Prompt
How is post-structuralism different from Trotskyism?
I made another thread where I was attempting to work through what the WSWS had said in relation to the 1619 Project and critical race theory. A lot of things that came up in that thread were more like real problems in the 1619 Project I skipped over, but I am still thinking about the basic concepts of the 1619 Project and what kinds of thinking might have led to it.
When I look at some of the most prominent motifs or concepts that would go in a 1619 Project article, what I think of is post-structuralism. At its core post-structuralism was something like a cluster of philosophies that came after structuralist linguists described how language approximately models real-world contradictions, and how the interactions between real-world objects or concepts lead to terms in language being defined relative to each other. The post-structuralists showed up and started to prototype what would later appear to be expressions of the postmodernist "monomyth" where no group of people can have an objective model of any other group of people — word meanings are arbitrary and can express personal biases, contradictions between words can reflect unjust systems and thus both of a pair of words can be wrong, entire connected ontologies of words that fit together into a "narrative" can simply be rejected. (I honestly haven't read a single post-structuralist text all the way through so that's just my best guesses of what post-structuralists were claiming that I've absorbed from a lot of references to them in other things.) I have a habit of seeing a philosophy, seeing that it vaguely matches up onto a real process, and thinking that it's leading to an understanding of that actual process if only it was improved. But, here goes.
In terms of the post-structuralist (?) concept of rejecting established ontologies and narratives, I can see a parallel to that in Trotsky. Trotsky wrote "Their morals and ours", both from his own observations and vaguely drawing on a number of prior writings by Lenin about underground organizations and liquidators. Between Lenin and Trotsky, there is a concept that comes up that established concepts of law and morality become irrelevant when there is a valid revolutionary organization and the overall set of regulatory processes of the bourgeoisie threaten that revolutionary organization, meaning the illegal organization has to break with the liquidators that uphold them. One thing that is important to Lenin and Trotsky is that the revolutionary organization actually has a viable Materialist framework for understanding the world including other organizations and itself, which can then be used to identify which groups are Leninist and which are not.
One issue that has caused a lot of problems for Marxism is that whenever a group emerges that understands dialectical materialism better than others it will often be small at first and there will be a much larger group of people that do not understand it, including revisionist parties and everyday people trapped in bourgeois ideology, and all the revisionist parties might try to claim the new, more correct understanding is revisionist rather than them. (This was a very serious problem for Trotsky in 1938 when there was a relatively small collection of Trotskyists and most of the "Marxist parties" that had been emerging across the world were Stalinist parties or another round of Menshevik-style parties.) If most of the parties in the world do not want to entertain a new set of observations that applies to them, then, in a way, any new underground party that forms between them has to consciously decide to reject all the old "narratives" that run against the new observations, no matter how much the revisionist parties present them as "a correct line", "established fact", or "common sense", or "a reason to get rid of other parties as counterrevolutionaries". It would seem to me like post-structuralism is basically the moment when Trotsky decides he is not going to accommodate Stalinist parties ever again to save all future Marxist organizations the pain (and death) that their betrayals will bring, but is that concept generalized much more widely and probably inappropriately.
The 1619 Project was never going to make a lot of sense. First of all it was intending to be a highly visible media effort, so adopting ways of thinking that are meant for underground parties would lead to strange decisions. Second, an account of history is not something that is merely "incorrect" to the point a whole narrative of events needs to be "rejected" in that way.
But, that said, I have seen the concept of Black people "rejecting narratives" applied in more productive ways than that. There is a writer called Ismatu Gwendolyn from Sierra Leone who has characterized revolution as something that cannot happen if people do not first survive. She figuratively describes the act of actually surviving a war zone as an act of "madness" where to try to accept people's existing notions of what is possible is to "negotiate with terrorists", and thus "sanity" is not the way you stay standing and get to rebuild society while "imagination" (the ability to operate on new predictions, observations, or methods that other people can't "imagine") can carry people through to the future. The Black Panthers said conceptually similar things, writing about how the way U.S. police were operating wasn't serving the people and had to be rejected by arming people against them, and how revolution was "about creating", which in my understanding had to do with building and defending society before the bourgeoisie of the First World could smash it, similar to the topics Stalin's party focused on but trying to imply that if people are dedicated enough to seeing the new society realized they could create a society based on people helping others in the population as their neigbors and somehow avoid the whole thing getting consumed by a bureaucratic apparatus as Trotsky had already been noticing in the 1920s. So, it would seem like there is a certain argument to be made that if Black people in the United States feel like nobody is listening to them when they try to get their issues heard then it is logical for them to start figuring out everything on their own, breaking from all the "narratives" that they have heard about what is possible, and regarding none of that as true until they can actually get the facts sorted out versus what is just people's prejudices or lack of information or wrong understandings. In and of itself, that would hardly be an argument for the anarchist-sounding frameworks and organizational forms that were going around at the time of BLM, or any postmodernist philosophy, and is more like an argument for Black people to form into a Marxist party; it doesn't exclude the possibility of forming a Trotskyist group that would have to connect to the Fourth International and effectively become racially integrated.
So I can see how post-structuralism or whatever major concept is sitting behind the 1619 Project could be turned into something better. But I know Trotsky didn't believe in post-structuralism and I don't think Cannon did or anyone else leading up to the ICFI. I also know that at various times people have tried to falsely claim that Marx "couldn't prove" determinism and because "narratives can't predict history" or "narratives can't predict other individuals / groups of people" he couldn't show that at any given time there is a correct answer that will unfold into a correct material analysis of the situation and a correct course of action as either of those sides is discovered.
How does post-structuralism actually operate versus the way I think it does? What am I really getting at when I feel compelled to say that Trotsky and the Black Panthers believed in post-structuralism?
- Q618/Q618Knowing does not exist / There is no activity called knowing which has a nature to be discovered; there is simply the process of justifying beliefs to audiences (Richard Rorty) -> wow. one of those things which would not be so bad in medieval times but is appalling if you think of it taking the place of Marxism
Subjective themes (no AI)
Usage notes
- You are allowed to post LLM prompts as prototype pages (the part you wrote manually), as long as they stay in one of the
... talk: namespaces and there are no direct quotes from machine-generated text. Concisely describing abstract propositions that turn up several times inside response text is fine.
- It's recommended you include all of the AI's "references", such that each prompt becomes a sort of 'combination nickel' that becomes a convenient place for collecting twenty or so links that answer the question. If any of the pages referenced are already nickel pages, you should link the nickel page.
Links
Ideologies, fields, topics, or search engines
- Q4699/Q46,99IV / Socialism AI
- Q4444/Q44,44MX / Trotskyism as meta-Marxism
- Q83/Q83MN / dialectical materialism
- Q4104/Q41,04IV / Trotskyism
- Q90/Q90MX / apparent forms of Marxism
