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material to serve as a scapegoat for the most vanous phenomena that
contradict the directives of the soviet party.
Thus in "The struggle of the Bolshevist party against Trotskyism
in the Post-October-period," a publication of the Academy for the
Social Sciences in the CC of the CPSU, the connections between
trotskyist thoughts and those of the "Mao Tse-tung group" is em–
phasized. The militarization of the Chinese Party and State system,
the preparations for war - as the best means for bringing about the
world revolution - is traced back to Trotsky's methods. Here too the
still unresolved events play a role that contributed to Trotsky's ban–
ning and expulsion from the Soviet Union when he advocated the
support of Chinese revolutionaries and took sides against Stalin and
the Comintern who preferred a pact with Chiang Kai-shek and
permitted the slaughtering of workers in the cities.
When he, like Lenin, set his hopes upon the revolution in China,
when he - also here in agreement with leninist ideas - saw the pos–
sibility of the victory of socialism only in the flaming up of the revolu–
tion on all continents - the conditions for it, however, had not yet been
created during his lifetime--or better: they remained largely unex–
ploited, then we find ourselves in the present amidst a burgeoning of
forces that both revolutionaries worked to bring about.
What is not being taken into consideration -and what ought to
interest the students of socialist countries is an examination of the his–
torical circumstances that led to Trotsky's propositions and political
decisions, as well as, for instance, of the questions under which cir–
cumstances his viewpoint of the militarization of work during the
last stage of war communism gave way to another insight-namely
of the necessity for the participation of workers councils in politics
and the economy on the broadest scale.
To determine Trotsky's influence upon the guerrilla activities in
Bolivia, Chile or Brazil can do honor to Trotsky only to the extent
that he would never have opposed these forces, that he would have
dismissed them as premature here, as mistaken there, and that he
would have discredited their strategy and exposed their leadership.
The development that was initiated here as well as in China through
the change in revolutionary emphasis to the countryside was only
recognized by him during the last part of his life. For him a revolu–
tion that was carried from the countryside into the cities did not
possess any convincing force : over and over again he characterized
the urban proletariat, the enlightened organized working class, as the
initiator of the revolution.
