There was never any such thing as a Trotskyist theory – only a deposed leader who tried desperately to recover his role, who could not realize that his efforts were vain, and who would not accept responsibility for a state of affairs which he regarded as a strange degeneration, but which was in fact that direct consequence of the principles that he, together with Lenin and the whole Bolshevik party, had established as the foundations of socialism.
-Main Currents of Marxism, Chapter V, Volume 3