9k:RD/ Their morals and ours (Q19,04)
Main entry
- Their Morals and Ours (Trotsky 1938) [1]
- Laws don't apply to "Lev Sedov" / Soviet laws exclude Trotsky / (9k)
Motifs or claims
- moral claims increasing along with reactionaries
- The excesses of revolutionaries cause reaction (Liberal-republicanism)
- Morality will prevent reactionaries -> oh god thanks Rothenberg
- Methodologically-individual moralizing is the shovel dream of petty bourgeois confusion, and a lack of preparation for reactionary attacks in a collection of petty bourgeois intellectuals
- Tsarism and Bolshevism have the same cause -> so a version of "horseshoe theory" existed in 1938, if not way back in 1900.
- Nazism and Bolshevism have the same cause / horseshoe theory
- Catholicism is a backdoor for Bolshevism -> I found this just hilarious the first time I saw it because I thought only U.S. people could come up with this. but when Trotsky has heard of this. did he find it in Europe? it has to have appeared across multiple regions, and that's just sad.
- Marxism and anarchism have the same cause (Catholicism)
- Materialist analysis of named tendencies / Materialist analysis of named "Marxisms" / the material foundation of the various currents (Trotsky)
- Idealist analysis of named tendencies / [not] the material foundation of the various currents ... their relation to one or another abstract principle [... with] a special professional value (Trotsky)
- an ignorant peasant will consider both belligerent camps with equal hatred / moralists wish that history should leave them in peace with their books
- The end justifies the means (Kantianism)
- Morality pre-dates the solar system (derived Christian proposition)
- philosophic-cowardly pseudonym for god / some kind of absolute which is nothing more than the philosophic-cowardly pseudonym for god
- Secular morality (philosophic idealism; eternal moral truths) is only a transitional stage between religion and materialism, either from religion to Materialism or from Materialism to religion
- The intent of an action is more important than its content (ethics) / The means of an action is indifferent and is given meaning by its end / The end distinguishes Good from Bad, not the means
- mad dogs
- Most Idealism implies that intents (ideas) justify means
- dissolving concrete historical morality in eternal human nature (Spencer) -> this is either blue or charcoal depending on where you think you've identified it.
- Whenever there are ethical decisions to be made and there is a ruling class the ruling class gets to decide the ends; this is to imply that anything the ruling class does not approve of might be marked immoral -> yeah. I've spat this one out in various forms toward YouTubers, trying to carefully stop just barely short of scary class-based language, at least twice. this is a lesson that for the past few decades nobody ever seems to learn.
- falsely considering the rainbow / they dabble in all colors of the rainbow but remain apostles of slavery and submission (Trotsky onto Liberal-republicanism) -> yeah that's bourgeois ethical philosophy for you in a nutshell. it all sounds completely pointless and detached from reality no matter how practical and important it's trying to be.
I bet this kind of sentiment eventually would have been thrown at me if I'd managed to get meta-Marxism out to people sooner and more broadly. swatches?? those can't all be valid!! I think I've made some really critical changes to the method in the past 6 or so months alone — notably things like no longer referring to all apparent forms of Marxism as "named Marxisms". (which even I knew was a misnomer.)
so, that said, I think this is most applicable to notions like Liberal-republicanism supposedly containing all possible forms of political philosophy working things out in a reasonable discussion until you bring up Bolshevism and it gets terrified. never stop talking about that and questioning it. - Why do societies kill murderers? / Why are murderers killed?
- If most societies do not want war, why are there wars?
- triumph of killing over The State in times of war
- The solidarity of workers, especially of strikers or barricade fighters, is incomparably more "categoric" than human solidarity in general -> the antidote to Lacanianism.
- The bourgeoisie conceal class interests under "common-sense" morality / The concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions patronized by religion, philosophy, or that hybrid which is called "common sense"
- Stalinism is the product of imperialist pressure upon a backward and isolated workers' state, a symmetrical complement in its own genre to fascism / the Stalinist bureaucracy, transmissive mechanism of imperialism
- common sense is exposed as just a clot of prejudices of a definite class and a definite epoch
- If Trotsky had been guided not by Marxist doctrine but by common sense then he would not have lost power (Max Eastman) -> what.
- Common sense is nothing, dialectic is key / Eastman does not understand that it is Stalin who in a historical sense fell victim to common sense ... since that power which he possesses serves ends hostile to Bolshevism. Marxist doctrine, on the other hand, permitted us to tear away in time from the Thermidorian bureaucracy and to continue to serve the ends of international socialism / there is nothing more flat, stale, self-satisfied and cynical than the moral rules of common sense! -> I can get behind this.
- A great number of people citing the Dewey investigation did not even care about whether the results were correct as much as whether the bourgeoisie would punish them / As for the petty bourgeois moralists and sycophants, they were never anything but servile echoes of the capitalist class ... open defense of the GPU signified peril of political and moral death
- Many people who were members of Stalinist parties in the 1930s dropped out and stopped being Marxists -> you hear a lot about Trotskyists doing this but you never hear about the other side.
Neutrality aids the oppressor
/ He who slanders the victim aids the executioner (Trotsky)If Trotsky is Good, become a Trotskyist
/ The French Socialist Party expelled the Trotskyists from their ranks exactly when it prepared to fuse with the Stalinists / (9k) -> I'd only thought about this in terms of regular old center-Liberals and Tories. looks like French social-democrats had a similar conundrum going on of not being able to justify why they can't stand with Trotskyists if ostensibly they are okay with Marxists. for Stalin it's obvious enough but for them it makes no sense- The Soviet Union holds socialism's fate (1938) / The fate of socialism is tied with the fate of the Soviet Union (Otto Bauer) -> well, that one's backhandedly true. whatever happened in the Soviet Union was important information about how socialism develops period and its possibilities at any given point. so, yeah. technically.
- Stalinists hold socialism's fate (1938) / The fate of socialism ... is the fate of Stalinism so long as the inner development of the Soviet Union itself does not overcome the Stalinist phase of development
Stalin was the worst
/ The barbarism of old Russian history upon new social bases seems yet more disgusting since it is constrained to conceal itself in hypocrisy unprecedented in history -> ah. I'd been thinking about what he actually meant by this one and was like, does he mean relative to Russian history? it seems that is approximately what he meant, yes.- contrasting real Stalinism with supra-historical abstractions of democracy
- Democracy came into the world not at all through the democratic road; only a vulgar mentality can satisfy itself by chewing on the theme that Bonapartism was ... the historical punishment for infringing upon democracy (Trotsky)
- Marxist errors invite capitalism / A bad Marxist party will ultimately do almost everything a Liberal-republican party does, including running an entire national government around capitalism / Counterrevolutions restore what existed before revolution (sense) / Every reaction regenerates, nourishes and strengthens those elements of the historic past which the revolution struck but which it could not vanquish
- It is impossible to create a revolutionary party of the proletariat without complete independence from the bourgeoisie and their morality / Whoever fawns before precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy! (Trotsky) -> hmm. you could in theory distort this one into post-structuralism.
- Without lies war would be as unimaginable as a machine without oil -> correct. it brings up some concerning questions related to Trotskyism though.
- The lies and the violence of war will go away in proportion to how much class conflicts have vanished from society -> this is very coherent. you can see how when revolution runs backward all the continuous acts of violence come back
- From the point of view of "eternal truths" revolution is of course "anti-moral", but this merely means that idealist morality is counter-revolutionary
- The material resolves the immaterial / The very conception of truth and lie was born of social contradictions -> yeah this is it, this is closer than Rorty got by saying truth values are arbitrary math constructs. society dividing into groups of people including physical tribes, factions, clusters of businesses, and finally class populations are the real roots of the entire discussion about truth versus lies in the age of capitalism
- Communist trolley problem / If the revolution had displayed less superfluous generosity from the very beginning, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved
- the ground of the Pyrennean peninsula is still too hot for them -> the motif of bourgeois ideologists attacking "disgusting" actions taken in war but only in some historical periods that happened a while ago or in another country and not ones that happened more recently in more familiar countries; motif of failing to understand the ways in which all wars are similar.
- History chooses grievous pathways -> Trotsky manages a four-word idiom by accident. I like this one. I'll definitely find a longer proposition to put it to later
- Tribal populations (?) will recognize and appreciate the power of workers to stop the exploiters -> I don't know who the Kaffirs are.
- Intentions alone cannot make you Progressive or Reactionary / The ends are not accessible without control over the effects of the means / Show not the goal but show also the path (Lassalle) -> there are a lot more small fragments of meta-Marxism in Trotsky than I realized
- Deceive unions when necessary / "Maneuvers and subterfuge" are in this case only methods of valid self-defense against a perfidious reformist bureaucracy (trade union bureaucracy; Soviet bureaucracy) (Lenin, Trotsky) -> he specifically refers to the trade union bureaucracy here but the context makes it amply obvious he does mean either one
- Deceive unions when necessary / They are distinguished from the GPU only by the fact that they have not yet resorted to spilling blood [... and save it] for the next imperialist war
- Deceive unions when necessary -> and this one... I can see being twisted into Gramscianism, only by the people who actually know Gramsci was attempting to be a Leninist in 1920.
- To a revolutionary Marxist there can be no contradiction between personal morality (conception of war, crime, deception) and the interests of the party, since the party embodies in his consciousness the very highest tasks and aims of mankind (Trotsky) / that strange communist amorality in which nothing matters but the party and its power (Norman Thomas) / ... the party is a weapon for the revolutionary reconstruction of society, including also its morality -> yeah, when you think about it, out of the Communist party you get things like the legal principle of punishing the remaining owners rather than non-owners if they had power to make decisions. [2] "Bolshevik morality" does in fact make sense as a concept if you're talking about things like the scaffolding for creating new laws. it's basically the negation of faulty legal principles that existed before
- Belgians let Norwegians lock up Communists indifferent to struggles inside Marxism so they can denounce Communism as a whole
- Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle ... the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship for the "leaders"
Subjective themes
- Psychoanalysis will prevent reactionaries (Rothenberg, Žižek)
- thanks, Rothenberg / you just became Rothenberg / (9k)
- neither Washington nor Moscow (Tony Cliff) / an ignorant peasant will consider both belligerent camps with equal hatred (Trotsky)
Faulty progressivisms produce irony
/ Every incorrect progressive theory produces irony- Marxist errors invite capitalism / When Marxism falters, capitalists return / A bad Marxist party will ultimately do almost everything a Liberal-republican party does, including running an entire national government around capitalism
- Anarchists seek refuge from Trotskyism in Stalinists -> this is clearly happening because regular people who aren't Trotskyists all eventually fall back to a vague schema of clustering with anyone who isn't immediately threatening them against people who are immediately threatening them. the anarchists wouldn't normally trust the Stalinists except for the threat of Trotskyists having come in. just like Trotskyists wouldn't normally trust the Gestapo except for the threat of the Stalinist and bureaucrat amalgam effectively trying to kill them. then they pull out just a few Gestapo who, to be fair, hypothetically might not be completely loyal to the Nazis. it's like with the Mensheviks in the soviets, opportunists are dangerous sometimes, but sometimes they find their use.
- Bolshevik morality basically amounts to the founding legal principles of a workers' state that will inform all state policies, such as taking away the legal principle of punishing workers for violating the "rights" of inanimate properties -> very interesting, and worth looking into. in some ways Marxism doesn't "prescribe" morality, but what it does instead is look at the injuries or contradictions coming from morality sociologically and materially and try to unravel them. Marxism can study morality but it does it descriptively as an account of all existing flawed forms of morality where it will steadily group them into forward- and backward-thinking and sort out the least bad ones to tolerate. weirdly enough accomplishing Habermas' whole thing of trying to study moral progress but having an actual objective method for it.
Related
- Liquidators are partially defined by persecuting Bolsheviks / The legalist who sets himself against the underground party (illegal party; revolutionary party) while considering his own party equal to it is nothing but a liquidator / The "equality" between an illegal Social Democrat (Bolshevik) ... and the legalist who is safeguarded by his divorce from the party is the equality between worker and capitalist [3] [4] ->
[old] oh my gosh. this means something in relation to Trotskyism, but I'm not sure what it means.
A) (obvious meaning) Liberal-republicans that try to absorb Communists are liquidators. B) Trotskyists that secede from the Fourth International are potential liquidators depending on how involuntary it really was. [5] C) people who defend Stalin's government while it persecutes Trotskyists are improperly liquidating the Fourth International, only when and because there is something similar to initial class rule emerging inside the Soviet Union in said situation which is slowly generating a strawberry or blue government
the thing that has always been a little bit of a mystery to me in case C is: how did the bureaucrats start 'multiplying' and generating an initial class rule in the first place? what was even causing that? I still don't quite understand it. and that's why at first I found it really hard to believe - "the underground" referring to Communist party [6] / (9k) -> as a fan of Undertale, you can see why this quote made me pause for a moment. I don't think it was intentional symbolism. really, it's hilarious to imagine a world in which it was. that is not our world.
- underground Bolshevik newspaper which is printed outside Russia [7] -> the closer I look at the early history of the Bolshevik party the more I keep seeing events that occur across international lines as critical moments in it.
Ideologies or fields
- / Lenin
- / Trotskyism
- / Stalinism (Soviet Union)
- / Stalin's Marxism (2020s)
- / morality or ethics
- / Christian morality
- / Lacanian psychoanalysis