Ontology:Q4002
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalin's Marxism is Leninism
(Q4002)1-1-1
Core characteristics
Main sense
Stalin's Marxism is a valid Marxism, is a form of Leninism, and could hypothetically be the most correct form of Leninism
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalin's Marxism is Leninism
(Q4002)1-1-1 - (... fuller list of aliases)
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽mainstream Marxism-Leninism
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Characteristics (sense )
Only the corpus of theory that Lenin described circa 1906 is actually Leninism, but Stalin deviated from this earliest form of Leninism, therefore anything Stalin created is a revisionist Marxism and is not Leninism; because Stalin's Marxism is not Leninism the label "Marxism-Leninism" is incorrect
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/ Trotskyism
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Characteristics (sense LB)
Stalin-followers of the 1900s-1950s did not meet the criteria to be Marxists; they were not assembled around a Marxist theory, they did not create a Marxist party in the Soviet Union (this is also to imply they did not create a Marxist party in any other country), and overall, Stalin's "Marxism" was not a form of Marxism at all, it was not a "named Marxism", and "meta-Marxist analysis of Stalinist factions" collapses into being the same thing as Marxist analysis of non-Marxist movements
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/ Trotskyism
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Components
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalin's Marxism is Leninism
(Q4002)1-1-1 - forming from [Item]
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalin's Marxism is Leninism
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/ Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism
(Q4002/IV)1-1-1
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalinists were not Marxists
(Q4002/LB)1-1-1
Wavebuilder characterizations
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalin's Marxism is Leninism
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/ Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism
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/ Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ Leninism is for defending Soviet borders ( / DX)1
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalin's Marxism is Leninism
(Q4002)1-1-1
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Stalin's Marxism is Leninism
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/ Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism
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/ Abandon Trotsky and Bolshevism has failed
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/ Abandon Trotsky and Bolshevism has failed
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/ Stalin expelled Trotskyists from
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/ Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism
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/ Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism
Background
This proposition has two major forms: the positive claim that Stalin's Marxism is Leninism, and the negative claim that Stalin's Marxism is not Leninism. Because these propositions are about as close as an organic claim about reality can get to being perfect negations of each other, they have been combined into the same Item.
The main sense of this proposition, sense "ML", is the claim that the corpus of Marxist theory built up by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union prior to 1950 is a valid form of Marxism with nothing in particular to disqualify it — that if one considers most of the works of Lenin to be valid Marxism, then Lenin and Stalin have made similar numbers of errors and Stalin's contributions are approximately as valid. This particular Item does not attempt to set up Stalin's Marxism as "mainstream", even though there are good arguments for that, and this proposition can be used in the process of reaching them.
The second sense of this proposition, sense , is the claim that by 1950 the theories of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as seen in the 1930s had become invalid for use at the time they were used and that at some point Stalin's contributions became unacceptable.
sense IV
This is the claim within
/ Trotskyism (top-level category)1-1-1 that
⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽mainstream Marxism-Leninism1-1-1 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 "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 Marxisms1-1-1 — not even to the advantage of Trotskyism as its own new Marxism. There is no meaningful way to say that this claim is true.
sense LB
This is a more narrow claim within Trotskyism that both puts more requirements on Stalin's faction and claims that Stalin's faction more or less did not fill any of the requirements. Here, Trotskyism is held up as a theory of all the world's workers' movements and it is claimed that through not applying some of the methods of Trotskyism other movements are simply not applying Marxism at all.
One very common way to argue this claim is attempting to characterize Stalin's party as a movement of bureaucrats that ultimately generates philosophy and strategies to suit the interests of that group of people rather than the interests of the overall population. The clearest way to make this argument is to point out that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union contained internal contradictions, and although the overall party may declare itself to be a "red" faction, it may internally contain several other ideologies of different colors. By 1952 in the Soviet Union, it had become apparent that people such as Yaroshenko with blue or strawberry Idealist theories were attempting to advance those theories in the Soviet government. Despite him not directly being a member of the central party himself, the presence of Yaroshenko casts doubt on how many members of the central party or overall body of people under consideration for it were actually red-aligned theorists. If it could be shown that the Soviet Union had been full of people like Yaroshenko with only a small number of respectable theorists like Stalin, then there would be reason to doubt the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a structure and ask why the overall structure of the Soviet Union was generating so many Idealists. The typical timelines and accounts of causality that Trotskyists present often do not give a convincing explanation of how the overall process would have happened. However, if Trotskyists wanted to discredit the CPSU the most effective argument they could make would look something like this:
1) The Communist Party of the Soviet Union forms. 2) The CPSU assumes it is legitimate because formations create philosophies. 3) The CPSU fills up with Idealists. 4) The few crimson Marxists remaining — the class traitors — try to defend the CPSU because they are still aligned with Marxism and they know that Marxism successfully created the CPSU. 5) Large numbers of questionable theorists across the Soviet government make bad decisions. 6) Stalin defends many of the bad decisions because they are not against his goals. The CPSU is actually an internal alliance between Marxism and non-Marxist factions. 7) Non-Marxist factions taking up large parts of the Soviet Union and China fail to join together, or try to form international Liberalisms, either way slicing apart the Communists and the Third International. 8) Stalin doesn't catch step 7 and persecutes early Trotskyism assuming he can prevent step 7. 9) Stalin dies, and the soup of non-Marxist factions rules the world.
Although Trotskyists' improper focus on Stalin has historically made their arguments difficult to believe, the situation changes if they instead present Stalin's Marxism as a model of the overall CPSU and then show that that model was incorrect and amounted to false consciousness despite the specific false claim being that supporting Marxism creates Marxism; Stalin was not supporting Marxism in that Stalin's theory is wrong. This particular argument might create difficulties for Trotskyist organizations as people accuse all of them of having false consciousness about their role in creating world socialism, but even so it would be the more honest way of judging both the CPSU and their own organizations. If Trotskyists can tolerate the terrifying implication that all Marxisms have some probability of being false and all Marxist organizations have some chance of being pointless, they can accuse the CPSU of being an eclectic strawberry Marxism full of bureaucrats which is not a dictatorship of the proletariat and by their particular standards is not Marxism.
Another angle from which Trotskyists make this argument is to point to the whole of all countries capable of forming Marxist parties and identify this as a top-level sociophilosophy — a grouping which is not simply an faction of people joined by ideas or shared characteristics, but a system containing contradictory elements which are expected to form a self-perpetuating whole. [2] From this angle, one could attempt to argue that Stalin departed from Marxism because he promoted not seeing the overall industrial world as a dialectical system where horizontal processes can happen at higher scales and only arguing about the internal workings of one country, on whether that country should spontaneously form "red" structure or "orange" structure. [3] In the grand scheme of things, people have been continually arguing about Stalin's Marxism or Trotskyism uniting individual countries since about 1991, but before World War II it was more common to discuss Communist Internationals and the best strategies for forming a Communist International. There is an entire discussion to be had about "red" Communist Internationals versus "orange" Communist Internationals which has often been neglected as Stalin-followers proceed to talk only about individual countries and Trotskyists proceed to talk about Communist Internationals more than individual countries. In this context Trotskyists may be correct in saying that for some reason the actions of Stalin's party may have ended up shifting the discussion entirely away from Communist Internationals, incidentally discarding discussions of dialectical systems and throwing away parts of Marxism. The caveat to understand with this claim is that individual Trotskyist authors may not fully understand the process of how it is that "Marxism" came to be about individual countries and not about Communist Internationals. If the author gives a wrong account of this process, then the claim will superficially appear to be false. However, this claim would become more likely if the author could present a materially accurate meta-Marxist analysis of the factions within the Soviet Union or any countries that seem to have similar historical situations. If the analysis does not appear to begin by assuming that Trotskyism is more valid than Stalin's Marxism or vice versa, accurately presents both factions in terms of their stated goals, actions toward those goals, and interactions, and is able to show that the actions of Stalin-followers did in fact ultimately end up putting an end to all Communist Internationals and most discussions of Communist Internationals, then it would be able to show that Stalin's Marxism contains less Marxism at the international scale, as an independent problem from whether it contains Marxism at the national scale. This would not fully prove that Stalin's Marxism actually contains no Marxism, but it would be a damning find as to whether Stalin's Marxism is or is not a revisionist Marxism; succeeding at this argument could be enough to get Stalin's Marxism demoted to a strawberry Marxism.
Overall, this version of the counter-claim turns out to be stronger inasmuch as it tends to involve material arguments about what is Marxism instead of historical continuity arguments about what is "the original" Leninism. There are two clear paths for showing either that the CPSU as opposed to Stalin could not produce a theory of how to turn itself back into a Marxist party, or that events around the CPSU more or less deleted all dialectical models of the international scale from later discussions of Marxism. If both statements could be shown to be the case, the case would have been made that Stalin's Marxism did not ultimately contain Marxism either on the inside or on the outside, and for however complicated of reasons was not actually crimson Marxism.
Notes
- ↑ The trade unions, the present situation, and Trotsky's mistakes (Lenin 1920). [1] [Item pending]
- ↑ M. Banda Embraces Stalinism (III) (North 1988/2018). In The Heritage We Defend. [chapter]. World Socialist Web Site.
- ↑ Trotskyists do not generally believe that a single country can spontaneously turn orange without horizontal processes happening between countries — or more precisely, across different chunks of people that can and will include countries. This "possibility" is only included here as one possible way of evaluating Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as two comparable sides of a single material contradiction happening in the Soviet Union region.