Though Le Blanc argues otherwise, there was only one version of permanent revolution — Trotsky’s. No one else adhered to Trotsky’s analysis of the coming Russian Revolution: that only workers could overthrow Tsarism and that as a result the democratic revolution in Russia would have to be a proletarian-socialist one, not a “bourgeois-democratic” one. [...]
In a nutshell, Trotsky thought he could persuade the party to adopt his domestic and foreign policies by majority vote only on condition that the leadership allow freewheeling democratic debate among rank-and-file party militants, not top-heavy bureaucratic “debate” dominated by business-as-usual apparatchiks who, collectively, Trotsky believed, had little interest in proactively building socialism at home, or working intelligently and conscientiously for socialist revolution abroad. [...]
Bukharin understood all too well that Stalin’s cure for the grain crisis was worse than the disease. Thus, a window of opportunity opened, ever so slightly to be sure and ever so briefly, to save the Russian Revolution from final destruction by mobilizing workers and peasants in its defense. Trotsky and the Left Opposition did everything in their power to slam this window shut.
Throughout 1928 Bukharin challenged Stalin’s predatory policies in the countryside, recognizing in them the risk of disaster. The Left Opposition did not. Bukharin and his cohorts, Trotsky explained, in trying to placate the ostensibly kulak-led peasantry, were simply opening the way for capitalist restoration in agriculture and, eventually, in industry. This would be the greatest evil. Trotsky’s slogan of the day was: “With Stalin against Bukharin — yes; with Bukharin against Stalin — never!” [...]
Trotsky’s view of the Right Opposition as capitalist-roaders was fantasy. So was his view that Stalin was a centrist, perpetually tossed now to the right, now to left, and incapable of striking out on his own to become the head of a new ruling class. He never came to terms with his utterly mistaken appraisal of Stalin’s politics, itself founded on a profoundly erroneous analysis of the bureaucracy as a non-class phenomenon, a “caste.” This confounds Le Blanc’s assertion that Trotsky always admitted to errors of political judgment.
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