Research talk:5¢/ICFI/WoodsIntroducingRCI
What is the Revolutionary Communist International proclaimed by the former International Marxist Tendency of Alan Woods?
- field, scope, or group [Item]
Links
Nickel usage or significance
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Motifs or claims (Woods)
- Global capitalism finished its progressive role in 2024 / Only now has global capitalism exhausted its historically progressive role of developing the means of production (Alan Woods, 2024) [4] -> not exactly wrong, but probably setting the boundary a bit too late. arguably it was actually done in about 2000, after the internet had been invented but before LLMS. maybe you could peg the end of big capitalism to 2008, when there was a speculation crisis so big it hit both the United States and Japan.
the one thing I know with a bit more certainty is that we now live in a world shaped by the petty bourgeoisie in global multicapitalist hell. - It wasn't time for a Fourth International in 1917 / Global capitalism has not been developed enough to create a successful Fourth International until 2024; this is to imply that there were not the right material conditions for Trotskyism in 1917 -> claim accidentally implied by Alan Woods.
this.... wow, this is complicated. if you're not talking about the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of China had a lot of trouble getting started and creating a workers' movement and then ended up turning into Dengism. so there could actually be a decent claim that it wasn't time for Trotskyism to form in China until about 2000. but it's much harder to say that it wasn't time for Trotskyism to form in the Soviet Union, because of how it had that unusual structure of many separate nations in a supranational federation that has hardly ever been seen since. that is a bizarrely Trotskyist country structure, particularly when the country is so big, with such a great overall area. so I would hesitate to say that there weren't conditions for Trotskyism between about 1900 and 1930. that might have been the previous time there were! as World War II developed that kind of put a damper on the conditions for Trotskyism and shifted the conditions to be more favorable to Stalin's Marxism and Dengism for about 20 years, until in about 1960 after all the pressure and actual physical occupations across places like Germany and Korea there was nothing but Dengism. I think it's denying World War II to say there have been great conditions for Trotskyism this whole time, but I think there was a notable change around 1960 where the conditions for Trotskyism became better, partly because Trotskyists were becoming more successful at expelling blatant non-Trotskyists from their own organizations.
I hate to say that part of that might actually be because Israel was founded in 1948 and the United States started disproportionately focusing on Israel, giving Trotskyism more room to breathe because it wasn't as important as "the arab menace". I don't think the United States ever actually became committed to peace; I think it just shifted to different wars that affected some people less. Trotskyism is a little dangerous in that it always has a setup phase before you can even do anything and global conditions can just win and destroy your parties before you've even quite stopped the Fourth International from forming right oppositions. but given about 20 years of "peace" for everybody but Palestine the conditions become better.
Motifs or claims (Grant)
- The Fourth International wasn't adapted to the end of World War II -> this... you could argue this from several angles. a better one might be that it wasn't ready for the end of WWII because it wasn't ready for the beginning of WWII, which is the time it actually should have been setting up.
Motifs or claims (Marsden)
- The IMT has always said that Stalinist states were inevitable -> I genuinely don't think that's true. I remember them talking about Stalinists as 'a betrayal' like anyone else. I know that Trotsky had moments of trying to apologize to everyone at the last minute by saying Stalinist parties had to happen based on the conditions — we don't really hate Third World countries / we didn't really mean to create Stalin's Marxism instead of Trotskyism — and I remember the IMT repeating that. the position that's basically Cannon's position that it seems like Trotsky only upheld a little begrudgingly. so I don't think you have proof they've broken away from Cannon there
- The death agony of capitalism had begun by 1938 (Trotsky, The Transitional Programme) -> that seems a bit subjective. how did capitalism become so good at overtaking Germany, Russia, and Cuba from all sides if it was already dying? I think Woods is a little closer there. I think the thing neither of these articles captures is that there are really actually two layers of capitalism and one of them may have died in 1938 but the other one based on tiny islands and dividing capitalists into two-party systems has been going until about 2008.
- crisis of revolutionary leadership (Trotsky 1938)
- All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet 'ripened' for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception (Trotsky 1938)
fervent perfidious enemies + end of history = this. - The proletariat can transform a crisis of humankind into a crisis of revolutionary leadership (Trotsky 1938)
- Ted Grant gave up on countering the Soviet bloc because he assumed that Stalinist states exterminating the Fourth International meant the Fourth International really was ahead of its time
- Ted Grant did not correctly read Trotsky's prediction about an explosion of Trotskyist parties during the war as conditional; he did not properly entertain the concept that the Trotskyist International must defeat the Stalinist parties to be born -> okay. I mean, I'm willing to listen to any explanation of why on earth nothing happened
- Struggle will decide (Trotsky) / Each historical prognosis contains a unity of opposites (Trotsky) [5]
- We have based our entire judgment upon the incapacity of Stalinist methods to effect the world overthrow of capitalism; we have explained the impossibility of overturning capitalism on a global scale "by any means whatsoever" (Mandel 1949) -> he has a point. Eastern Europe really did not last compared to even East Germany.
- Either the Soviet Union succumbs to the bureaucracy and restores capitalism or crushes the bureaucracy and transitions to Trotskyism (Trotsky 1938, "The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch") -> half of that statement is definitely correct.
- The Militant Tendency aimed to use the Labour Party for a complete transformation of society (Haston, Marsden) -> well, Haston said it himself, so if he represents them accurately, yes.
Subjective themes
- Replace the Fourth International with a Second International / The Fourth International should be replaced by an international consultative centre embracing all left wing currents (Haston) -> isn't what he says practically just a Second International?? the First International was arguably tilted toward anarchism but the Second was led by the Mensheviks so logically, if you let people who use the Labor Party form an International you get a Second International. Idealist economics, but without even any of the revolutionary rhetoric of supposedly being able to do things like create a Liberal republic over a monarchy