User:RD/9k/A post-Trotsky world (Q41,91)
Main entry
- We live in a post-Trotsky world / The events of the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy in the Soviet Union and the way First-World countries reacted to Trotsky and the conspirators have permanently changed the historical conditions in all countries but most of all in First-World countries
- We live in a post-Trotsky world -> technically, this could also be spun as an argument that Trotsky is right.
Liberal-republican angle
In the First World Trotsky is sacred
/ Most people in First-World countries consider "Stalinism" to be a real prejudice and anti-Trotskyism to be a real oppression / If you want to work with "The US Left" it is a "reality" that Stalin and the Soviet Union are a danger and your enemy / (9k)If Trotsky is Good, become a Trotskyist
/ If Stalin's government oppressing Trotsky is morally wrong then not aiding Trotsky in abolishing global capitalism and realizing Trotskyism is fully as morally wrong, because practically speaking, not oppressing Trotsky materially requires realizing Trotskyism; in order to back Trotsky against Stalin you also must realize Trotskyism, or you are lying to your supposed allies and everybody else ->
the whole reason Trotsky made noise and kicked up a movement, historically, was that he wanted to realize Trotskyism, and he was specifically determined to be upset when people stopped him from realizing Trotskyism. nobody actually thinks about this. but I thought about it a lot, because I was born post 1960 when the actual theoretical content of Trotskyism had been going around for a while, and it had become that engaging with the existence of Trotskyism without looking closely at what its theoretical content is would be intellectually dishonest. so, yeah, I looked at Trotskyism, and I went, "hey, wait, it makes no sense for Tories to keep claiming Trotsky supported Liberal-republicanism when he put out a lot of detailed work saying he didn't, and even on the ground, he corrected other Marxists on what he believed to be errors in Marxism, which he wasn't doing to help Liberal-republicanism. Trotskyism is at the very worst a militantly sectarian Marxism that's actually trying to do Marxism." and, after living in a world which was drenched in standpoint epistemology and "lived experience" and demographics "inherently having value" the more historical facts I learned the less sense that claim made. all the Liberal-republican nonsense stuffed into my head came together and I was like, "so according to LiberalRepublicanism-CriticalTheory-Kropotkinism. Trotskyists are human beings, and human beings have inherent value because they have Lived Experiences, and when somebody has a Lived Experience you can't overwrite it with your own, but Trotskyists' Lived Experiences inherently revolve around Trotskyism so logically speaking nobody should be allowed to overwrite Trotskyist Lived Experience with a Liberal-republican or anarchist idea of what Trotskyists want, only Trotskyists know what Trotskyists want, but Trotskyists want to abolish global capitalism down to the smallest levels and replace it with Trotskyism, so, like, if you believe in Liberal-republican or anarchist morality aren't you logically obligated to at least believe in realizing Trotskyism in limited areas of the world?"
this conclusion was entirely logical to me but it kind of turned me away from believing Trotskyism because even early on I was already looking at it through rudimentary forms of Marxism and I thought, "I don't know if it's a true model of history, and it's also super overzealous about overwriting every other form of Marxism on earth. that's kind of scary. I don't trust that." I thought that for about 6 years. and then... then I learned that apparently all the arguments inside Trotskyism that had become such a meme among other Marxisms had actually been slowly sorting people into multiple Communist Internationals but they were different sizes to where a lot of them would disappear but one would only get bigger, and I was like, "wait, did Trotskyism start with a bad method and then accidentally become true? that's crazy. I need to take a much closer look into what's going on here." and now I'm in what can only be described as denial, continuously trying to find ways that Trotskyism isn't actually true yet I think I'm losing, and I'm afraid what's going to happen is I will just have to explain that the most accurate form of Marxism has two variations where one is false and garbage and one is correct and we only got the correct one because some immoral people everyone around the world hated took a complete leap of faith on the false one that shouldn't have been true and a bunch of people told lies and claimed the false one wasn't false and didn't try to kill a handful of people and destroy a sovereign government over a materially inaccurate ideology. I guess it's still a lot better than anarchism being true, or believing in Liberal-republicanism and having to explain how Liberal-republicanism having to massacre North American tribes to exist doesn't really mean anything and actually Liberal-republicanism containing morality and amendments makes all of that okay and makes it desirable to spread to every country. and before you bring up Cuba, no, those aren't the same, because it wasn't an entire island filled with gay people before the Communists got there and replaced them.- Liberal-republicanism objectifies Communists / Liberal-republicanism judges Communists based on their instrumental value to Liberal-republicanism, not on their own inherent worth -> Liberal-republicans will hate this. they hate it when you point out the blatant contradictions in their theory that show special pleading. but they'll find this hard to argue against once you lay it all the way out. according to Liberal-republicanism's own rules and own standards, polluted by no external standards other than the standard that it must correctly model reality, it cannot keep existing as a single intact republic and must crumble away to leave something different.
- It is unethical to rescue someone from harm under claims they will find psychological contentment and then ignore what their inner psychological needs actually are / It is unethical to rescue someone from harm under claims they will find what brings them psychological contentment and then completely ignore and deny what their inner psychological needs actually are / (9k) -> the biggest problem with a statement like this is that you start asking whether morality or ethics are even real and what either word actually means
Trotskyist angle
Abandon Trotsky, and Bolshevism has failed
/ If Bolshevism fails to take the educated individuals who are dedicated supporters throughout a revolution and integrate them into society such that they will not starve and can use their talents to improve society then Bolshevism has failed -> sub-case of: I'm not anticommunist but. this is about the only anticommunist argument I have ever found convincing. every anticommunist argument that wasn't Trotsky was totally confusing to me and just left me digging deeper and deeper until I saw how false every one of them was. but this is the only one that's sort of held up as I got more and more information. and it's haunted me ever since. it's easy to blame Trotsky and say he made the wrong choices. but like, what happens if he obeys? if the country is actually failing at things and every time he tries to get into a position the should theoretically be worthy of the experts just kick him out until he's standing next to the handful of peasants still starving, isn't there actually some point where he has a right to complain? that has never sat right with me. the notion that even when you build Bolshevism it could have a fraying edge where people are still shunted into a world of individualism with no support, and perhaps treated really badly for just failing to spontaneously be unbelievably excellent at things, tossed quotes about revisionism because their actual skills are not perfect. it feels like there are natural points where people simply aren't materially part of the material object called society and it makes them angry because in a world where everything is claimed by a group of human beings they don't want to be treated as not human beings.- Abandon Trotsky, and Bolshevism has failed -> appears in: Animal Farm.
- Read Trotsky before bashing Stalin / If you haven't read Trotsky you can't hold up Stalin's work as the specimen that disproves Marxism (ICFI) / To overlook the work of Trotsky is to flatten and misrepresent Marxism (ICFI) [1]
- Trotskyism explains the 20th century / No political event in the 20th Century can be understood without reference to Trotsky's extensive writings (David North) (sense) [2] -> really bold statement but not necessarily wrong
- When people regress back to old Menshevik models, it was because the endorsement of Stalin made them [3] -> and that was because in the material world Stalin successfully defended his country from foreign empires while the primary thing foreign empires want is to slurp up as much of other countries as possible — while other stationary empires have empires as friends and don't want to upset their friends. so, this is technically true, but it's not the full story.
gosh this is exactly the kind of Trotskyist I was subtly making fun of in my video. [4] the Trotskyist that thinks that Stalin's publicity problem is an actual serious problem with Marxism. to be fair it's not as bad when they try to genuinely claim there were theoretical problems in Stalin and Trotsky somehow upheld a more robust theory, like this. Trotskyism is kind of hilarious from any angle but I definitely like it better when it isn't trying to make all its arguments using Stalin and actually claims to have theoretical models.
Meta-Marxist angle
- A theory of society which cannot explain the Trotskyite conspiracy is no theory of society at all -> a statement which is bold but as far as I can tell completely justified. mainstream Marxism-Leninism can't actually explain the series of events which would prevent Trotsky going to the external empires and betraying the Soviet population. early Maoism was actually closer to being able to solve this problem, even though today there are still problems of people leaving countries and becoming their enemies, all of them smaller in scope than the Trotskyite conspiracy.
Trotsky syndrome of countable cultures
/ (9k) -> the usually-nonfictional motif of someone being able to realize, assuming they're smart, that various people are forming into a countable culture and fighting for their rights against the rest of society legitimately and perhaps effectively, but utterly not being able to fit into that countable culture as a culture and remaining a cultural "foreigner" to countable civil rights movements that they never actually want inside them. you can see this with the Trotskyite conspiracy, which did it with very little wisdom or awareness, and separately with the way modern Trotskyism reacted to BLM / 1619 Project — although they were marginally smarter in that case. though it's hard to pinpoint exactly why it happens, this is a really big problem for progressive theories and movements in general. it has the potential to kill schizoanalysis through the failure of different sorted cultures to "properly" act as a freeform, uncountable unity of opposites that inherently wants to go together, but it can even kill particular Marxisms, as historically it arguably did. any movement or party or cluster of people-groups hit with Trotsky syndrome sees that it can't possibly control the people who don't fit into it and its days are numbered.- Read Trotsky before bashing Stalin / If you haven't read Trotsky you can't hold up Stalin's work as the specimen that disproves Marxism (Trotskyism, meta-Marxism) [5] -> I'd say this is stupid except... I think this is backhandedly true. I think it kind of is technically true that if you compare Stalin and Trotsky you'll come out with a better perspective on what Marxism is; the only problem is that you'll come away realizing Stalin was much better than you'd thought. so, ok, this is one of those statements that's 'right, but at what cost?'.
- A world in which Trotsky can exist without destroying Leninism is a better world -> although I believe nearly every single proposition in ethics is bogus with very few exceptions, this is one of the few ethical principles I still believe.
it's actually shocking how far this one can get you though. like, it rules out every bourgeois philosophy trying to represent itself as good, because none of them truly support or protect Trotskyists. but it also doesn't say that siding with Trotskyism to destroy "Stalinist" parties is good because if Trotsky destroys his own party through incompetence, then Trotsky still destroyed Leninism. so you very specifically need a party that Trotsky can't destroy because it is "Trotsky-proof". it can't shove Trotsky out of the overall party-nation but its core methods have to be good enough that he can't disintegrate it. which is a series of requirements that at this time is bound to make just about everybody a little mad, but I genuinely can't see how you could choose otherwise because I can't see how you could defend splitting Marxism in two to either fight off all the Trotskyists for Stalin or fight off all the "Stalinists" for Trotsky. that just seems medieval and like the exact kind of thing Marxism has been trying to end.
If Trotsky is Good, become a Trotskyist + existential materialism = this.
When the joke is over
Trotsky was framed
/ The 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy never happened / Trotsky was framed / Lev Sedov was framed / Zinoviev was framed / Emmanuel Goldstein was framed (fiction) / Snowball was framed (fiction) -> this is one of those statements that's so centrally important to world history that it's fine for the main sense of the Item to be in the negative instead of the positive.
yeah, no.... this proposition is so important I'm putting it in the first 1,000 where usually only basic stuff like physics and mathematics went.
Laws don't apply to Lev Sedov
/ No laws apply to Lev Sedov / Trotsky has exclusive privileges to kill people that nobody else has including Stalin, as long as nobody else ever finds out he did it; Trotsky or any other member of the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy is radically innocent until proven guilty, to the point that as long as enough people subjectively think he's innocent he is entitled to dismantle entire legal systems and governments and definitions of treason and definitions of terrorism as long as nobody notices before he's finished / You are exempt from all laws and moral dictates if your name is Lev Sedov (sense) ->
it really disturbs me to what extent everything that happens in the United States is all about morality and holding every single individual to the same standards even across situations that really should be different, and yet somehow, Trotsky is the only exception to all of it, and he gets to do whatever he wants as long as most people across the world agree he never did it. that makes absolutely no logical sense in any way and the last tiny fragment of me that can comprehend Enlightenment rationalism on any level at all is furious about it.
Trotsky enshrined the Spanishness Office
/ Trotsky forever changed the world by enshrining the framing that social structures are a special thing fully distinct from classes and the way to change societies is specifically to burst open or bring crushing pressure onto problem social structures, regardless of whether those structures are entire countries or ethnic groups; this is to imply but not state that the Trotskyite conspiracy spelled the end of all Marxism and marked the beginning of an age of anarchism- Tony Cliff enshrined the Spanishness Office -> actually... I think this one might be false as it's written above because it might have been Tony Cliff that did this. I know, I sound as crazy as the people I once made fun of. but there are about two major Trotskyist Internationals and Cliff jumped onto the movement in Britain exactly on the wing that either destroyed parties or dumped people into the blue Trotskyist International. see, it isn't difficult to explain — Trotsky and Cannon's positions are separable from Cliff and Grant's positions, and Cannon isn't the one endorsing putting pressure on entire countries, Cliff is.
Related
Ideologies or fields
- IV
/ Trotskyism
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/ meta-Marxism
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