Oh yeah, those sections I edited out (since it's already so long to encompass two posts, I think the original was actually three) are full of Trotsky being a sniveling little shit, especially the stuff about him collaborating with Hearst, a literal fascist propagandist and one of the major figures behind the Holodomor bullshit
In the 1930s when Trotsky was exiled from the USSR the Hearst Press immediately began championing Trotsky as the true revolutionary and the one true Communist. Meanwhile the Hearst Press began to pay Trotsky for contributions to it! The Hearst Press which was full of rumour, bizarre stories like the frog boy, telling the world the Communists were going to “nationalise women” and that they starved their own people - was now championing a “true communist”. I think its obvious that the Hearst Press saw a rivet in the international Communist movement and now sought to stick a crowbar into it.
“He received $10,000 for his first articles for the Daily Express, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, and other newspapers. Soon he would receive an advance of $7,000 from an American publisher for his autobiography, and for a series of articles entitled ‘The History of the Russian Revolution’ the Saturday Evening Post paid him $45,000.” -Volkogonov’s Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, page 323.
And of course a great dunk on him by Lenin
In 1914 Lenin Characterised Trotsky as a waverer with no ideological definiteness
Trotsky, however, possesses no ideological and political definiteness, for his patent for “non-factionalism”, as we shall soon see in greater detail, is merely a patent to flit freely to and fro, from one group to another.
Trotsky does not explain, nor does he understand, the historical significance of the ideological disagreements among the various Marxist trends and groups, although these disagreements run through the twenty years’ history of Social Democracy
and concern the fundamental questions of the present day (as we shall show later on);
Trotsky fails to understand that the main specific features of group-division are nominal recognition of unity and actual disunity;
Under cover of “non-factionalism” Trotsky is championing the interests of a group abroad which particularly lacks definite principles, and has no basis in the working-class movement in Russia.
All that glitters is not gold. There is much glitter and sound in Trotsky’s phrases, but they are meaningless.
Trotsky was an ardent Iskrist in 1901—03, and Ryazanov described his role at the Congress of 1903 as “Lenin’s cudgel”. At the end of 1903, Trotsky was an ardent Menshevik, i. e., he deserted from the Iskrists to the Economists. He said that “between the old Iskra and the new lies a gulf”. In 1904—05, he deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the Economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left “permanent revolution” theory. In 1906—07, he approached the Bolsheviks, and in the spring of 1907 he declared that he was in agreement with Rosa Luxemburg.
In the period of disintegration, after long “non-factional” vacillation, he again went to the right, and in August 1912, he entered into a bloc with the liquidators. He has now deserted them again, although in substance he reiterates their shoddy ideas.
Such types are characteristic of the flotsam of past historical formations, of the time when the mass, working-class movement in Russia was still dormant, and when every group had “ample room” in which to pose as a trend, group or faction, in short, as a “power”, negotiating amalgamation with others.
The younger generation of workers should know exactly whom they are dealing with, when individuals come before them with incredibly pretentious claims, unwilling absolutely to reckon with either the Party decisions, which since 1908 have defined and established our attitude towards liquidationism, or with the experience of the present-day working-class movement in Russia, which has actually brought about the unity of the majority on the basis of full recognition of the aforesaid decisions.
Under cover of “non-factionalism” Trotsky is championing the interests of a group abroad which particularly lacks definite principles, and has no basis in the working-class movement in Russia
Now let us examine the present situation from the point of view of Paris or Vienna. At once the whole picture changes. Besides the Pravdists and liquidators, we see no less than five Russian groups claiming membership of one and the same Social-Democratic Party: Trotsky’s group, two Vperyod groups, the “pro-Party Bolsheviks” and the “pro-Party Mensheviks”.[6] All Marxists in Paris and in Vienna (for the purpose of illustration I take two of the largest centres) are perfectly well aware of this.
...
Take a period of two full years—1912 and 1913. As everybody knows, this was a period of the revival and upswing of the working-class movement, when every trend or tendency of a more or less mass character (and in politics this mass character alone counts) could not but exercise some influence on the Fourth Duma elections, the strike movement, the legal newspapers, the trade unions, the insurance election campaign, and so on. Throughout those two years, not one of these five groups abroad asserted itself in the slightest degree in any of the activities of the mass working-class movement in Russia just enumerated!
...
It cannot be denied that some of the groups which, like Trotsky’s, really exist exclusively from the Vienna-Paris, but by no means from the Russian, point of view, possess a degree of definiteness
...
This example should serve the Russian “advanced workers”, with whom Trotsky has good reason to be so displeased, as a striking illustration of the lengths to which the groups in Vienna and Paris—who persuaded even Kautsky that there was “no Party” in Russia—go in their ludicrous project-mongering. But if it is some times possible to fool foreigners on this score, the Russian “advanced workers” (at the risk of provoking the terrible Trotsky to another outburst of displeasure) will laugh in the faces of these project-mongers.
It seems that he's talking about Russian emigre/exile socialists in Western & Central Europe. The "abroad" here seems to be less in the sense of some kind of shady NED-type thing (which is how it sounded to me at first), but more so socialists who haven't been to Russia in a long while, are completely unaware of and uninvolved in the development of the working class movement in Russia, and yet are apparently really opinionated on it (turns out, the more things change, the more they stay the same, Western leftists have been doing this shit since fucking forever).
I really don't know much about the pre-revolution history of socialism in Russia though, Lenin's dropping cool-sounding party names like "the liquidators", "the Machists" and "the Iskrists", which are completely alien to me. Apparently Russia had a whole lot of groups like this:
Such types are characteristic of the flotsam of past historical formations, of the time when the mass, working-class movement in Russia was still dormant, and when every group had “ample room” in which to pose as a trend, group or faction, in short, as a “power”, negotiating amalgamation with others.
Oh yeah, those sections I edited out (since it's already so long to encompass two posts, I think the original was actually three) are full of Trotsky being a sniveling little shit, especially the stuff about him collaborating with Hearst, a literal fascist propagandist and one of the major figures behind the Holodomor bullshit
And of course a great dunk on him by Lenin
What does this part refer to?
It seems that he's talking about Russian emigre/exile socialists in Western & Central Europe. The "abroad" here seems to be less in the sense of some kind of shady NED-type thing (which is how it sounded to me at first), but more so socialists who haven't been to Russia in a long while, are completely unaware of and uninvolved in the development of the working class movement in Russia, and yet are apparently really opinionated on it (turns out, the more things change, the more they stay the same, Western leftists have been doing this shit since fucking forever).
I really don't know much about the pre-revolution history of socialism in Russia though, Lenin's dropping cool-sounding party names like "the liquidators", "the Machists" and "the Iskrists", which are completely alien to me. Apparently Russia had a whole lot of groups like this: