and other true Leninists are the victims of Stalin and his 
followers.  However, without evaluating Leninism or Mavrakis' 
Maoism in the leaflet, one can easily see that Trotsky was 
not only not an innocent Leninist, but also that he was often 
outright counterrevolutionary and anti-Lenin; even though 
Trotsky had the power and the administrative skills to have a 
large role in the Soviet revolution.  In fact, Lenin 
criticized Trotsky for "the sin of excessive confidence and 
an exaggerated infatuation with the purely administrative 
side of things." (p. 56)
   Trotsky, on his side said the following of Lenin before 
the revolution:  "All leninism at this moment is based on 
lies and falsifications and bears within the germ of its own 
decomposition." (p. 8)  Also, Lenin according to Trotsky was 
"the leader of the reactionary wing of our Party" and "a 
hideous caricature of a malevolent and morally repugnant 
Robespierre." (p. 55)  Later, Trotsky was condemned at the 
13th Party Congress just before Lenin's death.  Despite high-
level movements to expel Trotsky from the Communist Party of 
the Soviet Union (CPSU), Stalin opposed the purge of Trotsky 
at that time.
   Then, two years later, Trotsky formed an opposition 
faction in the governing CPSU.  In his "Clemenceau 
Declaration," Trotsky promised to do his utmost to overthrow 
the Soviet government in time of war.  In fact, he flip flops 
on whether the Soviet government should be overthrown because 
it is bourgeois or for a different reason, but at one time he 
said that the Soviet people should "deal with the Stalinist 
bureaucracy as in their day they dealt with the Tsarist 
bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie." (p. 80) After Trotsky's 
"Clemenceau Declaration" of July 1926, Trotsky lost most of 
his posts until he was finally expelled from the CPSU on 
November 15, 1926. (p. 12)
   Yet Trotsky was not done with his undermining the 
fledgling revolutionary state.  Trotsky (who is quoted by 
such people as Milton Friedman's mentor, author of The Road 
to Serfdom, Hayek) commented to the St Louis Post-Dispatch 
that "the political regime of the USSR is not a new society 
but the worst caricature of the old." (p. 78)  Calling the 
USSR "the totalitarian abomination," Trotsky noted that 
fascist states and the USSR were "symmetrical phenomena" 
which "show a deadly similarity in many of their features." 
(pp. 78-79)  Furthermore, "Soviet forms of property on a 
basis of the most modern achievement of American technicque 
transplanted into all branches of economic life--that indeed 
would be the first stage of socialism." (p. 75)
   Trotsky's idea of socialism seems far from any standard 
notion and it certainly is not Leninist.  Lenin noted that 
proletarian state power and cooperative production relations 
are necessary to socialism.  He did not include international 
revolution as one of the things "necessary to build a 
complete socialist society" as Trotskyists do. (p. 27) 
Moreover, legal "property forms" and planning are not the 
keys to socialism just as Hitler Germany, Nasser Egypt and 
current South Africa are or were not socialist.  Even 
further, "politics must have precedence over economics" 
according to Lenin.  Meanwhile, Trotsky believed forced labor 
"would reach its highest degree of intensity during the 
transition from capitalism to socialism" and militarized 
labor "is the basis of socialism." (p. 44)
   Self-reliance did not occur to Trotsky as a major option 
for single revolutionary states as he admitted: "But in 
elaborating the theoretical prognosis of the October 
Revolution, I did not believe that, by conquering state 
power, the Russian proletariat would exclude the former 
Tsarist empire from the orbit of the world economy." (p. 30) 
In addition, "capitalism has converted the whole world into a 
single economic and political organism." (p. 179)
   According to Trotsky, "the living historical process 
always makes leaps over isolated 'stages' which derive from 
the theoretical breakdown into its component parts of the 
process of development in its entirety." (p. 178) Therefore, 
an economically backward country must wait for the advanced 
capitalist countries to lead on.  Socialism in the non-
Western countries is an absurd notion because "the example of 
a backward country, which in the course of several Five-Year 
Plans was able to construct a mightly socialist society with 
its own forces, would mean a death blow to world capitalism, 
and would reduce to a minimum, if not zero, the costs of the 
world proletarian revolution." (p. 30)
   
Indeed, any peasant-dominated country would have to wait 
because "the town is the hegemon of modern society and only 
the town is capable of assuming the role of hegemon in the 
bourgeois revolution."  Trotsky went out of his way to 
include "the East, China, India, etc." (p. 134)  Furthermore,
   
"Many sections of the working masses, particularly in 
the countryside will be drawn into the revolution and 
become politically organized only after the advance-
guard of the revolution, the urban proletariat, stands 
at the helm of the state.  Revolutionary agitation and 
organization will then be conducted with the help of 
state resources.
[later in same book]
   In such a situation, created by the transference of 
power to the proletariat, nothing remains for the 
peasantry to do but to rally to the regime of the 
workers' democracy.  It will not matter much even if the 
peasantry does this with a degree of consciousness no 
larger than that with which it usually rallies to the 
bourgeois regime. (p. 24)"
   
   In contrast, Lenin wrote that the revolution was 
accomplished first "with the whole of the peasants against 
the monarchy" and only later did the revolution move on, with 
the peasants, to build socialism. (p. 22)
   Since energy must be focused in the West, guerilla war is 
condemned by Trotsky:  "It must be said openly:  calculations 
based on guerilla adventure correspond entirely to the 
general nature of Stalinist policy." (p. 146)  Finally, 
Trotsky, who died in 1940 before most Third World liberations 
took place, wrote:  "the revolutionary center of gravity has 
shifted definitely to the West." (p. 181)