[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)

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