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Not that work but some essays as background for some argument on this or another list. I agree I was struck by the particular insight I was looking for. To refresh my memory I looked him up at the marxists. org and clicked Trotskyism since that's what I've been called. Knock out!
http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1937/trotskyism.htm
``Lenin, who was neither God nor Stalin, made a serious error when for twelve years he opposed Trotsky's theory of the Permanent Revolution. ... He [Lenin] thought that the Russian Revolution would liberate Russian capitalism, put the Russian bourgeoisie in power. ...
Trotsky, as we know, opposed this, and thus originated Trotskyism. He said that the proletariat would have to make the bourgeois revolution, but that it would have to hold the power and go on to the dictatorship of he proletariat. There was going to be no development of bourgeois democracy, no development of capitalism in revolutionary Russia. The time for that had passed...'' (Dated October 1937)
(I'll avoid who said what first, and who was more rad.)
This needs context and the best I can think of is from My Life where some of these arguments are briefly outlined. The other essential background is The History RR.
The general idea was that L and T lived in an absolute monarchy with a vampire squid aristocracy and that had to fall, so that from there a bourgeois capital establishment would take its place and then the prolitarian overthrow could take place.
That was a very reasonable plan and fit Marx's general idea on the sequence from feudal structures to bourgeois structures to socialist and then communist structures.
Real history changed that. After the February revolution it didn't take long to see big capital was in league with the whole monarchy state apparatus. Lenin came out with his April Thesis which reoriented the program and Trotsky went along after some argument... The capitalist could not pull out the factories which the workers already controlled. The fight had been to keep allied loans flowing to Russian state under the monarchy who in turn paid out on the capitalist war contracts. That system kept going after February hence the need to jump the bourgeois structures and go directly to the next step. The April thesis provided the plan...
Wow just finished James' short essay.
Man I never would have understood a word before reading Trotsky. It would have sounded like commie jargon. It doesn't now. Or let me put it this way, its jargon doesn't mask the reality as it once did.
There is no way to explain how annoying even simple words like bourgeois democracy was back in the 60s. The old left just wouldn't let that shit go. And they were doctrinair about it. They could have just said corporate state and gained a lot...
Anyway, thanks for reminding my of James. I'll put him on the list. At a guess he won't be in the black history month reader.
CG