Trotsky quotes Lenin, at length, from March 1917, to illustrate this point. To defeat Tsarism, Lenin says, its not necessary for the workers to support the government, but for the government to support the workers.
“For the only guarantee of freedom and of the final destruction of tsarism is the arming of the proletariat, the consolidation, the extension, the development of the role, the significance, and the power of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets.” (p 26)
All else is bourgeois lies and deception, Lenin says.
“Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, therefore the workers must support the bourgeoisie; that is what the worthless politicians from the camp of the liquidators say. Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, say we, the Marxists; therefore the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deception of the bourgeois politicians, must teach it to put no trust in words, to rely upon its own forces, its own organization, its own unity, its own arms.”” (p 26)
In 1917, after the February Revolution, the Mensheviks argued that, in, now, supporting a continuation of the war, they were not engaged in bourgeois-defencism, but in “revolutionary-defencism”. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev also adopted this position, until Lenin intervened. The concept required acceptance of the idea that what existed in Russia was some type of non-class state, because, not even the Mensheviks claimed it was a workers' state, and to have admitted it was still a bourgeois state, would mean accepting that any support for continuing the war, then, amounted to bourgeois-defencism/social-patriotism.
The Stalinists adopted the same position in China, in proposing the Popular Front of the “bloc of four classes”, and merging the Chinese communists into the KMT. They perpetrated the same betrayal in the Spanish Revolution, in the French Popular Front, Czech Popular Front, and Brazilian Popular Front. In the 1970's, the Popular Front government of Allende proved to be another such disaster that was swept aside by Pinochet's coup.
This same deception, and popular frontism, is the basis of the position of the USC, in relation to Ukraine, but worse. Ukrainian workers have no part in the Ukrainian government, which is as corrupt and vile as that of Putin in Russia. Yet, the USC would still have us believe that this government, and its war backed by NATO, is, somehow, a “people's war”, i.e. a war of all Ukrainian “people”, devoid of any class content whatsoever, or even more bizarrely, somehow, a war waged by Ukrainian workers that socialists should support!
The popular front position of the Stalinists, in China, saw the USSR arming the KMT, and, yet, as with Spain, in 1936, Chile, in 1973, and Ukraine, today, the great mass of workers remained unarmed, and unorganised into an independent workers militia.
“Matters had gone so far on this track, that on the eve of Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’état, Pravda, in order to expose the Opposition, proclaimed that revolutionary China was not being ruled by a bourgeois government but by a “government of the bloc of four classes”.” (p 27)
The pro-imperialists of the USC, of course, are not so brazen as to claim that Zelensky's government is a popular front government, though they do continually try to deny its corrupt and authoritarian nature, as well as its links to the Nazis of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector, and the extent to which its strings are pulled by NATO imperialism. But, that simply makes their position all the more untenable, in trying to claim that its war is a “people's war”, a national liberation war, and so on.
The position of the Stalinists provoked no opposition, from within the Comintern, and, today, the same approach not only provokes no opposition, in relation to Ukraine, from large sections of a “left” that claims some descent from Trotskyism, but is advocated by it!
“Yet it is tantamount to trampling under foot the fundamental principles of Marxism. It reproduces the crudest features of Russian and international Menshevism, applied to the conditions of the Chinese revolution.” (p 27)
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