Reddit mentions of The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky

>Could you explain this divide more? I would have thought the differences between SocDem and other Marxist ideologies would lie elsewhere.

Anarchists and SocDems believe, in different senses, that the ends don't justify the means. Soc Dems implement this by trying to reform the existing system into socialism; Anarchists do this by trying to create Anarchism within their own organizational structures and activities rather then as a set of policies to be implemented (though that is the end goal, obviously, of anarchism). Marxism says that whatever works is desirable, though they do not believe reform will be effective in the long-term because of the idea that capitalist states are in essence dictatorships.

>But the NEP was a mixed economy policy? Perhaps I am misinterpreting what you mean.

I'm meaning that the USSR bypassed capitalism completely, which besides Trotsky was thought ridiculous before it happened. The USSR passed straight from Feudalism to Socialism, and that's where industry was built up, not industry being built up followed by Socialism.

>Would the Rehn-Meidner Plan be an example of this?

Kind of. Stuff like the $15 minimum wage in the US is a modern example. The classic example is stuff like "full employment", "free education", etc., stuff that is relatable to the average person but basically impossible to fulfill within a capitalist system.

>Were the Mensheviks unilaterally opposed to the Bolsheviks? My understanding of this part of the USSR's history is somewhat limited.

Essentially, yes. After the October Revolution, the Mensheviks and Right SRs demanded cabinet posts in the new government, which was eventually refused after an all-night meeting of the Soviet. The Bolsheviks held 60% of the delegates, so they weren't under any obligation to do so anyway; but the Mensheviks and Right SRs walked out of the meeting "into the dustbin of history" and formed a rebel government at Samara. This was the beginning of the Civil War. Of course, the Whites eventually expelled them also as more right-wing factions took power, but still.

>Trotskyism seems agreeable as an ideology, I'll have to look into it more.

Most authors today espousing a more or less orthodox Marxist viewpoint are Trotskyists. Alex Callinicos book The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx is good, but doesn't go into much detail on Trotsky's ideas. Isaac Deutscher's three volume series The Prophet ( https://www.amazon.com/Prophet-Life-Leon-Trotsky/dp/1781685606/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469887542&sr=1-1&keywords=the+prophet+isaac+deutscher ) , about the life of Leon Trotsky, is a very good sympathetic biography (even Tony Blair liked it, for some reason). If you kind find any introductory texts by Ernest Mandel, they are also very good, but somewhat difficult to find as most of them were written in the 1970s. The Tariq Ali edited collection The Stalinist Legacy is another good collection of texts from a mostly Trotskyist viewpoint, most of them about Stalinism. Chris Harman's People's History of the World is an excellent book on world history from a Trotskyist viewpoint, though you can skip to modern times if you just want the stuff actually dealing with capitalism and socialism.