Editing Ontology:Q49,84 (section)

=== In Trotskyism and Bordigism ===

Within Trotskyism, Stalin has taken on a widely-varying array of negative connotations as different groups of Trotskyists have opposed him for different reasons. Among the earliest members of Trotskyism in the 1930s, the typical claim was that Stalin's government as a whole was failing to get the country through socialist transition. For some later Trotskyist theorists such as [[E:Hayashi Hiroyoshi|Hayashi]], as well as in [[E:Bordigism|Bordigism]] (a separate form of Marxism from Italy) the problem was in the structure of Bolshevism itself, and the complaint was that Stalin's government had either "only created state capitalism" or "not countered the problem of commodity production"<ref name="dialogue"/>.

Most "orange" Marxists tend to steadily claim that there exists [[E:Socialism can have Trotskyist characteristics|some form]] of socialist transition analogous to the material system of Bolshevism that Stalin's government created but which is somehow "more correct" and would have gotten through the process of transitioning out of the features of capitalism faster. Past the year 1960, this claim becomes almost quantifiable: if the Soviet Union began creating Bolshevism in about 1917 and it completely stopped pursuing socialist transition in about 1960, then the Soviet Union became upsetting to Trotskyists within the space of 43 years, and Trotsky and Bordiga were effectively trying to require that the full process of getting rid of elements of capitalism should go {{em|much faster}} than 43 years. Whether this is a reasonable requirement is highly debatable. David Graeber points out while attempting to justify anarchism that in the ancient world a form of social structure could take a thousand years to fully form. More recently, the United States took between 100 and 200 years to properly create industries and establish capitalism. It would not seem like an unreasonable claim to say that whatever Bolshevism is materially achieving could actually take 100-150 years to complete before it would cease to be and give way to a new system.

Although Trotskyist theorists and their supporters have made claims of persecution by Stalin's government, the reasons for these complaints are not actually centered around any concept of "freedom" or "oppression" as great portions of the populations of [[E:Liberal-republicanism|Liberal-republican]] countries have commonly been led to believe. In general, every complaint which comes from a Trotskyist {{em|theorist}} is actually a theoretical complaint that Stalin or other members of his government were not allowing Trotskyists to {{em|build a Communist party}} or {{em|enact socialist transition}} — that if Stalin did not allow a separate form of Marxism called Trotskyism to replace him, Stalin was flat-out [[E:Anti-Trotskyism is anticommunism|not allowing Communism]]. The concept of [[E:revisionism (Marxism)|revisionists]] and debate over the most materially correct Marxism is largely foreign to [[E:center-Liberalism|center-Liberals]], but it is central to the worldviews of many Marxist groups that have challenged Stalin, and critical to understanding their behavior and goals — Trotsky does not experience [[E:a world where Trotsky can be happy|freedom or contentment]] if he does not get to build the Soviet Union in his own separate conflicting image of Trotskyism.