9k:RD/BordigismNotActuallyMarxism/01 (Q618)

Prompt

If Stalinism isn't materially correct because it failed then how can Trotskyism be?
I used to be a Stalinist before over about 4-6 years I ended up realizing various parts of it were wrong, attempting to "fix" them, and then finally throwing out Stalinism and replacing it with a model of international permanent revolution. Back when I was a Stalinist it seemed completely obvious that, if Trotskyist parties kept producing revisionism in cases like the Militant Tendency and its later forms the IMT and RCI, "clearly" Trotskyism had to be a revisionist sect of Marxism that wasn't successfully producing Fourth Internationals because it wasn't true. Now I understand that wasn't fair with respect to regions like the Soviet Union where the strength of the Stalinist faction and Trotskyite resistance inside the country did not depend on how well each faction understood other countries; Trotskyists could have a more complete Marxism and Stalinists would still mobilize the entire bureaucratic apparatus connected to the central party to crush them. But... at various times I will see the ICFI present Stalinism as "nothing more than a deformation of Leninism", anarchism as being a failed philosophy because it didn't contain any viable strategies for taking power from the state, and postmodernism as funneling everyone back into accepting defeat because it has no theoretical content. Every theoretical tendency has an overall body of theories about movements, revolution, and what society will look like immediately after capitalism (obviously to varying degrees in that anarchism will have very little concrete theory about revolution and a lot of incoherent theory supposedly describing an anarchist society), and how well each tendency understands important events that happen at critical moments will determine whether it is effective at leading people away from capitalism or whether it eventually leads people back to capitalism. The ICFI has been able to show that for any given claim that "Stalin was defending the Soviet Union from capitalists" or "average people like anarchism more than Marxism", there is a pile of historical observations that will demonstrate that Stalin's allies repeatedly supported bureaucrats and imprisoned Marxists, and despite fighting against Marxists anarchists capitulate to the bourgeoisie. But in the context of the failures of so many other tendencies, how can anyone explain to everyday workers that Trotskyism isn't a "failed" tendency also? It can easily appear from a distance like the Cold War consisted of Liberal-republicanism and Stalinism (and perhaps some even worse revisionist Marxisms in Eastern Europe) but Trotsky's attempt to organize parties in Europe and North America hardly had any impact. And there are still any number of parties that claim to be Trotskyist but then end up feeding people into center-Liberal parties like the US Democratic Party or the British Labour Party. I know Trotskyism and the revisionist wings of Trotskyism are different things, but I really doubt the average person knows how to distinguish them. I am almost positive after my experiences taking multiple years to figure it out that the vast majority of people in the world do not have any idea how permanent revolution and the Fourth International are actually supposed to function. On an only partly related note, why isn't Stalinism its own Marxist tendency? Even if Stalin's allies were not correct about the future of the Soviet Union that would not necessarily mean they weren't Marxists at all. In practice, being "a Marxist" may be something of a spectrum that you attain to different levels where some people are "somewhat" Marxists but are not respectable Leninists (including Stalin), while other people are "definitely" Marxists in that they are Leninists; the ability to recognize attempts at Marxism may seem to needlessly legitimize Menshevism and such, but in the end, it also allows for clearly criticizing each time a writer or movement claims to understand part of Marxism but has blatantly changed the meaning of it. In my mind, the early Communist Party of China is evidence for "Stalin's Marxism" existing as a Marxist tendency because the CPC did create a new republic out of a feudal order, and the Kuomintang mainly existed in opposition to it. Maoism may have unique content of its own, but inasmuch as it is weak to being taken over by people who will simply restore capitalism, it seems to me like it is a form of Stalinism, which would mean that Stalinism as a whole is a unique form of revisionist Marxism and not purely a distortion of Lenin and Trotsky's Marxism.

When I attempted to describe Stalinism as a version of Marxism, you said that Marxism cannot exist as a body of claims without the dialectical materialist method. Is this to say that Bordigism wasn't Marxism? Bordiga conceptualized "Marxism" as more or less a body of claims that was already complete and would not need to be tested against the world and improved just to be close enough to carry out a worldwide revolution. This is clearly abandoning at least one of the central processes in dialectical materialism, that knowledge is only gained when two material things that could be groups of people interact.
I think one of the things that made me think Stalinism was a Marxist tendency is the fact that Marxist parties will form today and attempt to be Stalinist parties. I did not really know what to do with this. I guess a party can position itself as Stalinist or "mainstream Marxist-Leninist" (although "Stalinist tendency" is exactly what they mean by that) and actually contain an ahistorical Marxism that doesn't reflect the actual tendencies that existed in the Soviet Union at the time of Stalin.

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Ideologies, fields, or search engines

4699. Q4699/Q46,99IV (pronounced Fourth) / Socialism AI