Peter Hitchens on Trotskyism

Stalin 'understood' politics? I thought he was merely a gangster with about as much knowledge of politics as has Peter Hitchens.

Ironically, Joseph Stalin knew what socialism really is,  and Trotsky did not know that, for him state capitalism was socialism like Vladimir Lenin. The difference between Stalin and Trotsky were based on the concept of leadership, like the difference between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were on how to take control of the state,   there were not any major differences among them, and when Trotsky was the commissar of the Red Army he was a despot, and the killing of workers did not start during the times of Stalin, it was started during the times when Lenin and Trotsky were commissars. With the Soviet Union socialism did not move forward, on the contrary, it was retarded and completely distorted by all of them.  http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2003/no-1183-march-2003/trotsky-and-stalin-rival-leaders

I always find it really funny that so many Trotskyists are now lauding Cuban "Socialism", heading up "hands off Cuba" campaigns and praising Castro, considering that Ramon Mercador (Trotsky's killer) was welcomed to Havana by Castro with open arms and much celebration, following his release from prison. They clearly don't "do" history.

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed,  Chapter 3, Socialism and the State The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labor, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand – as it does not now in any well-off family or “decent” boarding-house – any control except that of education, habit and social opinion. Speaking frankly, I think it would be pretty dull-witted to consider such a really modest perspective “utopian.”  http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch03.htm Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism   The Mensheviks are against this. This is quite comprehensible, because in reality they are against the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is to this, in the long run, that the whole question is reduced. The Kautskians are against the dictatorship of the proletariat, and are thereby against all its consequences. Both economic and political compulsion are only forms of the expression of the dictatorship of the working class in two closely connected regions. True, Abramovich demonstrated to us most learnedly that under Socialism there will be no compulsion, that the principle of compulsion contradicts Socialism, that under Socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labor, etc., etc. This is unquestionable. Only this unquestionable truth must be a little extended. In point of fact, under Socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the State: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune. None the less, the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction. Now just that insignificant little fact – that historical step of the State dictatorship – Abramovich, and in his person the whole of Menshevism, did not notice; and consequently, he has fallen over it. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch08.htm