Trotsky misread Stalinism because his inherited categories were historically obsolete

Evidence

Trotsky had thus mistaken Stalinism for a workers’ bureaucracy, he had been incapable of transcending the once powerful categories derived from the experience of the Second International (p. 59) in order to recognize the further maturation of the contradictions of a workers’ movement in capitalist society. Hegel, of course, had anticipated Trotsky’s error: consciousness discovering what “was truth only for the particular vision, criterion, standards with which it looked on the world” (p. 54). Appearance had superseded Actuality: But you and I are dialecticians. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1311

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Frankfurt School’s charge that orthodox Marxism froze the labor movement’s analysis into outdated Second International categories.