> On Dec 20, 2024, at 5:16 PM, Joseph Green via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> In the thread entitled "Declaration: An Internationalist Position on the Fall
> of
> Assad and the Crisis in Syria", David Walters wrote:
>
>> There really is no difference between Marxism-Leninism of the Trotskyist
>> type
>> and that of the "Stalinist" type. All these groups generally,
>> due to their isolation, elevate tactical differences to one of principles,
>> and thus split.
>
> I agree that Trotskyism and Stalinism are flip sides of the same coin,
That's not what he wrote, is it?
>
...
>
> In 2014, I gave a summary of how I see this similarity between Trotskyism and
> Stalinism in the article "A new assessment of an old trend: Trotskyism as the
> equally evil twin of Stalinism"
> (see https://www.communistvoice.org/49cTwin.html).
The article has a shortage of references that don't refer the author's own
works. The prose of the article is spiked with pejoratives: Trotsky
"vacillated," "mistakenly believed," "denounced the Marxist division of working
class demands," "militarized the labor force," "lacked a clear conception of
party building" and left us a legacy that leads to "an arrogant bureaucracy,"
which is much worse than just a plain-old bureaucracy. This article employs a
"loaded-language fallacy" to persuade. And speaking of arrogance, there is no
recognition in Joseph's article about Trotsky role during the revolution or
that "Lenin's Bolsheviks" assigned Trotsky the most critical assignment that
anyone assumed during the Russian Revolution: Trotsky organized and led the Red
Army in the Russian Civil War. If they were "Lenin's Bolsheviks" that led the
revolution it was "Trotsky's Red Army" that defended and defeated the greatest
threat to it (I speak to this personalization below). Trotsky's revolutionary
role is overlooked. I feel that it is not a balanced assessment but a "hit
piece" and an anachronistic one at that.
What I find interesting in Joseph's article is something that I think is more
relevant to the 21st century, that it is the nature of working-class
organization, or lack thereof, is a key feature of socialism.
"Despite the domination of the economy by the state, these countries lacked the
social control of production that Marxism regards as a key feature of
socialism."
Social control and democratic organization of workers is important, but to me,
the crux of the matter in this case is the expropriation of the capitalist
class in Russia in addition to the aristocracy. It was the class character of
the revolution that led so many left organizations at the time to support and
defend it. If capitalism had been restored in the Soviet Union "sometime in the
1930's," that fact was lost of the rest of the capitalist world that invaded
it, contained it, and tried to destroy it, viz. World War II.
Before we can talk about "social control of production," it might be worth
exploring why "Lenin's Bolsheviks" reversed their position on universal
suffrage at the very start of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
I'd say that democracy was curtailed from the beginning and not sometime in the
1930's. It was after the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928 that the elected
leadership of the US Workers (Communist) Party of America, the immediate
predecessor of the Communist Party USA, were expelled by a
Comintern-controlled, undemocratic formation imposed by Moscow on US workers
sometime before the 1930s. This is what Joseph calls the "Leninist Third
International."
The needs of the US workers movement were overshadowed by the needs of Moscow's
realpolitik. It was fundamentally undemocratic, and we can debate if some of
its spin offs such as the Trotskyist Communist League of America were any more
democratic. That's a long and IMO an unnecessary debate, but it goes
unmentioned in Joseph's article that US Trotskyists led mass movements such as
the 1934 Minneapolis General Strike, the Central States Teamsters organizing
drive in the 1930s, and a mass antiwar movement in the late 1960's and early
1970s. I don't know what other splits from the CPUSA achieved as much.
But there was always a strong leader at the helm. This is true of many
Trotskyist splinter groups, the Cannonites, Schactmanites, Marcyites, etc. who
formed around and named after a central leader. Just this year, Kshama Sawant,
a former Seattle City Council member, recently led a split from Socialist
Alternative to establish a new political organization called Revolutionary
Workers. So this process of miniaturization is ongoing. Pretty much could be
said of the International movement but I'm most familiar with the US.
Joseph assigns this party dysfunction to the "Trotskyist conception of
organization" but it's general on the International left: The "Sahra
Wagenknecht Alliance" does not issue from the Trotskyist tradition and has
taken the centrality of the charismatic leader to a new level - as a celebrity
who names the organization after herself.
I think the lack of democratic functioning is a general problem for the entire
left and not a result of bad ideas. The focus on 20th century bogeymen like
Trotskyists and Stalinist devolves to so much name calling that distracts from
looking for real causes. This is true in the left and also in the labor
movement. Somehow we need to find alternative forms of organization that keep
the membership in control. Every movement has leaders who emerge and are
essential to its direction, but why do they need to have permanent control of
the organization, it finances, executive leadership, or to name it after
themselves? Why can't leaders lead from the floor rather than the chair? And
how do we achieve democratic forms of organization: Maybe the organization's
executive be chosen by randomly-selected nominated candidates rather than
elections that imply a personal mandate and entrenches leadership.
I think that organizational dysfunction is a problem for the left that cannot
be assigned to the "theoretical bankruptcy" of a particular pair of historical
tendencies. I disagree with Joseph on that. There are larger historical and
cultural forces at work.
Mark
>
> In this article, I deal with the theoretical bankruptcy of Trotskyism, which
> lies
> behind its inability to deal with new world developments, such as the
> changing
> face of world imperialism, the global wave of democratizations, and the
> environmental crisis.
>
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