[WS:] Trotsky's main problem, as I see it, was oblivion to social embeddedness when it comes to the proletariat. As many radical intellectuals, he envisioned proletariat as a sheer force capable of not only abolishing all social institutions, but creating new ones from the scratch, according to a radical blueprint. In a way, this concept of the proletariat is the collective equivalent of Musil's "man without qualities."
The problem with this thinking is that the notion of "proletariat" as defined by the relations to the means of production is a dangerous abstraction that ignores how people actually identify themselves. An d it makes the whole difference in world whether the proletariat identifies itself as German, French, Russian, Protestant, Catholic, White, Black, Socialist, Christian and so on - because this will determine, for a large part, which institutional framework will channel and thus define the working class movement and struggle.
The most obvious example of the perils of overlooking social embeddedness of the proletariat is the failure of the Second International, but then if you look at the divergent goals and struggles of the working class in different countries - the transnational, free of social embeddeness proletariat strikes me as absurd.
So perhaps Trotsky himself would not fall into a nationalist identity such as Zionism, but most of his followers did.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."