: Let me ask you this then. What is the basic thing that seperates a Trotskyite from a Leninist? Well, some Leninists are stalinists, so they backed "Socialism in One COuntry" and did anything Stalin said. But basically, Trotskyists advocate a programme of 'Transitional Demands', nationalisation, minimum wage, etc, strict Leninists like, say, the ultra-leftist CWO reject that. But mainly Trotskyism is defined by its opposition to Stalinism, more or less the Russian Loyal opposition (hence why the nature of Russia was such a Hot debate for them).
It can be thought of this way: In russia it was Lenin's model of the party (democratic centralism), with Trotsky's model of the revolution (permenant revolution).
: I asked them the same question and they more or less denied that there was any real difference, that it was the idea of actually putting Marxist ideas into practice that made one a Marxist.
Which means that Lenists are not Marxists because he distinctly opposed a minority vanguardist approach to revolution.
If you'd have asked Stalinists they'd have said Trotsky was a petit-bourgoise deviationist opportunist from Marxism; a strict Leninist like the late great historian E.P. Thompson would have said that Trotskyists were Marxists, but that there were theoretical disagreements - Thompson was a noted anti-Stalinist.
