[MC5 comments: Below I have collected quotes from Leon Trotsky
on "war communism" and attached the sources from marxists.org.
If we keep in mind Trotsky's particular rhetorical style,
especially if we substitute the word "communism" wherever he
says "socialism," because remember, he does not believe in 
"socialism in one country," then we can see where Progressive
Labor Party obtained its ideas (supposedly new) about
"dictatorship of the proletariat" and "communist" economic
production relations that it talks about in "Road to Revolution."
It's as if PLP read Trotsky's description 
of war communism and became even more enthusiastic than Trotsky was
about it.

Trotsky admitted that Lenin accused him of an excessive preoccupation
with "war communism" methods, but Trotsky also claims that 
Molotov sought to scheme with Stalin and Zinoviev against him by
exaggerating the question. Later in life, he tried to claim 
that his ideas for NEP should have
been adopted in 1920 and not 1923 as decided by Lenin
and that his ideas of agricultural collectivization should have been adopted 
before Stalin carried out collectivization. In any case, Trotsky admitted he became
for a while the greatest defender of war communism, relatively speaking.

The fact that PLP's most basic ideas on united front and socialist revolution
come from Trotsky does not prove that they are wrong, only that PLP is
confused and that someone is probably not honest in revealing who deserves credit
for their ideas.

The keys to the PLP line are here: use of force and administrative measures
politically and equal wages and rations economically.]


To define War Communism, three questions are most 
pertinent: How were the food supplies obtained? 
How were they apportioned? How was the operation 
of state industries regulated?

The Soviet power did not meet up with free trade 
in bread grains but with a monopoly resting on the 
old commercial apparatus. The civil war shattered 
this apparatus. Nothing remained for the workers’ 
state except to improvise hastily a substitute 
state apparatus for siphoning the grain from the 
peasants and concentrating the supply in its own 
hands,

Provisions were distributed virtually without 
regard to labour productivity. . . .

This was achieved by fixed food rations. Both the 
confiscation of grain surpluses from the peasants 
and the apportioning of rations were essentially 
measures of a beleaguered fortress and not of 
socialist economy.

The bourgeois apparatus of economic management was 
destroyed not only on a national scale but within 
each individual enterprise. Hence arose the 
elementary burning task: to create a substitute 
apparatus, even if only a crude and temporary one, 
in order to extract from our chaotic industrial 
heritage the most indispensable supplies. . . .

The policy of paying equal wages. . . .

You might ask whether we had expected to make the 
transition from War Communism to socialism without 
making major economic turns, without experiencing 
convulsions, without executing retreats, i.e., 
effecting the transition more or less along a 
steadily rising curve. Yes, it is true that at 
this period we did actually think that the 
revolutionary development in Western Europe would 
proceed more swiftly. 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1924/ffyci-2/20.htm

<B>When the change to the market system was rejected, 
I demanded that the “war” methods be applied 
properly and with system, so that real economic 
improvements could be obtained.</B>
[Bold-face mine--MC5. This is the entirety of the PLP line,
that the war communism model was not pushed hard enough.
It comes right from Trotsky.]

In the system of 
war communism in which all the resources are, at 
least in principle, nationalized and distributed 
by government order, I saw no independent role for 
trades-unions. If industry rests on the state’s 
insuring the supply of all the necessary products 
to the workers, the trades-unions must be included 
in the system of the state’s administration of 
industry and distribution of products. This was 
the real substance of the question of making the 
trades-unions part of the state organizations, a 
measure which flowed inexorably from the system of 
war communism, and it was in this sense that I 
defended it.

The principles of war communism approved by the 
ninth congress were the basis of my work in the 
organization of transport. The trade-union of 
railway men was closely bound to the 
administrative machinery of the department. The 
methods of military discipline were extended to 
the entire transport system. I brought the 
military administration, the strongest and best 
disciplined at that time, into close connection 
with the transport administration. This yielded 
certain important advantages, especially since 
military transport again assumed first importance 
with the beginning of war with Poland. Every day I 
went from the war commissariat, whose operations 
destroyed the railways, to the commissariat of 
transport, where I tried not only to save the 
railways from final collapse, but to raise them to 
a higher level of efficiency.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-lif/ch38.htm