Given the trajectory of Trotsky’s line on the USSR, it shouldn’t surprising that his theories missed the mark on China as well. In fact, if they had been followed, it is clear that they would have done considerable harm to the Chinese revolution. On the question of China, there are two main things that stand out regarding the position of Trotsky and his followers. First, there is the ever present failure to grasp the national-colonial question in the era of imperialism, and second, there is the failure to understand the united front in relation to that.

Trotsky argued, before and after the revolution of 1917, that building socialism in one country was impossible, and that the success of the revolution was dependent on the immediate expansion of the revolution to Western Europe. Once this didn’t happen, Trotsky’s only way to persist in this theory was to say that the Soviet Union wasn’t truly building socialism.

One of the main pillars of Trotskyism is the denial of the possibility of building socialism in a single country. This is an outgrowth of Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory, which argued that the revolution in Russia depended on the immediate success of revolution in western Europe to avoid defeat. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union did indeed build socialism in one country, so we should look at the disagreements between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism on this point and try to understand where they come from.

The disagreement between Trotsky’s “absurdly Left” (according to Lenin) theory of “Permanent Revolution” and the Leninist theory of revolution in two stages boils down to the question of how to deal with the question of the peasantry.

When Lenin gave his brief and scathing overview of Trotsky’s career in his 1914 article “Disruption of Unity Under Cover of Outcries for Unity,” so that “the younger generation of workers should know exactly whom they are dealing with,” he made a point of referring to Trotsky’s “absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.” What is the role of this “permanent revolution” theory within Trotskyism, and why is it “absurdly Left,” as Lenin says?

The Trotskyites always paint Trotsky as the true inheritor of the revolutionary legacy of Lenin. This is pure opportunism. They see the tremendous respect and admiration for Lenin that is held by working and oppressed people all over the world and seek to gain some of that respectability simply by association. They say Trotsky was Lenin’s true heir and comrade-in-arms, and that Stalin and the USSR betrayed Leninism.

Trotskyism has been one of the most persistent and damaging opportunist ideological opponents of Marxism-Leninism within the left. In the next several articles, we’re going to look at the origin and development of this ideology, what it is and what it seeks to accomplish. But first, who was Trotsky, and what is Trotskyism?

After waging revolution from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed from Tiananmen Gate that “the Chinese people have stood up!” This marked the end of imperialist domination in China and the beginning of socialism in the newly founded People’s Republic of China, led by the Communist Party. The Chinese revolution has continued through socialist construction from then until today, and we would do well to sum up some of its many heroic achievements in order to better understand, from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, the process of socialist revolution and socialist construction.

How is it possible that the Soviet Union, bastion of socialism and proletarian internationalism, collapsed in 1991? What factors led to its collapse, and what were the results? We should look at both the material and ideological basis for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. As Marxist-Leninists, what lessons can we draw from the experience of the fall of the Soviet Union?

As Marxist-Leninists in the United States, we can draw lessons from the experiences of others in carrying out revolution and building socialism. While every revolutionary struggle must be firmly based on the concrete analysis of its own conditions, we should still study closely both the successes and failures in the rich experience of the Soviet Union. From that experience we can draw both lessons from their struggle as well as inspiration from their heroic achievements. In the next article we will examine the causes of the collapse of the USSR and draw lessons from it, but here let’s look at all that it achieved.