Ontology:Q4002
Core characteristics
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- Stalin's Marxism is a form of Leninism, and could hypothetically be the most correct one
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Characteristics (sense IV)
- alias (en) [string]
- He calls it Marxism-Leninism, but it isn't really Leninism
- Marxism-Leninism as disputed theory (proposition)
- Stalin Thought is a revisionist Leninism
- Only the Leninism that Lenin described circa 1906 is actually Leninism, therefore anything Stalin created is not Leninism
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- Trotskyism
(top-level category)1-1-1
Components
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Wavebuilder combinations
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- Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism
(IV)1-1-1
Usage notes
sense IV
This is the claim within Trotskyism that mainstream Marxism-Leninism is supposedly not either mainstream or Leninism. It rests on the implicit claim that Trotskyism is the only possible content of Leninism, and any "Leninism" which is not equivalent to Trotskyism is thus not a Leninism.
This claim is called into question by all the times that Trotsky had differences with Lenin and the two got into arguments. The trade unions incident of 1920 was one of the more notable of these mistakes: within it, Trotsky presented a garbled understanding of unions while Lenin had to lay out the actual relationship between a Leninist party and the trade unions as a "complex arrangement of pulleys" where wisdom and experts would need to filter into the party.[1] If Trotsky did not understand how unions produce a Marxist party as the backbone of a workers' state three years after the Russian revolution, but Lenin did, this is not a good sign for Trotsky's legitimacy as the main theorist of Leninism. It is possible to attempt to argue against this observation from the angle that Trotskyism is a later variation of Leninism attempting to fix it by removing the parts which would produce a "E:Pig state" even as Lenin left them in. However, if one takes this point of view, it does not achieve the goal of aligning Trotsky with Lenin against Stalin; it would instead leave Lenin and Stalin aligned against Trotsky, meaning that Stalin is still the legitimate theoretical successor to Lenin. This problem only becomes glaringly obvious within a meta-Marxist framework, where neither Stalin nor Trotsky is taken as the only official Marxism. Within Trotskyism, it is not advantageous to label different schools of Marxism and model how each of them behaves as much as to support Marxisms that appear to be merging into Trotskyism and denounce all other Marxisms and their connected national independence struggles as threats to world revolution. Within mainstream Marxism-Leninism, theorists have been more open to understanding the behavior of Trotskyism than vice versa, even if this was primarily for the purpose of protecting workers' states by catching Trotskyite conspiracies. Stepping outside of Trotskyism, it becomes more obvious that Lenin's period, Stalin's period, and Trotskyist movements are all material-historical periods. To predict the behavior of each of these periods, we should understand them from their internal structure and how this structure interacts with itself. The internal content of Lenin's period and Stalin's period includes experts or "bureaucrats" in both cases, while the internal content of Trotskyism is different.
Trotsky's claim is not historically accurate and it does not show an understanding of the development of plural Marxisms — not even to the advantage of Trotskyism as its own new Marxism. There is no meaningful way to say that this claim is true.