Trotsky vs Stalin

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

What does a hypothetical Trotsky vs Stalin map look like if both were running for President in the present day US? Forget one being a Democrat and the other a Republican and just try to speculate on who would hypothetically be in their respective coalitions.

[Agonized-Statism]

Both anti-communists and communists tend to exaggerate their differences. They were about as similar as the US parties are to each other and it does no one on the left any good to hash out the feud between two long-dead men from a long-dead government.

That said, Trotsky rejected the theory of Socialism in one country and he declared the need for an international "permanent revolution"- that's a foreign policy of supporting communist revolutions around the world, with military intervention if necessary, and a domestic policy of ensuring no bureaucrats become entrenched as to uphold democracy and prevent revisionism from the goal of communism. Trotsky also supported united fronts between revolutionaries and reformists. He and the Left Opposition disliked Lenin's New Economic Policy, which he believed allowed a private sector to emerge and the socialized sector to languish. He called for the state to adopt a program for mass industrialization and to encourage the mechanization and collectivization of agriculture, definitively returning to a socialist mode of production and helping the Soviet Union move towards parity with Western capitalist countries. A lot of his support came from the Red Army.

Stalin was more conservative in that he didn't outright reject those things, but believed forcing them all at once was dangerous pie-in-the-sky idealism, noting that the Soviet Union had to withstand external threats before it could sponsor world revolution. He thought pragmatically that too much intervention abroad would invite another world war against the Soviets (probably true), and that too much factionalism from democracy and too many upheavals from attacking the establishment would destabilize the country while it was weak and surrounded. He was what we would call an establishment candidate whose support came largely from the bureaucracy. Also important to note is that he wound up fulfilling a lot of Trotsky's "campaign promises" anyway (mass industrialization, collectivization of agriculture). The former was a good idea in hindsight, because any less industrialization and the Nazis might have taken Moscow. But Stalin discouraging a united front between the German communists and social democrats was part of what allowed Hitler to rise in the first place (then again some kind of right-wing Germany was likely to emerge and attack the Soviets anyway) and purging the army didn't help later on.

Beats me. The US doesn't really have the threat of invasion to encourage mass industrialization and agricultural collectivization for anything other than socialist fervor, and that's obviously not a thing here either. Nor are those even our biggest industries at this point anyway. How do those platforms even apply to service workers in a globalized capitalist economy that's also still more or less the hegemonic power? You could compare Trotsky to an outsider populist, but a hawkish one who wants to fulfill the goals and ideals of the state, while the establishmentarian Stalin would be the isolationist who wants to strengthen the state first even if it means straying from ideals for a time. I guess that translates to Trotsky sweeping the Sun Belt and Stalin sweeping the Midwest? Trotsky took a lot of criticism in the USSR as a "Bonapartist", so I imagine he'd ironically get targeted with a lot of the dictator-in-the-making scare pieces that Trump got. Their feud was closer to Adams vs. Jefferson than, say, Trump vs. Biden.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Both anti-communists and communists tend to exaggerate their differences. They were about as similar as the US parties are to each other and it does no one on the left any good to hash out the feud between two long-dead men from a long-dead government.

That said, Trotsky rejected the theory of Socialism in one country and he declared the need for an international "permanent revolution"- that's a foreign policy of supporting communist revolutions around the world, with military intervention if necessary, and a domestic policy of ensuring no bureaucrats become entrenched as to uphold democracy and prevent revisionism from the goal of communism. Trotsky also supported united fronts between revolutionaries and reformists. He and the Left Opposition disliked Lenin's New Economic Policy, which he believed allowed a private sector to emerge and the socialized sector to languish. He called for the state to adopt a program for mass industrialization and to encourage the mechanization and collectivization of agriculture, definitively returning to a socialist mode of production and helping the Soviet Union move towards parity with Western capitalist countries. A lot of his support came from the Red Army.

Stalin was more conservative in that he didn't outright reject those things, but believed forcing them all at once was dangerous pie-in-the-sky idealism, noting that the Soviet Union had to withstand external threats before it could sponsor world revolution. He thought pragmatically that too much intervention abroad would invite another world war against the Soviets (probably true), and that too much factionalism from democracy and too many upheavals from attacking the establishment would destabilize the country while it was weak and surrounded. He was what we would call an establishment candidate whose support came largely from the bureaucracy. Also important to note is that he wound up fulfilling a lot of Trotsky's "campaign promises" anyway (mass industrialization, collectivization of agriculture). The former was a good idea in hindsight, because any less industrialization and the Nazis might have taken Moscow. But Stalin discouraging a united front between the German communists and social democrats was part of what allowed Hitler to rise in the first place (then again some kind of right-wing Germany was likely to emerge and attack the Sovieta anyway) and purging the army didn't help later on.

Beats me. The US doesn't really have the threat of invasion to encourage mass industrialization and agricultural collectivization for anything other than socialist fervor, and that's obviously not a thing here either. Nor are those even our biggest industries at this point anyway. How do those platforms even apply to service workers in a globalized capitalist economy that's also still more or less the hegemonic power? You could compare Trotsky to an outsider populist, but a hawkish one who wants to fulfill the goals and ideals of the state, while the establishmentarian Stalin would be the isolationist who wants to strengthen the state first even if it means straying from ideals for a time. I guess that translates to Trotsky sweeping the Sun Belt and Stalin sweeping the Midwest? Trotsky took a lot of criticism in the USSR as a "Bonapartist", so I imagine he'd ironically get targeted with a lot of the dictator-in-the-making scare pieces that Trump got. Their feud was closer to Adams vs. Jefferson than, say, Trump vs. Biden.

Interesting.
Thanks for the rundown.