User:RD/9k/Che was a Trotskyist (Q42,19)
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- Che Guevara could have become a Trotskyist [1] -> kind of a ridiculous claim when Trotskyists are saying such bad things about Cuba now. what does it mean for Che Guevara to fight for the people? it means Che Guevara and all the more peaceful Third-World Marxists fight to defend Third World populations from First-World populations. if you tear down their "wall" they'll probably hate you. that said, if you look at this from a class analysis angle it manages to be a little less terrible. here again we have Trotskyists trying to claim Cuba has the wrong internal structure and if it had the right internal structure The Pigs wouldn't have won and created a "Pig state". this thing they keep saying should hypothetically be testable, if you could somehow do a crude simulation of the internal structure of workers' states and watch that structure stack up emergently and develop. I'm really feeling that Marxism can be a science someday if we just had the right meta-Marxist mathematics.
Supporting claims
- Che Guevara got his ideas of international revolution from Trotsky -> this seems laughable to me. it's like... didn't everything he did originate from the Latin American people. it's so weird how they have to set up that Che Guevara is supposedly positioned with early Trotskyism to explain why him supposedly turning against the Cuban bureaucracy is good
- U.S. Trotskyists care about Cuba / (9k)
- Alan Woods had books published in Cuba / I've had my books published in Cuba (Alan Woods) / Cuban Marxists are turning towards Trotskyism -> this remark really stands out because it could mean at least two things: A) the private sector in Cuba likes Trotskyist books B) Cuban Marxism has actually become tolerant of Trotskyism. I have no idea which of these is true. Woods really wants to believe it's the second one and specifically that all the Cuban Marxists are turning into Trotskyists.
- Reason in Revolt (1995) -> this is apparently one of the Trotskyist books that has been published in Cuba. on the surface it seems to lean into "Trotskyism is early-Marxism" and not go into any of the "Stalinism controversy". so, I guess it isn't all that surprising he got it through. still kind of funny he talked about his books like they were really subversive, and from that angle, worth discussing the possibility of what a genuinely critical Trotskyist book getting through would mean.
Counter-claims
- Trotskyists typically have a rather specific collection of things they are allied with or support that distinguish them as Trotskyists, so if Cuba was becoming Trotskyist, it would be obvious; some part of Cuba would show identifiable signs of actually being aligned with Trotskyist theorists or groups in Britain, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, etc. -> it's notable that identifying Trotskyite conspiracies is different from identifying the hypothetical state of a true majority of a country being aligned with Trotskyism because Trotskyite conspiracies to actively overthrow a government have to hide themselves, but movements that are essentially aligned with the central party already or are no threat to it and whose aim is more specifically to join up with other countries don't necessarily have to be hidden in that way. this proposition is assuming the latter type of thing, that somehow the central party of Cuba is itself okay with Trotskyism, or something other that that but equally that strange.
Related
- If a Trotskyist civilization committed imperialism, what would it look like? / (9k)
Ideology codes
- MX / meta-Marxism
- IV / Trotskyism
- MX onto IV / meta-Marxism onto Trotskyism