Trotskyism originated from Trotsky's opposition against Stalin in the theoretical struggle towards a scientific interpretation of Leninism for the case of world revolution. In order to advocate the opposition against Stalin, Bukharinism and social democracy. In opposing Stalinism, he emphasized the abolition of bureaucratic dictatorship; in opposing social democracy, he advocated a militant workers' revolution.
Permanent Revolution
Trotsky occupied a middle position between the Bolsheviks and Menshiviks but in essence was closer to the Mensheviks.
He agreed with the Bolsheviks that the liberal bourgeois would have nothing to do with the coming revolution. At the same time he agreed with the Mensheviks that the peasantry could not be a dependable ally.
Tsarism, according to Trotsky could be replaced by a workers government. On no account could it be replaced by a joint dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry. And on coming to power it would be the function of the Workers government to attack private property, including the peasant holdings. By its attack on private property by the Workers government would alienate and arouse the hostility and resistance (thanks to Trotsky) of the majority of the population.
The resistance of the peasantry would endanger the workers government. But on the other hand the workers government would stimulate the working class of the industrially advanced European countries to wage ruthless struggle against their own bourgeoisie, seize state power and establish socialism.
In return Western europe, would now come to the aid of the Russian workers government in Russia to crush by force the resistance of the peasantry. This is permanent revolution.
“In the absence of direct State support on the part of the European proletariat, the Russian working class will not be able to keep itself in power and to transform its temporary rule into a stable socialist dictatorship. No doubt as to the truth of this is possible.”(“Our Revolution,” Russian Edition, Pg. 278.
Trotsky, Our Revolution 1906
“A steady rise of socialist economy in Russia will not be possible until after the victory of the proletariat in the leading countries of Europe.”
Trotsky, (“Collected Works,” Vol. 3, Part I, Pgs.92-93.)
What this would mean in practice is Permanent Counter-Revolution. By the negation of the peasantry as a revolutionary role that the peasantry could play (and did play) it would mean depriving the Russian working class of a dependable ally and turning the peasantry into a tool of the liberal bourgeois. There would have been no revolution in Russia had this line followed and Lenin was to reject it for a second time in 1915 in the following:
To bring clarity into the alignment of classes in the impending revolution is the main task of a revolutionary party. This task is being shirked by the Organising Committee, which within Russia remains a faithful ally to Nashe Dyelo, and abroad utters meaningless “Left” phrases. This task is being wrongly tackled in Nashe Slovo by Trotsky, who is repeating his “original” 1905 theory and refuses to give some thought to the reason why, in the course of ten years, life has been bypassing this splendid theory.
From the Bolsheviks Trotsky’s original theory has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks it has borrowed “repudiation” of the peasantry’s role. The peasantry, he asserts, are divided into strata, have become differentiated; their potential revolutionary role has dwindled more and more; in Russia a “national” revolution is impossible; “we are living in the era of imperialism,” says Trotsky, and “imperialism does not contra pose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation.”
Here we have an amusing example of playing with the word “imperialism”. If, in Russia, the proletariat already stands contra posed to the “bourgeois nation”, then Russia is facing a socialist revolution (!), and the slogan “Confiscate the landed estates” (repeated by Trotsky in 1915, following the January Conference of 1912), is incorrect; in that case we must speak, not of a “revolutionary workers’” government, but of a “workers’ socialist” government! The length Trotsky’s muddled thinking goes to is evident from his phrase that by their resoluteness the proletariat will attract the “non-proletarian [!] popular masses” as well (No. 217)! Trotsky has not realised that if the proletariat induce the non-proletarian masses to confiscate the landed estates and overthrow the monarchy, then that will be the consummation of the “national bourgeois revolution” in Russia; it will be a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry!
A whole decade—the great decade of 1905-15—has shown the existence of two and only two class lines in the Russian revolution. The differentiation of the peasantry has enhanced the class struggle within them; it has aroused very many hitherto politically dormant elements. It has drawn the rural proletariat closer to the urban proletariat (the Bolsheviks have insisted ever since 1906 that the former should be separately organised, and they included this demand in the resolution of the Menshevik congress in Stockholm). However, the antagonism between the peasantry, on the one hand, and the Markovs, Romanovs and Khvostovs, on the other, has become stronger and more acute. This is such an obvious truth that not even the thousands of phrases in scores of Trotsky’s Paris articles will “refute” it. Trotsky is in fact helping the liberal-labour politicians in Russia, who by “repudiation” of the role of the peasantry understand a refusal to raise up the peasants for the revolution!
-Lenin, Two Lines On The Revolution
It took only two years to prove Lenins correctness
To sum up
The rejection of the peasantry as a revolutionary force
The rejection of stages in the development of the revolution (Which amounted in practice skipping the first stage of the revolution: the majority of the Russian people, particularly the peasantry, against the Tsar. But only the working class who constituted a tiny minority at the time against the Tsar and the “bourgeois nation” including the peasantry)
It is noted that the Soviets did eventually wage a war against the nascent bourgeois elements in the peasantry which did seriously de-stabilise the Soviet government. But this was done in the early 1930s when a lot of the peasantry had been drawn into the cities and into the proletariat. Not as immediate fact against the “bourgeois nation” in 1917 which would’ve seen the peasantry side with the White guardists