https://workersocialist.blogspot.com/2020/02/did-leon-trotsky-assign-reactionary.html?m=1
I posted this as a comment to their website, but it is still “under review.”
The Bolsheviks could rely on the peasantry for support in two ways: soldiers for the army fighting for individual plots of redistributed land despite police state measures used against the working class to replace elected worker leaders with unelected party appointments, and through support for privatization and private property in the production and distribution of food.
The Bolsheviks did bring Marxists into power for the first time, but this did not mean the working class itself had emancipated itself. The Bolshevik leaders consisted of rich merchants, Russian nobility, and after 1917, many middle class servants of the Tsarist state. Their consciousness of class divisions and study of history prepared them to unite with the poor peasantry to bring a revolution to power. It did not prepare them for a workers’ state that would not compromise with German imperialism, leading to the Brest-Litovsk controversy in which Lenin sided against Trotsky and Luxemburg, freeing the German imperialists to return to Berlin and deal with Luxemburg and Leibnicht. It did not prepare them for the demands of workers after the revolution, which would have sent more peasants into war with German imperialism to negotiate for a workers’ state in Germany, and for this reason they suppressed the democratic rights and democratically elected representatives of the working class with appointments favorable to their deals with German and American imperialism, with middle class peasants, with small business owners, etc. all in the name of keeping the Bolshevik Marxists in power. This should not have come at the expense of the German and British leadership or the rights of workers to elect their own leaders.
Sylvia Pankhurst, British Communist leader, saw this process as early as 1921 and called for the establishment of a Fourth International. Had the work of building the Fourth International begun in 1921, Stalin could have been overthrown, Western powers would have lost the benefit of their deals with leading Bolsheviks (parties independent of the Comintern could still challenge capitalist power in their countries), and the establishment of the privileged bureaucracy, unanswerable to the Soviets, would have been prevented. World War II and fascism would have been prevented. The really important task of building the Fourth International would not have been delayed until 1938, only a year before the outbreak of war and five years after Hitler’s rise to power, when the capitalists had already removed all pretense of ruling by legal, peaceful, or popular means. It is important to separate the accomplishment of a Marxist-led government consisting of nobility and the rich as its leadership and an actually functioning Marxist state based on the self-emancipation and self-governance of the working class.
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The Left Communist policy of continuing the war with Germany may seem excessively violent, considering the criticism of imperialism for its endless wars. However, if you consider the outcome of a German revolution at the end of the war, a million or two million extra deaths for the Russian peasantry (a class that barely exists in developed capitalist countries today) in defense of workers’ democracy and international socialist unity, then those two million extra deaths would have prevented famines that cost millions of lives, the rise of Hitler to power, the conquest and occupation of Europe by the far right, and World War II. Two million peasant lives lost to save more than fifty million. Trotsky-worshippers and Lenin-worshippers, not actual Leninists or Trotskyists, might still argue further: “this is arguing in hindsight.” In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves knew, including Lenin and Trotsky, that a failure to spread the revolution to Germany would isolate the new government and give rise to a new round of imperialist violence on a larger scale than WWI. They knew this, but, because of their reliance on the peasants for political support, they sacrificed the tens of millions of lives and the entire Soviet revolution accomplished by the working class conquest of power, especially in St. Petersburg, for the immediate interests of the aristocratic and rich middle class leadership of the Marxist party. In fact, it could be argued that the entire Marxist movement of the Second International had taken a step back in rejecting the leadership and theories of Marx and Engels and allowing the middle class to gentrify the executive board of the party organization and newspaper. Mandatory recusal can protect the political and theoretical unity of the party, a rational union of factions, not a vulgar materialist “collection of fixed, internally undifferentiated” members without democratic rights or the freedom to criticize.
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