Research talk:x4mer/WhyNotBoth01
Why fight the USSR's last Marxists?
- field, scope, or group [Item]
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/ Trotskyism
(top-level category)1-1-1 -
/ International Committee (Q46,02)1
-1-1
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Prompt
If Trotskyists did not intend to make the Soviet Union an extension of the First World as a step toward establishing Trotskyism, why take the risk of fighting Stalin and the last few Marxist theorists in the USSR at all costs?
Say, hypothetically, that Trotskyists had actually been setting up underground organizations in the 1930s, and the aim of those organizations was nothing more than to clear out the existing CPSU and create a new Communist party or federation of parties. Stalin's government hunts down the underground "Trotskyite conspiracy" and puts them on trial so no important Stalin-followers will be killed. Every Trotskyist ally has reason to defend the underground movement because in the end all it wants to do is create a Trotskyist party — something Stalinist-leaning Marxists have had for a while but which Trotskyists have never actually had. No one including Stalinists can deny that the Trotskyists' actions are logical. Marxists generally operate by creating a Leninist party to lead various regions of workers so workers can coordinate on strategy and cohere together long enough to defend themselves from external empires. And if Trotskyists believe based on their observations that large parts of the USSR are being led by mere-structures-themselves and clusters of bureaucrats as opposed to workers or Marxist theorists, it is only natural for them to come up with a plan to take back the rest of the USSR that Stalin and his followers do not even have any control over; in concept, if a country area contained 1/5 proletarian class rule and 4/5 bourgeois class rule, it would be better if it contained two rival dictatorships of the proletariat than it would to let the bourgeoisie have control of the country. As much as people on the outside may accuse it of being largely composed of anticommunists and non-proletarians, if the 1930s Trotskyist movement contains even a few Leninist theorists, which it does, then they operate best working toward a goal of creating a Trotskyist party so that if they accumulate workers to the movement, workers are well organized. Trotskyists organizing an underground movement to create the world's first Trotskyist parties makes sense.
The confusing thing is why Trotskyists were so focused on getting rid of Stalin and variously insisting that Stalin was not a Leninist or not a Marxist when the real composition of the CPSU was basically a lot of non-Marxists and then Stalin as one of the only people who tirelessly tried to keep distortions of Marxism out of the party.
When people like Yaroshenko appeared and tried to suggest socialism was based on Idealism and that a Marxist society can simply pass legislation or decide things in the soviets and improve production, Stalin pushed back on that and made it clear that within a country Marxism is about studying the fine-scale relations that make up society and assemble individuals into an economy where, thanks to transitions in the smaller structures to become larger or more robust structures, smaller local chunks of people grow together into a larger more connected unit (Economic Problems of the USSR, 1952). Whether Stalin made a mistake regarding Trotskyism and whether Stalin was a Marxist aren't the same question. It could be that Stalin was a Marxist who made errors about Trotskyism and Trotsky was a Marxist who made errors about Stalin.
So, can Trotskyists really claim to have a sound epistemology based on only the Trotskyist understanding of Marxism, when deciding that Stalin has not correctly modeled the overall contradiction between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism trying to control the region, Stalin has boxed his model of Marxism into the scope of his own group of followers instead of the world, and 'Stalin's obviously wrong model' is the only problem? To understand that larger contradiction, wouldn't it actually be necessary to create a descriptive model of how each of the two Marxist movements physically behaves "for its own sake" — meaning, understanding Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as amoral material objects that function based on their own internal material processes and motivations as well as according to back-and-forth dialectical interactions where they change and define each other — to truly understand what the big contradiction between the two parties over the region is doing and the best outcomes? What if the real problem was that both Stalin and Trotsky had failed to create a Violet Marxist / meta-Marxist model which described history as the interaction of not just bourgeois factions versus Marxism but also multiple countable Marxisms that would have to successfully sublate the correct parts of each other to join into a single Communist International? Why was it acceptable to assume getting rid of Stalin would not be equally as heinous as persecuting Trotsky's movement, or equivalent to regarding a party "winning" the fight over the country as an important first step in its own right that simply has to complete before workers take power?
Motifs or claims in prompt (no AI)
Motifs or claims from response
- The Revolution Betrayed [1] [2]
- Stalinism and Bolshevism (1937) [3]
- Trotsky had a predictive theory of Stalin's Marxism
Subjective themes (no AI)
Usage notes
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