``Lenin was not a theorist -- he rather 'applied' Kautsky to Russian conditions. (See Lars Lih). Trotsky was not only a theorist but suffered from the worst disease of theory: the assumption that theory could directly control practice.... The errors of so many left intellectuals in their early response to OWS were essentially 'Trotskyist' errors: they tried to fit Occupy to their abstract theory '' (CC)
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Okay I'll bite. First I don't know what a Trotskyist is and probably don't want know the history of that term. I recently read History of the Russian Revolution and My Life and they turned me on, pretty much like nothing I ever read before---fired the mind and spirit. Off hand, about the only thing close was Malcome X and Che Guevarra, but they didn't have the scope and deeper implicit intellectual background that Trotsky could command. They are all certainly comrades but nevermind.
Lenin, Trotsky and theory. There are theories and there are theories. In astronomy for example there are cosmological theories like general relative and the big bang. There are also a much richer variety of theories that arise directly out of explanations for empirical observation, and at the moment there is a big conflict between these two levels of theory.
I suspect on closer examination most fields of study and practice will show this division is common. Marx had to jump back and forth all the time. I don't know about Lenin because I haven't read very much of him. His work is rather scattered. State and Revolution are on the list. I should probably put Kautsky on the list, but that is for later.
BTW have you read The History of the Russian Revolution? I suspect not. In the opening sections T outlines the general parameters of his approach which I roughly characterize in a previous post. It amounts to this. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, Tolstoy is a master of the representative character of a class and most of the novel is drawn from the aristocracy, of landowners and urban based lower level aristocrats. There are long sections that bring in the lower orders down to the peasant foreman and estate managers. But they are all something like what we would call the psychological profile, combined with their class characteristics.
What Trotsky did intentionally or maybe intuitatively was to draw portraits of characteristic figures and events with the palette of his understanding of social and economic forces and considered this approach historical in the sense of an adaptive historical materialism. These range from the remote ethnic peasantry up to lords of power including Nicholas to the British Foreign Office and the petty French bureaucratic officials.
In my mind this is empirical theory and it most definitely applies to various sections of Occupy movements, journalism, propaganda pro and con, concrete conditions and so forth. These current events are close enough to my own past experience that I think I can read them and recognize them. And even better, I can look back and see my own mistakes and those of various movements in the past.
I didn't belong to organizations after CORE because it wasn't necessary at the time. Organizations and movements needed bodies, and I was a body. Later I was part of more organized movements with the drive to gain disabled civil rights and independent (non-institutional) living.
I am repeating this resume, because Carrol, you don't ever listen. Nevermind.
So then reflecting more on watching Egypt, that's were I recognized the scale and constellation of forces that Trotsky saw and wrote about. Application of theory, not exactly. What I see is more like a suggestive insight into societies in turmoil.
As to the detail that Lenin and Trotsky were on different poles. The facts as I read them in Trotsky were, the differences were not fundamental. They argued about their famous comrades, they argued about the endless variety of programs one or the other proposed, they argued directions. But they trusted each other.
Lenin appointed Trotsky to manage foriegn affairs right after October because both knew they needed to worry about the imperialist reaction. Within a few months it was obvious the more immediate threat were the German's eastern front, so Lenin took Trotsky out of diplomacy and moved him into forming up a fighting army as the Germans were beginning to push through the empty lines and the recently outsed Kerensky cohorts were becoming an armed counter-revolution. I'd call that fundamental agreement and trust.
I recognized this kind of trust with disagreement immediately from days in a project for disabled students. I knew my boss intimately, since I had been his attendent. We often argued and as a suboardinate and non-disabled, I adopted the discipline necessary to make the argument, push pretty hard, and then let go---in the well let's see how it goes mode. And it was accepted in that mode.
I am using these trival personal experiences in order to find understanding for much greater scaled events and people, because all I have are tiny little models. So far, they pretty much work, and are always correctible from much better analysis and experience.
CG