a reddit comment from a deleted account explaining how trots differ from stalinists:
Trots ARE Marxist-Leninists. Trotsky's contributions to ML theory include the concept of the degenerated worker state, or a ML dictatorship of the proletariat which has stopped representing its workers in favour of its bureaucracy – this is a label he quite rightly applied to the USSR. Another of his big theoretical concepts was the permanent revolution, a concept slightly different from the orthodox Marxist one by the same name. Trotsky's permanent revolution is to do with how a society which has not yet advanced to late stage capitalism requires a slightly different approach, such as in Russia when the bourgeois revolution had not yet occurred. This meant that the proletariat revolution would have to bear the entire momentum of re-shaping society and not just riding in once the bourgeois revolution devolves into capitalist dystopia. He was also a proponent of world revolution, as opposed to Stalin's model of socialism in one country.
Trotsky opposed Stalin because Stalin pulled a power move and edged him out of the leadership of the USSR. But don't let his opposition to Stalin blind you to the fact that Trotsky was always a Marxist-Leninist, and a key figure in the building of the USSR pre-Stalin.
In terms of his links with anarchism, he has none, beyond being the man who was sent to end the Kronstadt rebellion and being the one in Ukraine working to defeat the White Russians, and in the process stabbing the Free Territories straight in the back.
I’m not sure there is any other single person in history, except maybe Franco, who is responsible for killing more anarchist than Trotsky. Kronstadt is just the most famous example.
Trotsky was a leader in suppressing the makhnovists and Kronstadt sailors and had 200,000 Ukrainian peasants slaughtered. If Trotsky had gained power he would have been just as authoritarian as Stalin.
In the early days, he'd ride around northwestern Russia in an armored train equipped with a garage for guncars, terrorizing moudjiks and forcefully conscripting them for manual labour tasks which he'd pay for with piles of the party's journal (he had a printing press inthere too) that the moudjiks would use as firestarter mostly. He'd conscript moudjiks into service regardless of if the white armies/defecting bandits had done so beforehand.
Trotskyist Infiltration and Methods - An Anarchist View
ziq OP wrote (edited )
a reddit comment from a deleted account explaining how trots differ from stalinists: