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I agree Hero. Good work.

Trotsky was a political imbecile with a messiah complex. That said, I welcome you as my comrade.

Rob. More. Seriously.

He opposed the Politburo's decision to instate Comrade Stalin, and instead went off to Mexico to have a hissy fit and called for the complete destruction of the socialist state (on the very eve of the nazi invasion, mind you).

His political imbecility is clear when one takes into context that he would say anything to discredit the Party. He even declared in 1934 that Stalin was responsible for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. He was a pawn of all sorts of anti-communist forces. His theory, that of permanent revolution, is not a new concept within Marxism, and the man himself would have made a horrid leader of the Soviet Union. The only reason people even consider him capable as a leader is because Trotsky, full of himself, assigned himself a planetary and historic role, while even Lenin considered him politically harmful. I tend to think this has to do with his feeling that while him and Lenin were both of bourgeois origins, Stalin had no right to be in that position because he was what we'd call a bumpkin. Of course, that's not back-uppable, it's just my opinion. Seeking character guides, one should look at the quotes of Leon Sedov, his son.

Under a technical Marxist view, Teachers are subjects of the bourgeois state, and therefore, are bourgeois themselves. Still, I understand your point, and I'll restate. They were both from low-ranking nobilities.

Give me a second. Marx wrote on this subject, and stated that those who work directly for a capitalist dominated government should be considered to be in the same class themselves, despite not necessarily being bourgeois. Some guy was yammering about it last YCL meeting I was at, so I should remember the document name...
Edit: I think I'm referring to Marx talking about the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, which includes professors, teachers, and the like. Still can't find a document, quite sorry...
Edit2: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch01.htm

There.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx also mentions how the intelligentsia are the paid wage-laborers of the bourgeoisie, but in context, this statement makes it clear that they belong with the capitalist class, not the proletariat.

Went to Mexico to have a hissy fit?
The man was exiled internally, and then externally. Everywhere he went the Comintern fought to have his passport revoked, and STILL he fought as an external faction of the 3int until Hitler came to power.

I also find amazing this idea that he called for the destruction of the SU.
In 1938 Trotsky wrote: "If tomorrow the bourgeois-fascist grouping [in the CPSU], the 'faction of Butenko,' so to speak, should attempt the conquest of power, the 'faction of Reiss' [Trotskyists] inevitably would align itself on the opposete side of the barricades. Although it would find itself temporarily the ally of Stalin, it would nevertheless defend not the Bonapartist clique but the social base of the USSR, i.e., the property wrenched away from the capitalists and transformed into state property."
Are these the words of one who wants to destroy the Soviet Union?

How about this:


And now on to the stuff about Hitler. Again, I will let Trotsky speak for himself:
In 1928, when the opposition was expelled from the party, Trotsky said to those that declared the Comintern dead and that the revolution had been overthrown:
"Naturally, such intervention [trying to win over the members of the Communist Parties] is out of the question if the point of departure is that the party as a whole has degenerated, that the party is a corpse. With such an evaluation of the party, it is absurd to address oneself to it, and still more absurd to wait for it, or for this or that section of it, that is, primarily, for its proletarian core, to heed or understand you. To conquer this core, however, is to conquer the party."

In 1933 he wrote:
"During the last few years--appropriately enough--our opponents[within the Left Opposition] have told us more than once that we 'are losing time in vain' by occupying ourselves with curing the Comintern. We never promised anybody that we would cure the Comintern. We only refused, until the decisive test, to pronounce the sick as dead or hopelessly ill."

That test was Hitler's rise to power, or rather, the reaction to it by the Comintern and the KPD:
"Only after the German Communist Party, which had been gathering millions of votes. proved incapable of offering even the least resistance to Hitler, and after the Comintern refused to recognize not only the defeat of the proletariat (in reality the victory of Hitler is the greatest defeat of the proletariat in the history of the world!) and replacedthe analysis of its mistakes and crimes by a new campaign of persecution and slander against real Marxists--only after this did we say: nothing can save these people any more.... The historical judgement on the Comintern has ben pronounced. There is no appeal from this verdict."

And you are right to say that Permanent Revolution is not his, but rather it is Marx's very own. Everyone knows of his 'revolution in permanence' speech. It was even contained in embryo in the Manifesto, and more clearly in the draft version of the Manifesto.

Let's compare the two to see how different they are:


They are both saying this: When a proletariat exists, and the bourgeois-democratic revolution has not been completed yet, it falls to the proletariat to perform the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. But in so doing, it will by necessity overstep the bounds of the bourgeois revolution and will begin on socialist tasks. In so doing, the democratic revolution becomes a proletarian revolution.

Now as to whether he would have been a good or bad leader of the SU, I can't say. But he was the man who built the Red Army and he was the man who's politics history has vindicated.

And the rest... That is just stupid. Trotsky called for Soviet democracy, not for this or that person to be put in power. He wanted to extend the revolution internationally and to remove the bureaucratic privileges that Stalin implemented.