[lbo-talk] I'm a "committed Leninist"

[Chris Doss]

More falsification.  Trotsky always left no doubt that he viewed
the defeat of Hitler as inevitable.  He said that proletarian revolution
("social" in the rest of the world but "political" in the then-USSR)
was the only thing that could save the USSR from capitalist
restoration *by the Stalinist bureaucracy*.  Of course, no-one
nowadays thinks that was anything but fantasy.  As we all know,
socialism was definitively established by "Stalin" and could never,
ever, be overthrown!

Shane Mage
----
The following quotes are attributed to Trotsky in my copy of Trotsky: Mify i Lichnost'. Translation is by me:

 
"They (the military agreements between the USSR and the Allies) will preserve their worth in the first period of military operations, but there is no doubt that the united forces, in the decisive phase of war, will be defined incomparably more in terms of more meaningful factors than the oaths of diplomats, as they are liars by profession... The imperialist contradictions, of course, will be overcome with the help of a compromise in order to prevent a military victory of the Soviet Union..."

 
In the case of war "the fate of the Soviet Union will be decided in the final account not on the maps of generals, but on the map of class struggle. Only the European proletariat... can defend the Soviet Union from destruction or from a stab in the back by its allies... War will help revolution."

 
"It is hard to doubt that a military defeat will turn out to be fatal, not only for the Soviet ruling class, but for the social bases of the Soviet Union... Under the influence of the pressing needs of the state in matters of first importance, the individualistic tendencies of the peasant economy will receive actual support, and the centrifugal forces inside the collective farms will grow with every month... In other words, in the case of a long war, if the world proletariat remains passive, the internal social contradictions of the Soviet Union not only may, but must, lead to a bourgeois bonopartist counterrevolution."

 
"If the war is just a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union will be inevitable. In the technological, economic and military senses, imperialism is incomparably stronger. If imperialism is not paralyzed by a revolution in the West, it will sweep away the Russian that was brought into being by the October Revolution."

		
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