On 4/3/21 2:28 PM, Kaiwen Dong wrote:
[Edited Message Follows]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSGIqXkJYCA
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSGIqXkJYCA>
On April 2nd, 2021, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a virtual
panel on "The Legacy of Trotskyism" as part of the 2021 Platypus
International Convention. In 2011 at its third international
convention, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a plenary
discussion titled "The Legacy of Trotskyism." That panel's
introduction specifically mentioned the Socialist Workers Party (UK),
International Socialist Organization (USA), and New Anticapitalist
Party (France) as contemporary representatives of Trotskyism. Since
2011, all three groups have significantly declined, or collapsed
outright. The smaller Trotskyist sects, once a familiar sight outside
socialist and trade union meetings, seem unable to replace their aging
membership through recruitment and face the prospect of their
long-term leaders passing away without a new generation prepared to
continue their mission. The current generation of Left activists,
whether inspired by social democracy or "new social movements," seem
to have bypassed Trotskyism entirely, in contrast to the 2001-2008
antiwar movement, which drew heavily on existing organizations'
experience and discipline.
I doubt if I'll be sufficiently motivated to watch this video but would
only offer this thought about Trotskyism. Trotsky's ideas, like
Bukharin's and other important Marxist thinkers, will live on as part of
the legacy of our movement broadly speaking going back to Marx and
Engels. The collapse of the groups enumerated above has more to do with
an organizational model that goes back to the Fifth Comintern Congress
in 1924 that adopted "Bolshevization", Zinoviev's mechanical version of
Lenin's party. It imposed a "democratic centralism" that led to sect
formations and then to cults.
Organizational methods have to flow from the living class struggle and
cannot be turned into formulas. The task facing the left in the USA is
to build a revolutionary party that is much looser than the groups
mentioned above but is far tighter than the DSA, which in many ways is a
paper organization. As for its 90,000 members, I doubt that much more
than 10,000 are committed activists. If we had 10,000 activists in a
left group that had the kind of militancy of the SWP and the ISO in
their heyday, it would shake the USA to its foundations, especially if
it ran openly socialist candidates rather than tail-ending liberals who
called themselves "socialists".
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