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<pre>~~my past six years of studying the history of Trotskyism as one conversation~~
# My past six years of studying Trotskyists as one conversation

Me (RD): Marxism makes a lot more sense than Liberal-republicanism. Now let's see what Marxists think of LGBT people. This satirical skit I'm writing about Marxists arguing like Christians? It's going to be wild.

Left Voice: LGBT people entirely make sense in terms of world history, because first of all when explaining the historical status of women Engels said that—

Stalinist Redditors: LGBT people are a scourge on the Third World

RD: What the hell am I reading? None of this makes any sense.

Socialism for All: LGBT issues are important because the United States is almost entirely composed of proletariat.

RD: ...That can't be right. Everyone in the town I was born in works at a medium-sized business of fewer than 100 employees.

RD: Let's see. _Stalinists... hate transgender people... Trotskyist groups... are focused on using the overlooked voices of oppressed people to convince everyone to let them destroy Stalin's government and build their own government._

Socialist Appeal: Nothing about the Soviet Union came from real Bolshevism

RD: ...What?

Socialist Appeal: Stalinism was a _betrayal_ of the world revolution carried out by bureaucrats and liars

RD: Then why are there Stalinist parties, and why does their program contain sky-high stacks of Marxist history?

Alan Woods: Marxism was always international. If you bottle up a socialist revolution into the area of Cuba it's going to burst like a pressure cooker.

RD: ...They're really just trying to gather up any excuse to invade Third World countries, aren't they?

Revolutionary Communists of America: Cuba was a real Marxist revolution but Castro betrayed it, so it's not worth anything any more.

~~RD: Is Trotskyism secretly in league with the Third World bourgeoisie?~~

RD: How can that possibly be true? You're saying both that Cuba _is Marxist_ and _isn't Marxist_ and both of those things can't be true at the same time. Can they...?

RD: Hmm. I mean, maybe the problem is that I've been looking at formal logic wrong. There are many times where two people say seemingly-conflicting statements and they're both true. So maybe different propositions are asking different kinds of questions and to properly capture when a statement is actually accurate to the world you'd actually need a wide array of different axes of boolean truth values. If somebody presents a proposition like "God created the world", you could answer it with the truth values "False" or "Canon to _Chronicles of Narnia_", or if somebody presents a proposition like "Black people experience structural racism", you could only answer it with an array of multiple truth values that might include "Not True at Atlanta University" or "Some Occurrence in Detroit". When the proposition returns a truthy value on the truth axis that the asker currently cares most about, the proposition is considered "True".

WSWS: Hold on there, things aren't true or false for individual people according to their perspective.

RD: No, of course not. Wait, who are you again?

RD: Let me just open up my map of the convoluted relationships between every individual Trotskyist group and Trotskyist outlet and failed or successful Trotskyist international and all the joinings and splits and... okay... after the Fourth International of 1938 split from the Bolshevik Party and Third International and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Fourth Internationals of 1953 became the ISFI and the ICFI and the ICFI launched the WSWS—

WSWS: Don't bother, we have a better one.

RD: Huh. Okay. This is in fact a much better map than the map I got off Reddit.

ICFI: So, there has been a lot of confusion lately about what Marxists and Trotskyists actually hold to, but we can answer any of your questions.

RD: Really?

RD: If Marxists have always been trying to build a single Communist International, why did the Communist International divide in two? What made that necessary? All the Communist parties in 1900-1960 were trying to get rid of Liberal-republicanism and cover the world in Bolshevism. So what made the Third International and the Fourth International turn against each other? What turned them into different things?

ICFI: Simple. Stalin betrayed the revolution.

RD: The IMT told me that too, and when they said it I didn't believe it.

ICFI: What about Trotsky's work _The Revolution Betrayed_? Do you think that's reliable?

RD: Possibly. But most of that was an extended description of Soviet bureaucrats that seemed like it wasn't relevant to anything.

ICFI: The bureaucrats were the real problem.

RD: I have never seen anybody ever talk about that.

ICFI: Well, they were. Trotsky compiled all that information about the bureaucrats so that the world's Communist parties would realize that Stalin's party was allowing the bureaucrats to overrun the Soviet Union and destroy the work of the Third International.

RD: Okay. But then why does every single Trotskyist article talk about Stalin?

ICFI: Because Stalin misrepresented the Soviet Union as a workers' state when it was a deformed workers' state.

RD: How did early Trotskyists know that?

ICFI: What do you mean?

RD: Any given party of people has a limited amount of information taken from observations of the physical world. The information they have isn't the only information they will ever have access to — since the world is never truly divided into separate smaller pockets of time or space — but it _is_ the information they will be making decisions with. If Stalin's party can manage to convince large numbers of Soviet people that it's on their side with its rhetoric, but ultimately it's limited to the perceptions of all the people currently in it and they will only be able to gather information through the way that particular socially-linked group of people interacts with the world, _and then Stalin's party can be wrong_, how does a Trotskyist party have any way of knowing that its Trotskyist-tinted assessments of other parties are actually the materially-correct observations of other parties and aren't just another potentially-wrong judgement made with incomplete information caused by the existing shape of the party and set of people allowed into the party? I'm not saying that Trotskyists are definitely wrong, but is there any actual difference? To me it seems like the difference between Leninism and Leninism.

ICFI: Well, the difference is the revolutionary leadership.

RD: How does leadership fix that problem? Doesn't the movement find its way to success based on all the average workers and non-proletarian allies coming to consciousness of the world, not through party leaders knowing things?

ICFI: You say the difference between parties is "the difference between Leninism and Leninism", but Leninism is the study of revolutionary leadership. When leadership guides people into further stages of the revolution, it aids all those "average workers" in coming to consciousness.

ICFI: I feel like all you've just said is that Leninism is when parties go through the activity of Communist-party-ing and when parties party correctly then people understand their party is partying correctly. But how would any other party know that those insights were happening if all they can see is the consciousness process that's happening inside their party, and not the understandings building up inside the other party? If Trotsky said Stalin's party was wrong, how would they ever know that? If Stalin's party said Trotsky's party was wrong, how would _they_ ever know if they were or weren't if only Stalin's party's revolutionary leadership could have hypothetically produced that understanding?

ICFI: Well, there's only one material reality.

RD: On that I agree with you. So... I have a proposition to present.

RD: Political parties can only ever know if they're right or wrong by applying a framework which is designed to see up and through all political parties. We can call this framework "meta-Marxism". Stalinist parties and Trotskyist parties create a named Marxism through the Leninist methods they're familiar with and then they apply meta-Marxism to determine which named Marxism is actually correct and viable.

ICFI: No, that wouldn't be possible. There is no such thing as meta-Marxism.

RD: That's what everyone in a political party currently believes. But just because they can't see the potential existence of meta-Marxism from within the bounds of their political party and the specific set of people in it doesn't mean there _is_ no meta-Marxism.

ICFI: But not being in a political party doesn't mean there _is_ meta-Marxism.

RD: Of course not. If meta-Marxism came to exist just because people weren't in political parties, it would have no way to prove it wasn't just another named Marxism limited by its own perspective, like Bordigism or Juche-socialism or Maoism or Ho Chi Minh's Marxism.

ICFI: None of those four tendencies are "Marxisms".

RD: Well... I'm reluctant to just call a Marxist party "not an instance of Marxism" given how every Marxist I know would say that _your_ organization isn't an instance of Marxism. I'm trying to help you here, not reinforce the Stalinist understanding of Trotskyism.

ICFI: A party isn't Marxist just because people politely call it Marxism.

RD: No. — Now let me finish. A cluster of theorists forming a meta-Marxist organization wouldn't prove the existence of meta-Marxism. But the thing that does provide evidence for meta-Marxism is the interactions between conflicting Marxist parties or other factions of people. If Louis Althusser comes up with a Western-Marxist model of the United States and it isn't correct, it's dubious that it's even Materialist, he's never going to know that it's incorrect because as long as he's in an apparently Marxist party he's going to believe that everything he writes is Marxism. So to get out of his own errors by studying other parties and conflicts between historical parties, he has to apply _meta_-Marxism.

ICFI: That's not the difference between meta-Marxism and Marxism, that's the difference between Marxism and non-Marxism.

RD: Okay, but if the Black Panther Party or the Workers' Party of Korea starts with a very small area of people and they want to extend out to a larger area of people, their origin in a tiny group of people will be an inescapable part of where they came from and to properly build a larger party they'd first have to understand themselves in relation to other parties and how other parties came to be, which would require meta-Marxism.

ICFI: The Black Panther Party's model was based on the wrong collection of classes. So once again, they would only need to apply Marxism.

RD: Are you sure about that? It seems like a great way to get people to turn against Marxist parties as a united ethnic group to take people who are united against oppression as an ethnic group but naturally consist of the wrong class composition and tell them they're doing Marxism wrong because Black people are not the correct collection of people.

ICFI: We never said Black people were "not the correct collection of people".

RD: Then why do you have so many articles shaming them for trying to make people aware of shared oppressions? The first step to becoming aware of capitalism is simply becoming aware of _anything_ instead of nothing. The first step is getting groups of people to even care about learning so they can then learn more things.

WSWS: The issue in all of those articles was that each of the Black professors we were calling out was misrepresenting history. In order to learn anything else, people have to be able to put it into the overall processes of history.

RD: But every understanding of history is shaped by the exact socially-linked population of people studying it and which people were excluded, like Black people, LGBT people, North Koreans, or early Trotskyists. Every faction of people presents history based on the knowledge it's gathered as that faction. So by that logic, Stalin's government could say "all these Trotskyist newspapers are wrong and not worth reading" because they believe that only members of Stalinist parties have a correct understanding of historical materialism. If you tried to argue with them that Trotskyists really were right, they'd just say that you had to use Stalinist methods before they'd think about honoring anything you had to say in their publications.

ICFI: What makes you think Stalinists would be willing to change their minds about Trotskyists in the first place?

RD: I dunno, the Comintern?

RD: In principle, the Third International was perfectly structured to work out the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism. It's made of parties. Each party has allies connected to it and an internal structure made of classes or physical arrangements of people. So, you put all the early Trotskyists in a party, and you put Stalin's government in a party, and they take up separate regions in space, I don't know in what physical layout exactly, and then they work together to defeat the Liberal-republican countries.

ICFI: You seem to think Trotskyism is made of countries.

RD: ...Wait, what? It's not?

Socialist Appeal: There can't be socialism in one country

WSWS: The Stalinist Comintern _betrayed_ Trotsky

Left Voice: People organize around the _transitional_ program containing minimum and maximum demands to get out of the trap of reformism, and this will inevitably draw everyone toward socialism

RD: What is Trotskyism made of if it's not created out of countries?

ICFI: The working class.

RD: That's not what I mean. You could take 430 million people and randomly strew them across North America but if you put them down utterly at random I think it's fairly clear it wouldn't be Trotskyism. To go from a body of workers to forming Trotskyism they have to be organized into something for it to even exist. Those are the things I'm asking about.

ICFI: The answer to that doesn't even matter if you're trying to get to socialism with just North America.

RD: What? — Uh. How big does it need to be then? The Soviet Union was really big. So if North America isn't big enough what are you saying? I don't see how it helps to make it bigger and bigger if I don't even know what's inside it.

ICFI: The working class. If by "forming Trotskyism" you mean "forming socialism", Trotskyism starts out at the size of the world because the working class is the size of the world, not the size of North America.

RD: Pardon me if this sounds a bit harsh or cruel, but how is Trotskyism going to extend all the way across the world if Stalinists keep trying to destroy it?

ICFI: That is a legitimate question. The answer is to get rid of Stalinism.

RD: Didn't Liberal-republican countries already do that? The Soviet Union is gone and every Stalinist country turned into a Deng Xiaoping state.

Alan Woods: Stalinists have tried to deny what Trotsky was saying, but they can't deny it for much longer

Socialist Appeal, Socialist Alternative: Crisis of global capitalism

RD: How do you know that Trotskyism triumphing over Stalinism is anything more than one of two arbitrary parties collapsing a plurality of parties so they won't have to argue with each other any more?

ICFI: You've missed the tautology in that sentence.

RD: The... what part is the problem?

ICFI: The Fourth International forms in the absence of a plurality of parties. Or to be more precise, a plurality of Communist Internationals. The Fourth International is the world party.

RD: But if there aren't countries how can there be a world party? Isn't a party an instrument for forming a country? Isn't that what Lenin presented to the anarchists?

ICFI: No, Lenin presented to the anarchists that they would need a _state_, not a country.

RD: What's the difference?

ICFI: The point of constructing the Soviet Union was to abolish the Soviet Union by creating the Fourth International.

RD: Okay. Then why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union try to destroy Trotskyism as a threat to the Third International? Because now it sounds even less like it immediately threatens the Third International.

ICFI: Because the bureaucrats tried to destroy the Bolshevik Party the first time and then they moved upward to the Third International. Trotsky removed the remaining Marxists from the Third International and created the Fourth International.

RD: Then who created the other Fourth Internationals?

WSWS: The British Labor Party. Or, that was one source of it, anyway.

RD: You mean to tell me that every time someone tries to form a Trotskyist international there are always _fake_ Trotskyists hiding inside it that are actually other factions like center-Liberals or Mensheviks. ...And there's still no need for meta-Marxism.

ICFI: Exactly.

Communist Party USA: Remember to vote for the Democratic Party!

Democratic Socialists of America: There's no better time to be a socialist.

RD: How did anyone figure out that the fake Fourth Internationals were fake if they didn't have meta-Marxism?

Socialism for All: 100 Fourth Internationals? Every one of them is a joke, including the original one.

RD: —Okay, apparently some people _never_ figured it out.

ICFI: The Fourth International sifts out all the fake Fourth Internationals by practicing Marxism _inside_ the Fourth International.

RD: ...Wait.

RD: So the Stalinist parties can't make out the "Second Internationals" posing as Fourth Internationals because they were never part of the Fourth International? They can't see into the internal consciousness of the larger Fourth International, so they can't see what insights are being made there, and they remain stuck in only what they can see with the perceptive abilities of their own group of people.

~~RD: That makes so much sense and yet also I understand nothing now~~
RD: That makes so much sense and yet now I understand nothing. How is this different from standpoint epistemology? How is this different from _Christianity_?

RD: You know. Christianity isn't Materialism, but it always says that because it's trying to unite all people on earth around the same emotions and concepts only the people who are currently part of it can understand it. It promises a reward only if about a billion plus people all stay united until the end of the process that is incomprehensible until they get there. I don't like how much actually understanding Trotskyism makes me wrap around to wondering if religion is technically effective at what it does even if it isn't true just because it got enough people to stay in the same group and try it.

ICFI: Well, it's not like Christianity because the Fourth International promotes all its members developing class consciousness. It's a process of understanding, not a process of blind faith.

RD: How do they have consciousness of themselves if nobody else can understand what they're saying? I know that sounds silly. Clearly _they_ know. But in the Enlightenment when the bourgeoisie was still first emerging people used to think that when someone had information about the world that information just existed and everyone could equally understand it. Why is that not the way it is? I mean, I know a certain swath of Tory-type people don't even quite understand what vaccines are, but why is it that Trotskyism is so... eldritch and incomprehensible?

ICFI: Appearance forms.

RD: What?

Capital volume I, chapter 14: Appearance forms

RD: I've gotten so far into this I feel like I've fallen into an _isekai_. /So this is the new lore for this chapter??/

ICFI: It's very real. Appearance-forms are the outer shell of a physical object that conceal its internal or underlying processes.

RD: Like products, and corporations.

ICFI: Yes, but no. Like the outer shell of the Fourth International, and the Stalinist parties.

RD: ...Beatrice.

ICFI: Who?

RD: Never mind. She's just one of the main characters inside _Capital_. Pay no attention to me.

ICFI: This is why there's no such thing as meta-Marxism. Every party that appears to be Marxist is hiding a slice of reality. Whenever you open up all those parties you find capitalists or bureaucrats or some other unwanted thing inside. Historical materialism has already seen into these parties. And because of that, the only solution is to remove the proletariat from those enclosed spaces and put the proletariat into the Fourth International.

RD: I think I'm starting to understand. But... how will the proletariat get out of all those fake organizations and isolated medium-sized businesses? Sometimes it seems like there are about three proletarians per every owner or bureaucrat or center-Liberal representative type. It's like some sort of undercover mission just to avoid the people who turn up every three to five human beings attempting to put people in faulty businesses or social structures. If you so much as say "Lenin" at the wrong time fifty center-Liberals complain about how unbelievably extreme you are and form a faulty org around you. And if you don't say anything, they form one anyway.

ICFI: That shouldn't happen if the people you're recruiting are workers.

WSWS: Tell everyone in the area of a strike to form rank-and-file committees

RD: But there are never any strikes here.

Alan Woods: Capital keeps pushing down on workers but you can only compress something so much until it explodes

Socialism for All: Capitalism is like a battery

RD: It's been 32 years, and I've only seen two big events happen in Seattle and France. ...Neither of those started at workers, come to think of it.

ICFI: Why do you think you haven't seen them?

[fractured glass sound]

RD: ..._I'm_ Beatrice. The Tin Man became the Wizard.

ICFI: What are you talking about?

RD: —I mean — we're all accidentally propagating appearance-forms.

RD: Not so much the products and corporations, though for a few people it's those. The isolated chunks of society that conceal the proletariat, like the fake organizations, and the bourgeois parties, and people who can't work, and people excluded by racism, and nation-states.

ICFI: Hey, whoa, wait up. We didn't say that unemployed people and racial minorities were oppressing the proletariat.

RD: Not "oppressing". Just unable to see it. Other causes of isolation feed into the primary cause of isolation which is business territories; this way everybody excluded from capital empowers capital. When there is isolation people don't break out of consciousness barriers. Which are the appearance-forms. They want to think that their isolation is superior. That the barrier around North Korea is not a North Korea containment chamber so the United States doesn't have to look at it. The SCP Foundation keeps the Veil over Massachusetts so the SCP Foundation staff have control over Massachusetts and the Foundation. Toriel walks away from Asgore so she can keep up the illusion that Alphys and Undyne will never make it to the surface world and Asriel and Chara dying is just what happens if you go there. But Sora was taught the wrong message by Organization XIII. Dess Holiday had the right solution and actually what Kris and Susie need to do is break down all the cliffs between light and dark so the false construction of Kris having to tear open Ralsei doesn't have to happen in Chapter 7 and Ralsei can be a real boy because he doesn't have to be the servant of God A.K.A. The Angel, which is a reflection of the Weird Route in the normal route because Ralsei is Ted Grant but, you know, only figuratively and not intentionally. Yeah. Twilight doesn't get through to Starlight Glimmer because _Twilight_ is locked up in Equestria, and Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash have to unlock Equestria if they wanted to see either Twilight or Starlight for what they are. I think I really get this consciousness thing.

David North, hypothetically: I did not understand a single word of that. Somebody needs to call in an _Undertale_ expert before this "transcending appearance forms" thing gets any more steps ahead of us.

~~WSWS headlines 2027: Is Asriel Dreemurr Finally out of The Matrix? On Ralsei's Impending Defeat~~ ~~Has Asriel Dreemurr Left The Matrix? On the Clash Against Ralsei~~
WSWS headlines 2027: Has Asriel Dreemurr Left The Matrix? On the Clash Against Ralsei

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[cr. 2026-11-07T07:17:30H]

~~Communist Party USA: Remember to vote for the Democratic Party!~~
~~RD: Does CPUSA understand _anything_?~~
Anark: No. Communism inevitably leads to Dengism, so it's historically obsolete now. I read all the Wikipedia lists on it.
~~RD: ...Wow. I don't like that there are still at least 100,000 instances of that guy. There are probably 3 hidden in my town somewhere. I probably have more of him around me than workers.~~

BadEmpanada: If you're an American you aren't getting into heaven

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[*] "named Marxism": apparent form of Marxism; apparently Marxist party.

=> https://www.leftvoice.org/in-defense-of-the-transitional-program/
:: cr. 2026-11-07T07:17:30H</pre>



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