Research talk:5¢/IFCI/DwightMacdonaldAbandonsHistory
article title
- author
- field, scope, or group [Item]
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/ Trotskyism
(top-level category)1-1-1 - topic or subject [Item] (TS)
- critical theory ( / ES)1
-1-1 - date
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Links
- WSWS: [1]
Nickel usage or significance
- (fill in later)
Motifs or claims
Motifs or claims (North)
- The euro has not successfully unified Europe / Inasmuch as it is still unstable and having crises, the euro has not successfully unified Europe (David North 2012)
- Dialectical-materialist analysis of Trotskyism is nothing without past history / You cannot do dialectical-materialist analysis of the processes within Trotskyism without knowing the overall history of Trotskyism and Leninism over the past century and how each moment in history has shaped subsequent sets of conditions; if analyses do not make use of previous conditions they will distort the dialectical method (David North 2012)
- The NPA is an opportunist party (2012) / As of 2012, the New Anti-capitalist Party of France is essentially an opportunist party; its unwillingness to turn against imperialist military actions in Libya and Syria is one sign of its class alignment (North 2012)
State capitalism was neither
(North) / In the theory of "state capitalism", neither "state" nor "capitalist" was used in a Marxist sense; because Marxist revolution was disagreeable to anarchists, "state" was used to describe domination and "capitalism" was used to describe the shape of domination and coercion- Dialectic of Enlightenment is an expression of petty-bourgeois intellectuals' despair
- excising Pabloites from the Fourth International -> according to this article this was a really important step in stabilizing the Fourth International. because apparently they were not serious supporters of Stalin's Marxism either and all the Pabloite theorists were enabling the most wishy-washy sections that would flip between workers' movements and critical theory / Existentialism / postmodernism
Motifs or claims (pseudo-left)
- New Anti-capitalist Party of France (NPA) -> their recorded statement was basically 'we got tired of having to be pro-Stalin but it doesn't mean we're pro-Trotsky'. not very promising. sounds kind of like when they walked away from "Stalinism" they just flat out lost their principles
- we leave all strategic debates about taking power, dual power, and transitional demands for future conferences / Unlike the LCR, the NPA however does not resolve some issues, it leaves them open for future Conferences ... (New Parties of the Left: Experiences from Europe, 2011) -> this sounds almost satirical, good grief
The Root is Man
(Dwight Macdonald)power beyond the factory floor
/ post-Marxism (generic) / although the working class is certainly an element in any reconstitution of society along more tolerable lines, it is not now, and possibly never was, the element Marx thought it was (Macdonald) / (9k)Parties are historicist or ethicist
/ Divide parties into historicists and ethicists / All supposedly-progressive ideologies are instead to be divided into progressives (historicists; Materialists), the ideologies that conceptualize the present as a slice of unfolding history and appeal to the world's problems as a lack of scientific or Materialist understandings, and radicals, who live in the present and conceptualize politics not primarily through greater mastery over material reality but through ethics and immaterial values such as truth, justice, and love (Macdonald) ->
the deepest contradiction in this statement is that he claims that "truth" is something he can even appeal to if he doesn't believe in the central importance of scientific objectivity. without that you have no standard for what is actually true and what is not true, and likewise you lose all grip over what "justice" will practically be because without objective truth justice becomes totally subjective and the very definition of what is a just outcome will be determined by the most powerful person around. just ask any of the people that cover up for murderers in the imaginary scenarios in Ace Attorney; they absolutely believe in justice but they don't believe in scientific inquiry into an objective truth.
- Freud understood that decisive battles for the future of humanity were being waged specifically over the human body (Roszak) -> that's not entirely wrong, but it becomes a deepity if you zoom out, because every single "struggle over the human body" is generally one over what demographic identity people will be forced to be part of or will form into themselves after seceding from another one. that's ultimately a battle between physical populations which will secure a territory or will be defeated on that territory and absorbed or destroyed, which is ultimately Hegelian. something as simple as abortion rights cannot be won as an individual without joining a particular subpopulation of similar people capable of having a movement. so while the "decisive battles for humanity's future" part is technically right the part where it's contained in a single human body is wrong.