Earlier I sought to lay out some basics of Marxism and Leninism, and I have already, in many posts, begun introducing the reader to the fourth stage of the communist science, Leading Light Communism. But it occurs to me that I never completed my previously-announced task fully. I have not yet introduced the reader to the basics of classical Maoism. This post will be dedicated to that subject. I will break its distinctive aspects down.
THE TWO "ROOTS" OF MAOIST THEORY:
1. Continual Revolution. Maoists rejected the concept of the "negation of the negation", thus embracing the reality of endless contradictions. Even communist society features contradictions, just not antagonistic ones. Getting from here to a communist world means making revolution, both immediately and at every stage between here and there. It does not mean something else.
2. The Mass Line. This entails two principles that operate simultaneously in a back-and-forth relationship: leading the people in revolution and learning from the people. Communists bring to the oppressed and exploited masses of the world the scientific perspective of communism (authentic communism, that is) in order to give their progressive struggles against oppression and exploitation a radical direction. But it is also not simply a matter of bringing the masses 'our views' from without. It is also a matter of being among the masses in their struggles against oppression and exploitation, listening to their demands, and orienting our strategies to meet their needs. The important thing of the mass line is the understanding that the people are the principal revolutionary weapon in your arsenal. You must depend on the masses to make their revolution. You cannot make it for them or simply wield them as instruments. You instead must guide the masses in their struggles in an overall sense, while learning their needs and genuinely listening to their perspectives. You synthesize the resultant lessons in an ongoing way, thereby continually refining the communist science itself. This orientation, if applied correctly, yields continual advances in both communist theory and revolutionary practice. The purpose of communist revolution is to service the needs of the world's oppressed and exploited masses. (Leading Light Communists understand that this means the Third World masses, not the exploiter First World populations.)
These two principles are the most elementary to Maoism. All other aspects of Maoist theory are built on the above two foundations: the foundations of ongoing revolutionary struggle through mass mobilization for the purpose of meeting the needs of the oppressed and exploited. These two principles are concentrated in many other Maoist formulations, such as "people's war", "cultural revolution", etc.
THE MAOIST PATH TO COMMUNISM BROADLY:
Mao described the path to communism as the process of abolishing the 4 Alls: 1) all class distinctions, 2) all exploitative economic relations, 3) all oppressive social relations, and 4) all corresponding ideas. The Maoist principle of continual revolution holds that these are all actionable principles (as in not just the natural result of economic development), and the mass line concept contends that the masses must be mobilized to accomplish all these objectives for themselves.
THE THREE "BRANCHES" (i.e. SPECIFICS) OF MAOIST THEORY:
1. People's War and New Democratic Revolution. People's war is a revolutionary war led by a proletarian vanguard party that operates according to the principles of the mass line. Its objective is democratic revolution of a new sort; a revolution that establishes proletarian democracy, not capitalist democracy. Maoists have conceived of this as being concentrated in the objective of establishing a people's republic as the first objective in the struggle to get to a communist world. A people's republic is a coalition government consisting of parties corresponding to all the progressive sections of society (all the oppressed and exploited masses), led by the vanguard party of the proletariat: the most oppressed class in society. Accordingly, succeeding in people's war entails working in a nuanced way with a block of 4 progressive classes: 1) the proletariat, 2) the peasantry, 3) the various middle strata, and 4) the anti-imperialist Third World bourgeoisie. This block of classes unites around the common objective of achieving Third World development. The contradictions within this block of classes may be apparent, but they are also non-antagonistic ones that can be resolved in peaceful ways. Accordingly, the Maoist conception of the transition to socialism entails, for example, buying out the Third World anti-imperialist bourgeoisie and integrating them into the regular workforce rather than treating them in a hostile way, like by forcibly expropriating them and shipping them off to forced work camps. Traditionally, Maoists were in agreement that this path was appropriate at least for Third World nations, while some held that people's war was a universally applicable principle. Among the Chinese Maoists, Lin Biao went as far as to theorize that the world proletarian revolution should take the form of a single, worldwide people's war fought by the oppressed peoples of the Third World against the First World. Leading Light Communists embrace a strategy essentially similar to Lin Biao's. New democratic revolution opens the door to socialism by sweeping away imperialism and feudalism.
2. Collectivization of Life as the Path to Communism. Maoists do not embrace the Soviet model of socialist development, which centered on the state-ification of society and a developmental focus on heavy industry. Maoists instead embrace a balanced, all-around approach to economic development (i.e. simultaneous development of light and heavy industry, of city and countryside) achieved through the collectivization of life. Continual collectivization is understood as being compatible with the eventual abolition of the state altogether. It is the bridge between socialism and communism. The masses must come to run society for themselves directly, and this must be an actionable principle (not simply 'the natural result of economic development').
3. Cultural Revolution. The cultural life of society must be transformed through mass mobilization as well. This is particularly essential to prevent counterrevolution. A proletarian culture must flourish under socialism.
Showing posts with label Maoism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maoism. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
A Great Basic Introduction to the Chinese Cultural Revolution!
There is just too much good stuff here to not link all my readers to it. What you'll find at the link is a superb article outlining the very most basic and crucial features of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It well worth reading, for those who are new to the communist science.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Failure of the Second United Front: Incidental or the Result of an Incorrect Perspective?
Some groups out there today are able to recognize the obvious about the so-called Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) -- that they are a revisionist and comprador party that, after a decade of heroic struggle for liberation that nearly succeeded, has now abandoned people's war, dismantled the popular government they had established in the liberated areas, jailed the People's Liberation Army in cantonments, and which is working vigorously, with the full support of the imperialists (including the United States) to disband the PLA altogether and integrate its fighters into the nation's regular army in exchange for a seat in the country's bourgeois parliament -- while others prefer to champion their path as some sort of major ideological breakthrough. It is painfully obvious that the Nepali "Maoists" are surrendering, not advancing in their revolution. One thing I have noticed though about those who champion the Prachanda Path to nowhere is that they usually come back to a certain particular comparison: the Second United Front in the Chinese people's war. Comparison is regularly drawn between the Second United Front on the one hand and the 2006 peace agreement between the then-CPN(M) and the Nepali parliamentary parties on the other. (After all, wasn't it Mao who had the revolutionary soldiers remove the red stars from their caps, etc.?) What these fools somehow don't realize is that the Second United Front was a failure!
The idea of the Maoist block of 4 progressive classes is that you can not only establish a temporary unity toward a particular set of objectives (as the various revisionist groups tell us the Nepali "Maoists" are doing), but also that you can ultimately resolve the contradictions therein non-antagonistically. The block of 4 classes is, in that way, a permanent alliance.
Going back to the historical case of China, if one actually reads the contents of the Maoists' writings throughout the Second United Front period, one sees that they saw Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang as a relatively unified whole. They believed the entire organization to be essentially patriotic and thus part of the block of 4 progressive classes. That's why during the said period they sought to form a coalition government with the Kuomintang as the expression of people's democracy applicable to China. Yes, they wanted to include even Chiang and his group within the KMT as part of that coalition government. It wasn't that they recognized Chiang and those around him within the KMT to be reactionary foreign puppets and were just seeing them as sort of a "lesser evil"next to Japan; they genuinely believed that Chiang and Co. were patriots with serious progressive potential.
However, tt was not factually the case that the Kuomintang as a whole was a nationalist bourgeois party. The KMT government was a one-party state. That doesn't mean the contradictions of bourgeois economic interests...the differing political positions resulting from market competitions, etc....disappeared in the KMT-ruled part of China because they had that political set-up. Rather, it meant that these differing political perspectives, including both patriotic and comprador ones, were basically suppressed into one party organization in their political expression. In other words, the KMT always featured both patriotic sections and comprador sections. So there was always a sort of good side and a bad side to them. Looking back historically, we can identify, for example, that Sun Yat-Sen was a patriotic KMT element, whereas Chiang Kai-Shek was really a foreign puppet.
That the theory of the Maoists on Chiang and his group of compradors was wrong is borne out in events. While the Chinese Maoists sought to maintain this united front with the KMT under Chiang's leadership, in reality Chiang, really from 1939, had dissolved it in practice by resuming the civil war on a low level and approaching that, rather than the war of resistance against Japan, as their primary war effort. (We'll recall that, at a certain point, Chiang had even threatened to surrender to Japan if Amerika didn't step up its assistance to the Kuomintang government.) So the 8th Route Army was fighting a more or less offensive war against Japan while simultaneously being forced to fight a more or less defensive, low-level war against Chiang Kai-Shek's forces. After World War 2's conclusion (which the Chinese Communists hadn't expected would come as soon as it did), they attempted a rapprochement with the KMT in earnest that very much resembled what the Nepali "Maoists" are doing right now: they reached an agreement in January 1946 to form a coalition government with the KMT under Chiang's leadership and to unify their armies. This is a topic most "Maoists" I know carefully dodge because frankly it was obviously a huge mistake!! And no, it wasn't an agreement reached in cynicism, as our media insists. It was sincere. Mao was submitting to the Soviet Union's new 30-year trade agreement with the KMT-led government. The breaking point of the agreement was Manchuria. The Soviet Union basically handed the Chinese Communists the manufacturing center of Manchuria on a silver platter and this stirred up the ire of Chiang, who in turn responded by sending in 1.6 million troops to conquer the liberated areas and destroy the Communists. At that point, the Chinese Communists hardly had any alternative but to jettison the Second United Front and shift the strategic focus from from the maintaining of world "peace" under imperialist domination to that of liberation against the new, Western-backed puppet government.
None of this is to say that the concept of the strategic 4-class alliance was wrong. On the contrary, I would particularly highlight the emergence of the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang in 1948, which, in betrayal of their former party, joined up with the Communist-led side. This was an organization of political representatives of China's genuinely patriotic bourgeoisie. It became an important party in the revolutionary united front led by Communists. When they established a people's republic, the loyal KMT elements were not treated in a hostile way, but rather were given a position in the government alongside other loyal parties. In the mid-50s, China transitioned into socialism in earnest. This was done in a mainly non-antagonistic way wherein the assets of the remaining bourgeois elements generally were bought by the socialist state, rather than seized aggressively. Ongoing ideological struggle was a crucial part of that mixture. They had to and basically did win over even these native bourgeois elements to the idea of giving up their private capital holdings and becoming part of the workforce in a socialist economy. In that way, it can be said that the bulk of the class contradictions between the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese bourgeoisie were actually resolved in favor of the proletarian perspective in a primarily non-antagonistic way. That is a historical expression of what the progressive block of 4 democratic classes is all about. It was ultimately a successful idea.
We have to remember that all of the 4 Alls are factors in terms of who you can work with. Maoists seek the abolition of 1) all class distinctions, 2) all exploitative production relations, 3) all oppressive social relations, and 4) all the corresponding, reactionary ideas. Many would-be communists focus in only on the first two of those 4 Alls and forget about the relevance of the latter two. The native bourgeoisie of the third world is (obviously) not exploited, but it is oppressed, and this oppression can form the basis for a strategic alliance with them. Through that alliance, you can win them over more decisively to the side of the proletariat through ideological struggle with them over such matters as morality questions. Now that's not going to plausibly be as rock solid a unity as you could have between various working classes (e.g. between the proletariat and the peasantry)...these bourgeois forces do, after all, have some investment in the capitalist system and thus will tend to waver a lot more...but that is why you "lean to one side" of this united front: the side of the working classes, under the leadership of the proletariat. Yes, the third world 4-class alliance concept differs qualitatively from Lenin's conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e. it is a different form of proletarian rule): it's more fully mass-based and more strategic. It's better, in my view.
My point though for this post is that the Chinese people's war wasn't all just some smooth, 2-stage operation that all went perfectly according to plan, as so many convey it. There were major, unexpected twists and turns along the way that very easily could have led them in the wrong direction on a lasting basis. It was a complex process. And I would argue that they did not completely learn the lesson. The Second United Front was a failure for real, not incidental, reasons. It failed not because it was a bad idea, but because of the form it took. The Chinese Communists didn't seem to really much appreciate the dynamics that existed within the KMT and approach the KMT with the according nuance. Rather, they, at least initially, treated it as a unified, all-patriotic body. The Communists' petitions for the establishment of a united front with the genuine KMT patriots was a good thing, and it ultimately resulted in Chiang's arrest, precisely for treason. Sending in Zhou Enlai to negotiate Chiang's release was the mistake. As soon as he got back into safe territory, Chiang immediately placed the coup leaders under arrest. He was always insincere about the united front. (As another observation, pretty much anything "special" like this that Zhou Enlai did had basic, opportunist flaws, much like Zhou himself did.)
Now if we exclusively look back at the historical record through the narrow lenses of official history, such as recorded in Lin Biao's Long Live the Victory of People's War!, then we may fail to see these mistakes as mistakes. After all, if the principal contradiction in the world was, as the Chinese Maoists themselves concurred with the Comintern (under clear Soviet leadership) that it was at the time, between fascistic forces on the one hand and democratic forces on the other, then uniting with "democratic" comprador elements and working with "democratic" imperialists like the United States and the other imperialist Allies makes sense. On the other hand, if the principal contradiction throughout the whole imperialist era has been between the first world on the one hand and the third world on the other, then uniting with imperialists and compradors of any stripe made no sense. I would argue that the latter perspective seems to be a closer match for the historical record. It clarifies the record on this matter that has been so difficult for so many people to flesh out.
Now that we have this clearer view of the Second United Front and the actual historical implications thereof, it becomes much easier for us to see how the Prachanda Path is indeed revisionist and capitulationist: they are following the path of forming a "national" united front with traitors to their nation. All compradors are reactionaries and principal class enemies, just like the imperialists they're shielded by.
History is dynamic. We should study it that way, rather than just adopting the mindset in advance that "side X was always right and my task is to figure out how".
The idea of the Maoist block of 4 progressive classes is that you can not only establish a temporary unity toward a particular set of objectives (as the various revisionist groups tell us the Nepali "Maoists" are doing), but also that you can ultimately resolve the contradictions therein non-antagonistically. The block of 4 classes is, in that way, a permanent alliance.
Going back to the historical case of China, if one actually reads the contents of the Maoists' writings throughout the Second United Front period, one sees that they saw Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang as a relatively unified whole. They believed the entire organization to be essentially patriotic and thus part of the block of 4 progressive classes. That's why during the said period they sought to form a coalition government with the Kuomintang as the expression of people's democracy applicable to China. Yes, they wanted to include even Chiang and his group within the KMT as part of that coalition government. It wasn't that they recognized Chiang and those around him within the KMT to be reactionary foreign puppets and were just seeing them as sort of a "lesser evil"next to Japan; they genuinely believed that Chiang and Co. were patriots with serious progressive potential.
However, tt was not factually the case that the Kuomintang as a whole was a nationalist bourgeois party. The KMT government was a one-party state. That doesn't mean the contradictions of bourgeois economic interests...the differing political positions resulting from market competitions, etc....disappeared in the KMT-ruled part of China because they had that political set-up. Rather, it meant that these differing political perspectives, including both patriotic and comprador ones, were basically suppressed into one party organization in their political expression. In other words, the KMT always featured both patriotic sections and comprador sections. So there was always a sort of good side and a bad side to them. Looking back historically, we can identify, for example, that Sun Yat-Sen was a patriotic KMT element, whereas Chiang Kai-Shek was really a foreign puppet.
That the theory of the Maoists on Chiang and his group of compradors was wrong is borne out in events. While the Chinese Maoists sought to maintain this united front with the KMT under Chiang's leadership, in reality Chiang, really from 1939, had dissolved it in practice by resuming the civil war on a low level and approaching that, rather than the war of resistance against Japan, as their primary war effort. (We'll recall that, at a certain point, Chiang had even threatened to surrender to Japan if Amerika didn't step up its assistance to the Kuomintang government.) So the 8th Route Army was fighting a more or less offensive war against Japan while simultaneously being forced to fight a more or less defensive, low-level war against Chiang Kai-Shek's forces. After World War 2's conclusion (which the Chinese Communists hadn't expected would come as soon as it did), they attempted a rapprochement with the KMT in earnest that very much resembled what the Nepali "Maoists" are doing right now: they reached an agreement in January 1946 to form a coalition government with the KMT under Chiang's leadership and to unify their armies. This is a topic most "Maoists" I know carefully dodge because frankly it was obviously a huge mistake!! And no, it wasn't an agreement reached in cynicism, as our media insists. It was sincere. Mao was submitting to the Soviet Union's new 30-year trade agreement with the KMT-led government. The breaking point of the agreement was Manchuria. The Soviet Union basically handed the Chinese Communists the manufacturing center of Manchuria on a silver platter and this stirred up the ire of Chiang, who in turn responded by sending in 1.6 million troops to conquer the liberated areas and destroy the Communists. At that point, the Chinese Communists hardly had any alternative but to jettison the Second United Front and shift the strategic focus from from the maintaining of world "peace" under imperialist domination to that of liberation against the new, Western-backed puppet government.
None of this is to say that the concept of the strategic 4-class alliance was wrong. On the contrary, I would particularly highlight the emergence of the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang in 1948, which, in betrayal of their former party, joined up with the Communist-led side. This was an organization of political representatives of China's genuinely patriotic bourgeoisie. It became an important party in the revolutionary united front led by Communists. When they established a people's republic, the loyal KMT elements were not treated in a hostile way, but rather were given a position in the government alongside other loyal parties. In the mid-50s, China transitioned into socialism in earnest. This was done in a mainly non-antagonistic way wherein the assets of the remaining bourgeois elements generally were bought by the socialist state, rather than seized aggressively. Ongoing ideological struggle was a crucial part of that mixture. They had to and basically did win over even these native bourgeois elements to the idea of giving up their private capital holdings and becoming part of the workforce in a socialist economy. In that way, it can be said that the bulk of the class contradictions between the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese bourgeoisie were actually resolved in favor of the proletarian perspective in a primarily non-antagonistic way. That is a historical expression of what the progressive block of 4 democratic classes is all about. It was ultimately a successful idea.
We have to remember that all of the 4 Alls are factors in terms of who you can work with. Maoists seek the abolition of 1) all class distinctions, 2) all exploitative production relations, 3) all oppressive social relations, and 4) all the corresponding, reactionary ideas. Many would-be communists focus in only on the first two of those 4 Alls and forget about the relevance of the latter two. The native bourgeoisie of the third world is (obviously) not exploited, but it is oppressed, and this oppression can form the basis for a strategic alliance with them. Through that alliance, you can win them over more decisively to the side of the proletariat through ideological struggle with them over such matters as morality questions. Now that's not going to plausibly be as rock solid a unity as you could have between various working classes (e.g. between the proletariat and the peasantry)...these bourgeois forces do, after all, have some investment in the capitalist system and thus will tend to waver a lot more...but that is why you "lean to one side" of this united front: the side of the working classes, under the leadership of the proletariat. Yes, the third world 4-class alliance concept differs qualitatively from Lenin's conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e. it is a different form of proletarian rule): it's more fully mass-based and more strategic. It's better, in my view.
My point though for this post is that the Chinese people's war wasn't all just some smooth, 2-stage operation that all went perfectly according to plan, as so many convey it. There were major, unexpected twists and turns along the way that very easily could have led them in the wrong direction on a lasting basis. It was a complex process. And I would argue that they did not completely learn the lesson. The Second United Front was a failure for real, not incidental, reasons. It failed not because it was a bad idea, but because of the form it took. The Chinese Communists didn't seem to really much appreciate the dynamics that existed within the KMT and approach the KMT with the according nuance. Rather, they, at least initially, treated it as a unified, all-patriotic body. The Communists' petitions for the establishment of a united front with the genuine KMT patriots was a good thing, and it ultimately resulted in Chiang's arrest, precisely for treason. Sending in Zhou Enlai to negotiate Chiang's release was the mistake. As soon as he got back into safe territory, Chiang immediately placed the coup leaders under arrest. He was always insincere about the united front. (As another observation, pretty much anything "special" like this that Zhou Enlai did had basic, opportunist flaws, much like Zhou himself did.)
Now if we exclusively look back at the historical record through the narrow lenses of official history, such as recorded in Lin Biao's Long Live the Victory of People's War!, then we may fail to see these mistakes as mistakes. After all, if the principal contradiction in the world was, as the Chinese Maoists themselves concurred with the Comintern (under clear Soviet leadership) that it was at the time, between fascistic forces on the one hand and democratic forces on the other, then uniting with "democratic" comprador elements and working with "democratic" imperialists like the United States and the other imperialist Allies makes sense. On the other hand, if the principal contradiction throughout the whole imperialist era has been between the first world on the one hand and the third world on the other, then uniting with imperialists and compradors of any stripe made no sense. I would argue that the latter perspective seems to be a closer match for the historical record. It clarifies the record on this matter that has been so difficult for so many people to flesh out.
Now that we have this clearer view of the Second United Front and the actual historical implications thereof, it becomes much easier for us to see how the Prachanda Path is indeed revisionist and capitulationist: they are following the path of forming a "national" united front with traitors to their nation. All compradors are reactionaries and principal class enemies, just like the imperialists they're shielded by.
History is dynamic. We should study it that way, rather than just adopting the mindset in advance that "side X was always right and my task is to figure out how".
Leninism vs. Trotskyism: What's the Fundamental Difference?
So what was that '20s debate in the Soviet Union about anyway and how do modern communists relate to it? The two basic perspectives that were dominant therein were Leninism and Trotskyism, so let's get into what those respectively are/were a bit, since they're often confused for one-another:
Leninism consists of some main components including the recognition of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, the corresponding labor aristocracy theory, democratic centralist vanguard organization, a strategic alliance between all the working people of a society (the proletariat, the peasantry, and the various middle strata) led by the proletariat and peasantry, and the centrality of revolutionary councils and committees to at least the early stages of socialism. Lenin believed that it was possible and desirable for the proletariat, through the aforementioned class alliance, to seize state power even in backward, underdeveloped countries like Russia, and to, from there, develop a mixed economy -- an economy with a mixture of socialist and capitalist attributes -- until such time as the proletariat became the majority of the society by way of the natural workings of capitalistic development: the more bourgeois forces in society gradually running the peasants off their land in order lay the foundation for urbanization. The strategic alliance of all working people would be maintained through the course of all this, and eventually the proletariat would naturally come to be a majority therein as its ranks grew with the development of the economy. Such was the basic idea. Many modern Leninists confuse the Stalin era with representing the application of classical Leninist views. Actually, Lenin was deeply stagist, and fairly dogmatically so. His views roughly corresponded to those which Bukharin voiced at the end of the 1920s and can be justly summed up in Bukharin's slogan for developing socialism "at a snail's pace". Lenin sought a gradual development of socialism in backward countries, seeing said gradualism as necessary in order to maintain a mass base of support for the revolution itself. As such, Lenin more or less mentally associate the objective factor and the subjective factor as inextricably and absolutely linked and inseparable. In Lenin's view, almost every peasant was destined to maintain a narrow, traditionally-peasant outlook on the world, favorable simply to their own further enrichment rather than to the abolition of all exploitative and oppressive relations...etc. The ideological difference between Leninism (a.k.a. Bolshevism) and Menshevism was the difference between whether or not the proletariat should seek to seize state power in the here and now or whether instead this task should be relegated to the distant future, after the bourgeoisie have completed a long period of capitalist development that has placed the proletariat in the majority of society. The latter view was that upheld by the Mensheviks. While still upholding the classical view that a 30 or 50 year-ish transitional stage of development loosely corresponding to the bourgeois-democratic revolution would be required in countries like Russia, the Bolsheviks believed the task of achieving the bourgeois-democratic revolution and carrying it out could be done in an effort led by the proletariat, without bourgeois political power. The proletariat, the Bolsheviks contended, would not seek to develop a full-fledged capitalist economy through this revolution, but would seek to maintain a mixed economy, with the balance of economic and political muscle therein gradually swinging more and more toward the socialist component. Some people confuse the period of emergency 'wartime communism' with the actual Leninist strategy. That was an emergency policy. The New Economic Policy essentially was Lenin's strategy for getting to socialism. The NEP wasn't an ideological compromise of Leninism; it was classical Leninism in practical application. Stalin's move away from the NEP was originally conceived of as another sort of emergency policy, corresponding to the ostensibly forthcoming end of capitalism worldwide. The more distinctly Stalinist flavor of Leninism was only developed from the mid-to-late '30s. So anyhow, the Bolsheviks developed party organization according to their revolutionary approach and the Mensheviks according to their more gradualist approach.
Trotskyism consists of positions similar to Leninism, but differs with it in one key area: the mass basis of the proletarian state. Trotsky argued that the proletariat, upon achieving state power, would "be unable to contain itself" even generally to the historical tasks of the bourgeoisie and thus would inevitably need to press on to socialism upon the achievement of the basics of the democratic revolution, rather than more or less waiting around for another generation or two until such time as the proletariat was in the majority of society. Trotsky's view of party and societal dynamics was, well, more dynamic than that of the Leninists. He believed there existed real contradictions of class alignments within the Bolsheviks that corresponded to the existing classes within the society; there were, in Trotsky's view, Bolsheviks ideologically aligned with the peasants and Bolsheviks ideologically aligned with the proletariat, among other things. So the party was somewhat less monolithic and more plagued by contradictions in the Trotskyist view, and the task was to take the correct alignment. This meant insisting on always continuing the forward momentum of revolution. That may sound all well and good and even perhaps more essentially comparable to the Maoist outlook and orientation than the classical Leninist perspective, but here is the key issue: whereas the Maoist permanent revolution theory is built upon the foundation of the mass line...that of scientifically-founded trust in and unity with the broad masses of society toward a non-antagonistic reconciliation...the Trotskyist permanent revolution theory, by contrast, is rooted in profound distrust of most of the world's oppressed and exploited majority and takes a corresponding expression. According to the Trotskyist perspective, it is not possible to maintain a permanent united front with the non-proletarian classes. Rather, even in countries wherein the proletariat finds itself a relatively small minority, the proletariat must face off against even the broad masses of peasants that may constitute most of the population. You implement "socialism", in other words, by way of more or less imposing the rigors of 'wartime communism' on the peasants indefinitely; seizing all their surplus output for use by the military and by urban dwellers. Being that this "hostile collision" (being a sort of military exploitation of the peasantry) eliminates the mass basis of proletarian rule in recently-feudal countries (like the Soviet Union at the time), the Trostkyists thus would have the socialist state rely fundamentally on external help; upon "proletarian revolutions" in more developed, imperialist countries wherein allegedly "the proletariat" formed the majority of society already or (again, allegedly) at least was much more nearly in the majority. This makes for a sort of weak, dependent, authoritarian, and frankly exploitative (and thus clearly non-proletarian) 'bailout socialism', if you will.
Classical Leninism may not exactly have been without flaws, but at least it rooted itself in a sort of mass basis! Was that mass basis sufficiently wide? No. Was the classical Leninist outlook terribly dynamic and realistic by comparison to Maoism (or even, in some ways (as explained above), to Trotskyism)? No. Might the complement of a permanent revolutionary theory rooted in a mass basis have been a positive and worthy addition? Certainly! But here is the main point: without a mass basis, what you were inevitably left with as a vision of "socialism" was a nightmarish, warped, oppressive and exploitative puppet state. Or, in other words, you are left with a new variant of the old society. At least classical Leninism was comparatively mass-based.
Leninism consists of some main components including the recognition of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, the corresponding labor aristocracy theory, democratic centralist vanguard organization, a strategic alliance between all the working people of a society (the proletariat, the peasantry, and the various middle strata) led by the proletariat and peasantry, and the centrality of revolutionary councils and committees to at least the early stages of socialism. Lenin believed that it was possible and desirable for the proletariat, through the aforementioned class alliance, to seize state power even in backward, underdeveloped countries like Russia, and to, from there, develop a mixed economy -- an economy with a mixture of socialist and capitalist attributes -- until such time as the proletariat became the majority of the society by way of the natural workings of capitalistic development: the more bourgeois forces in society gradually running the peasants off their land in order lay the foundation for urbanization. The strategic alliance of all working people would be maintained through the course of all this, and eventually the proletariat would naturally come to be a majority therein as its ranks grew with the development of the economy. Such was the basic idea. Many modern Leninists confuse the Stalin era with representing the application of classical Leninist views. Actually, Lenin was deeply stagist, and fairly dogmatically so. His views roughly corresponded to those which Bukharin voiced at the end of the 1920s and can be justly summed up in Bukharin's slogan for developing socialism "at a snail's pace". Lenin sought a gradual development of socialism in backward countries, seeing said gradualism as necessary in order to maintain a mass base of support for the revolution itself. As such, Lenin more or less mentally associate the objective factor and the subjective factor as inextricably and absolutely linked and inseparable. In Lenin's view, almost every peasant was destined to maintain a narrow, traditionally-peasant outlook on the world, favorable simply to their own further enrichment rather than to the abolition of all exploitative and oppressive relations...etc. The ideological difference between Leninism (a.k.a. Bolshevism) and Menshevism was the difference between whether or not the proletariat should seek to seize state power in the here and now or whether instead this task should be relegated to the distant future, after the bourgeoisie have completed a long period of capitalist development that has placed the proletariat in the majority of society. The latter view was that upheld by the Mensheviks. While still upholding the classical view that a 30 or 50 year-ish transitional stage of development loosely corresponding to the bourgeois-democratic revolution would be required in countries like Russia, the Bolsheviks believed the task of achieving the bourgeois-democratic revolution and carrying it out could be done in an effort led by the proletariat, without bourgeois political power. The proletariat, the Bolsheviks contended, would not seek to develop a full-fledged capitalist economy through this revolution, but would seek to maintain a mixed economy, with the balance of economic and political muscle therein gradually swinging more and more toward the socialist component. Some people confuse the period of emergency 'wartime communism' with the actual Leninist strategy. That was an emergency policy. The New Economic Policy essentially was Lenin's strategy for getting to socialism. The NEP wasn't an ideological compromise of Leninism; it was classical Leninism in practical application. Stalin's move away from the NEP was originally conceived of as another sort of emergency policy, corresponding to the ostensibly forthcoming end of capitalism worldwide. The more distinctly Stalinist flavor of Leninism was only developed from the mid-to-late '30s. So anyhow, the Bolsheviks developed party organization according to their revolutionary approach and the Mensheviks according to their more gradualist approach.
Trotskyism consists of positions similar to Leninism, but differs with it in one key area: the mass basis of the proletarian state. Trotsky argued that the proletariat, upon achieving state power, would "be unable to contain itself" even generally to the historical tasks of the bourgeoisie and thus would inevitably need to press on to socialism upon the achievement of the basics of the democratic revolution, rather than more or less waiting around for another generation or two until such time as the proletariat was in the majority of society. Trotsky's view of party and societal dynamics was, well, more dynamic than that of the Leninists. He believed there existed real contradictions of class alignments within the Bolsheviks that corresponded to the existing classes within the society; there were, in Trotsky's view, Bolsheviks ideologically aligned with the peasants and Bolsheviks ideologically aligned with the proletariat, among other things. So the party was somewhat less monolithic and more plagued by contradictions in the Trotskyist view, and the task was to take the correct alignment. This meant insisting on always continuing the forward momentum of revolution. That may sound all well and good and even perhaps more essentially comparable to the Maoist outlook and orientation than the classical Leninist perspective, but here is the key issue: whereas the Maoist permanent revolution theory is built upon the foundation of the mass line...that of scientifically-founded trust in and unity with the broad masses of society toward a non-antagonistic reconciliation...the Trotskyist permanent revolution theory, by contrast, is rooted in profound distrust of most of the world's oppressed and exploited majority and takes a corresponding expression. According to the Trotskyist perspective, it is not possible to maintain a permanent united front with the non-proletarian classes. Rather, even in countries wherein the proletariat finds itself a relatively small minority, the proletariat must face off against even the broad masses of peasants that may constitute most of the population. You implement "socialism", in other words, by way of more or less imposing the rigors of 'wartime communism' on the peasants indefinitely; seizing all their surplus output for use by the military and by urban dwellers. Being that this "hostile collision" (being a sort of military exploitation of the peasantry) eliminates the mass basis of proletarian rule in recently-feudal countries (like the Soviet Union at the time), the Trostkyists thus would have the socialist state rely fundamentally on external help; upon "proletarian revolutions" in more developed, imperialist countries wherein allegedly "the proletariat" formed the majority of society already or (again, allegedly) at least was much more nearly in the majority. This makes for a sort of weak, dependent, authoritarian, and frankly exploitative (and thus clearly non-proletarian) 'bailout socialism', if you will.
Classical Leninism may not exactly have been without flaws, but at least it rooted itself in a sort of mass basis! Was that mass basis sufficiently wide? No. Was the classical Leninist outlook terribly dynamic and realistic by comparison to Maoism (or even, in some ways (as explained above), to Trotskyism)? No. Might the complement of a permanent revolutionary theory rooted in a mass basis have been a positive and worthy addition? Certainly! But here is the main point: without a mass basis, what you were inevitably left with as a vision of "socialism" was a nightmarish, warped, oppressive and exploitative puppet state. Or, in other words, you are left with a new variant of the old society. At least classical Leninism was comparatively mass-based.
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