From Philosophical Research
Main entry
- Lenin said workers never become class-conscious / Lenin said that workers in trade unions only get to trade union consciousness, therefore within the historical process of a Leninist movement and transition into the beginning of Bolshevism workers never extract themselves from rule by the bourgeoisie [1] -> ooh. this is a very subtle one. this is one of those articles where I should be mad but I'm only excited to take the great new fallacy I found, stow it in the framed moth board, and put a pin through it. so, Marxist movements begin with bourgeois class traitors. that's true. that isn't not true. but what happens next is the workers and the theorists join into a party-nation and the party-nation shoves out the bourgeoisie and subsequently the workers don't have to deal with the Liberal-republican, center-Liberal bourgeoisie or the Tory bourgeoisie any more, both of which are a big problem and in the latter case potentially outright violent and terrifying. I think part of the problem here is how crudely old Marxist texts before 1991 described things and how imprecise they were in their language relative to how many levels of complexity real historical processes have. when you look at the real-world historical events nothing is confusing. you see that "class" was a bit of an abstract and misleading word and what specifically happens is particular countable subpopulations filled with a given class have to form. a whole population mostly filled with a new class has to form in order to change a country's ideology. and funny enough the article almost gets that part right. it implies that breaking out of capitalism involves rounding up a lot of workers — so far so good. then... well, it ends, because it wasn't a long article. there's one useful thing here that might be worth focusing on. "Intellectuals receive benefits from the system to toe its ideological line". I'm going to assume because of the premise of the article that this refers to Leninist theorists.
so let's assume that this is true. traditional capitalists are toeing the line and Lenin is toeing the line, and Stalin and Trotsky are toeing the line. Lenin takes capitalism and he replaces it with a new capitalism which is headed by Marxist theorists. logically there would be two of the new capitalism: Stalin's capitalism and Trotsky's capitalism; this is technically a theory of the Soviet Union containing multicapitalism. to conceptualize Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as both creating capitalisms you basically need something like a theory of state capitalism to be able to say that because all the state businesses are in the party-nation but something owns them (the party-nation) then it's capitalism. this brings up the classic question: why is a party-nation owning businesses even a bad thing? how is it different from shouting that Liberal-republicanism is no kind of progress from warring states periods because it's "just nation-state localstateism" and so it hasn't truly made anyone free? one of the only coherent arguments I think exists is the "world of Alert" argument where corporations are groups of people and making groups of people be part of a population that might potentially fight another one is morally wrong. which, we have to be perfectly clear, that argument only even begins to have any legs when you recognize Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism and Maoism as separate parallel Marxisms. without that historical data it would be a stupid argument because there would be no good reason to side with the First World over the Second World. it's only when we get to China and the Soviet Union separating and failing to form an International because at different times they call each other revisionist (if I remember right?) that we start to see that there is kind of an argument to be made only if you somehow know what existential materialism is and you're arguing existential materialism and meta-Marxism. which I am pretty sure anarchists don't typically argue.
starting from this article's premises you can argue Trotskyism, but argue anything else and you basically deny the Cold War and the latter half of the 1900s. why is arguing Trotskyism not denying the Cold War? well, because you said the movement was somehow made of a solid base of workers exactly like it totally wasn't the first time. if Trotskyism was made of workers constantly kicking out their theorists for bad Leninism and refusing to split apart versus joining into an increasingly huger population of people, yet also actually accepting at the end of the day that the workers need Marxist theorists and the concept of countable populations to actually defeat borders and become connected, then it actually wouldn't be all that bad. out of all the forms of Trotskyism there are like fifteen I hate and two I like but the problem is nobody advocates the actually good ones. I wonder if the problem is that I'm naming things that aren't Trotskyism Trotskyism. I have so many civilizational shapes to study the history of and properly distinguish and name.
Related
Ideology codes
- A / anarchism
- ML / mainstream Marxism-Leninism
- A onto ML
