# Letter: Trotskyism in one country is the only way to Trotskyism
Rhandr Bergfalk / "reverseDragon"
[... most of article draft omitted]
... if Trotskyists ultimately want all the nations of the world to live in harmony, and no workers to pointlessly harm other groups of workers, then why do they bring such grim fates onto Third-World countries, and keep calling for the same processes to happen in even more countries even after they should know very well what these strategies lead to? ...
Here it's worth taking a brief aside to examine the concept of _non-linear determinism_, which violet Marxism makes use of in the process of putting together concepts that Liberal-republican-aligned reference works should be amply familar with in order to reconstruct all of dialectical materialism. ...
History is a complicated process of separate elements crashing into each other and affecting each other based on their starting characteristics, only to produce that neat "distance over time" graph in yesterday's math textbooks after the actual processes of history have long since completed. And without going all the way into Einstein, the other important thing to understand is that _nothing ever happens "first"_. ... Nothing happens second, nothing happens third, and nothing happens first. Everything happens at once over and over in continuous slices, and that is time.
... When Che Guevara began to observe Cuban society coming together during and after the Cuban revolution, he remarked that the way peasants responded to the revolution was nothing like the way he had previously seen people conceptualize being a doctor. [*ORM] In the before times doctors had always been training off in some university removed from the people, and they had had to think of their contribution to society as isolated individual actions coming only from themselves. Then as Cuba proceeded along into socialist transition, it became that doctors and rural communities were contributing to each other in both directions, everything happening at the same time. Doctor and peasants, one slice. Doctor and peasants, another slice. Time is not a visual novel where the protagonist makes one choice and it changes the entire world. Time is not a turn-based role-playing game where Pikachu chooses to do something and then Sobble chooses to do something, and if Pikachu has the higher Speed number its isolated individual choice in a favorable type matchup results in a 3× multiplier and brings it to victory. (As much as that model does in fact consist of slices of interacting things that proceed two-opposing-actions-per-slice and may be termed much /closer/ to how time actually functions.) Time actually happens several times at a time, and history is the cumulative history of multiple colliding histories. This is how it is that hundreds of thousands of workers who are all separate and competing as living organisms and may not even know each other can all end up coming together to create a movement. None of them decides to start the movement first. They simply start joining into a larger object in which they are all connected, and time proceeds to happen several times at a time per unit of time. Marx and Lenin each have their well-known quotes about "days where decades happen". But what is not fully appreciated is that at truly important moments in history that compression seems to go almost infinitely deep and there is almost a singularity happening. For a while very few things happen each week, but then more and more things happen in less and less time until everything is happening at once and linear time itself almost seems to go away entirely. When a particular short-term historical process has nothing further to do, the vortex of simultaneous interactions will begin to flatten out again, and time will once again begin to resemble a straight line. Ultimately, this perceived difference in linear versus non-linear time is because people perceive the world as individuals. The existence of individual people puts a mild distortion on what is really happening due to the fact that in every instance individuals separate from each other and act by themselves, they do not have as much opportunity to perceive the way that interactions between physical objects, whether large-scale and social or microscopic and chemical or just below all immediate material perception and quantum, can completely take away linear time.
...
In the course of creating every stable workers' state — the processes that happen in the real world, not the hypothetical processes that happen in our heads — there is a particular recurring series of events that seems to happen:
* A central party-nation is created, typically known as the Communist Party, or occasionally the Workers' Party.
* People start talking about things happening all at once through the fusion of different regions and trades into local communities rather than in a linear way. Especially if the country still has peasants. Che Guevara and the skilled doctors go to the rural regions. [*ORM] The Workers' Party of Korea tries to stimulate different industries being developed in balance so that a particular town will have everything it needs at low cost.
* The central party and peripheral Leninist theorists start realizing that classes are not as important to the development of society after class-based governments are removed from society. Experts, skilled workers, artisanal businesses, theorists, and lingering capitalists all begin contributing to the other parts of society around them and behaving in ways that are less antagonistic than before. The Workers' Party of Korea adds experts to its emblem next to workers and peasants. Fewer owners in China fight the rules and get arrested than you'd expect.
* The central party creates forms of republican representation for archaic classes and factions so that they don't actually try to destroy the central party or take over the government. The layout of political factions changes from an unstable slosh to an orderly series of islands where they all occupy their own particular position in society and stop attacking each other. In the United States, this would be as if the Republican and Democratic parties just became permanent nation-states each with their own local president rather than there being a country-wide president.
* The country rushes to create all the things it needs inside its country whenever possible, in order to prevent external countries from effecting neocolonialism and increasingly slurping up all its area for the purpose of multiplying their own stacks of capital, armies, and populations, as well as in case First World countries cruelly decide to cut everything off. China tries to make sure it owns all the patents and various designs that other countries are trying to manufacture inside it, and that it has control of the entire factory pipeline so that it effectively turns other countries' attempts at outsourcing into overseas retail. Earlier China makes a bunch of bootlegs copying First World products to varying degrees of accuracy. They know they will never get any help from First World countries in affording the first-party more expensive products and that they will effectively have to start every part of civilization from scratch, so they just go ahead and do it, permitting everyone to copy things as long as they put different names on them. The country prepares to become its own self-contained "world" detached from all countries showing it any hostility in case of emergency.
* People start talking about how they actually like their government and feel loyal to it and how it and them are part of the same thing, rather than hating it. Sometimes this comes out a little weird, like with North Korea talking about "the Juche idea". But it's rather consistent across countries. China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea all started talking about the general notion of a "tuning fork" where the central party genuinely listens to the people and the people do what it asks them to but both of these things happen at once, in all directions, in a single cohesive process. The government doesn't linearly tell people to do something they "then" have to do, it orders people to particular places only as it is in tune with them.
* People start talking about "being part of the Collective" as an immaterial value, as if it is an emotion that comes naturally to them but is hard to explain to people who haven't experienced it. People from Vietnam will give you a strangely mushy account of Marxism like it is actually somehow about immaterial values of wanting to help others and becoming a collective whole, but they aren't doing that because they're corrupted by European-style bourgeoisie who have an interest in teaching people to think like isolated packaged books so they can sell more books. They're doing it because the structure of the society they live in has actually changed and this new structure is causing them to think differently and distort their descriptions of the world in a new way which is less harmful and perhaps less inaccurate to reality even if it still has problems. People start spouting actual "socialist ideology" which is not based in Materialism but is unlike capitalist ideology. [*Lo2,*LO]
* The central party pays a lot of attention to the poorest or most vulnerable regions of the country, possibly ignoring all the groups of people that are doing somewhat okay. China starts ignoring most of the country in favor of creating programs to help rural areas, making Chinese workers and unemployed city dwellers in areas of stagnating job growth tired. (I predict this would be likely to happen in the United States — all the programs go to Black people due to decades of internal sanctions destroying their towns and neighborhoods and White people are just kind of left in a marginally better [but-otherwise-nearly-exactly-the-same] capitalism confused on why they created socialism.)
* People talk about improbable-sounding plans to change the basic structure of society without a revolution. Seeing the central party actually do things without getting rid of all capitalists, and capitalist parties and a Communist party simply exist and have congresses together side by side, they start to believe that it's possible to somehow get capitalists to just give up the remaining areas of enclosed capitalism and turn corporations into different social structures, and the central party can just mediate that and incentivize people to do that little by little instead of having to fight anybody. [*wa2,*WA] This sounds utterly crazy if you don't live in China or Cuba, but if you do live in China, Cuba, or Vietnam, you see things differently and you realize on some level that society is actually made of groups of things of particular types more than it's made of owners or domination. It simply becomes intuitive to you that corporations and subsidiaries are actually just groups of people and if you could somehow rearrange those groups of workers like a sliding puzzle or a _Sokoban_ level or something until all the boxes were on the correct point in the room to walk around them instead of pushing them any more, maybe you could just make capitalists unnecessary that way.
* People become confused why "Existentialism" is so popular in First-World countries — the general cluster of bourgeois ideologies based around "lived experiences", "narratives", "people just existing and being themselves without being judged in reactionary political programs", "prejudices", "attitudes", "microaggressions", "representation in media", "community" (especially terming every demographic of people a "community"), the idea every problem with society is actually a lack of "freedom" or a malicious restriction of Freedom, and society changing through marginalized individuals making a lot of noise and doing everything themselves. Nobody in the country understands the weird back-and-forth between ferocious reactionaries and Existentialists that characterizes United States politics. People develop movements and "communities" for specific demographics much slower, and don't think of demographic-specific issues like homophobia as urgent compared with things that affect the whole society. This is one of the very few downsides of living in a workers' state. However, if you've looked very closely at all the other bullet points, you would know that the best chance of having movements and appropriate anti-discrimination laws comes when you neatly fit your movement into the overall goals of the central party and the junctions where parts of society merge together rather than fighting them. This was true even back in the time of the Soviet Union; Lenin said bad things about gay people, but ultimately, nearly every decision was made based on whether movements allied with the central party plus its majority of people in support. I think quite seriously that if a bunch of people were pro-gay but against Trotsky they would have changed the gay laws.
The picture of a socialist republic that you see in the real world looks very different from the picture that is in people's heads before a revolution. Is this because parties in other countries have forgotten how to apply Marxism? That would not actually seem to be the case, given that many of these changes have been independently repeated across different countries that are far away from each other or not particularly easy to get into and study. Some of these changes look much more like predictable historical patterns that Marxist historical materialism should be studying as material processes of societal transition. But there is something unexpected about these societal transitions. They are not based in traditional concepts of "class movements". They are simply repeated processes that keep occurring in different countries where particular structural elements are combined into particular structural arrangements, such as with different political factions being combined into New Democracy, or with different existing social strata having to be recogized as part of a single town to get them to function together, or with national populations in the Soviet Union being combined to become union republics (a very underappreciated feature of the Soviet Union in comparison to state businesses). ... [*wb2]
Perhaps nothing is neatly linear, in a world where everything happens at once.
Here is what I think is the reason that neither Stalin's Marxism nor Trotskyism predicted the arrival of Deng Xiaoping Thought. They didn't predict the arrival of each other. At the end of the day, all three of these variants of Marxism have different content. Mainstream Marxism-Leninism often strictly believes in realizing Bolshevism and making sure capitalists are abolished first. Trotskyism believes in realizing some kind of very large structure containing multiple countries and making sure that happens first, while it assumes that any other kinds of development should only be happening after that. Deng Xiaoping Thought has another totally different set of priorities, where it creates a central party but then steps over to the side and starts focusing on all parts of the country using what they currently have and operating together so that they aid each other rather than fighting each other. It looks strange and frightening from the outside when all you can see is China obsessing about defending itself from foreign capital and not taking a chance at abolishing capitalists, but on the inside of one of these countries the experience is very different and you see a society where people support and include each other as part of the same society, at least in basic ways. [*LO] Different Marxisms are not unequivocally better or worse. They seem to be parallel forms of development which merely transform themselves on tracks of different "colors". Crimson Marxisms are basic, and focus on the fundamentals such as state businesses. Orange Marxisms are rather perfectionist, and get upset if a country is not meeting some oddly specific set of criteria by an often impossibly early date, where the actual criteria for calling the country's progress adequate are often not very clear. Strawberry or peach-flower Marxisms have an emphasis on defending a population from external aggressors, and will sometimes put aside fundamentals, but at other times will show superb national unity. The early Soviet Union was a crimson Marxism. Trotskyism and Bordigism are orange Marxisms. Deng Xiaoping states, including China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea are strawberry Marxisms. There may also be a category of mauve Marxisms that contains the historical Black Panther Party and certain Marxisms from Africa, emphasizing concepts like having the hope to stay standing in unthinkable conditions or being prepared to build the structures that will compose society over being prepared to destroy. The origins of such concepts are self-evident: mauve Marxisms emerge in devastated populations that resemble living ruins, so naturally rebuilding society will be one of their goals.
Nobody should actually have been surprised that Marxism seems to express itself as various distinct trajectories that only vary further by country. Marx himself realized that countries began with different forms of structure including division into the United States North and South where only one contained slave plantations or the so-called "Asiatic mode of production", and suggested that as countries flipped over into their era of socialism there would be socialisms with different characteristics. Keeping crimson Marxism versus creating Deng Xiaoping Thought could be a result of different country characteristics. But more than that, it appears these different "color trajectories" are a new thing all their own. Neither Marx nor Lenin saw them coming, but this alone is not to say they are not real. If one simply looks through the observed course of history and all the events that happened, there are some events that did not previously make any sense. One of these events is the split between the Soviet Union and China despite their "revisionist deviations" from Marxism looking similar to each other when viewed at a distance. Another of these events is the split between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and early Trotskyism. If these groups were all working off the same theory and there were only a single thing called Marxism-Leninism, none of this would seem to be in line with their goals. But if Stalin's Marxism, Maoism, and Trotskyism are all different things all separated by their own beginning country characteristics and all aiming at different desired trajectories, these splits would become almost expected. The entire universe we live in exists on top of the shaky foundation of entropy. Stars break the limits of spacetime and turn into black holes. Frozen rivers spontaneously break open. An ordinary banana contains radioactive potassium atoms. Quantum particles don't stay themselves, and convert between matter particles and energy particles even though they are small enough they should be fundamental. Nothing is perfectly stable. It would be stranger to suggest that the development of workers' states is a linear progression toward what is better that never goes backward than that it is an error-prone process where sometimes things are built and sometimes things break apart. After all, nothing in this universe is linear; time happens multiple times at a time. It may be more useful to think of the development of workers' states like the development of chemical polymers, where several things are stacked together into a larger object through effort (energy) but the overall structure can also be broken open and the transformations undone. Societal transformations are a bit like combining a bunch of carbon atoms together into cellulose and then into plant cells. Each transformation builds something in particular which may be unique and yet whose unique identity and characteristics are distinguished by the structural elements that built it.
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[*Lo2] "Vietnamese people ... have a tradition of helping each other, caring about each other ... we've been taught that selfishness and individualism is bad" "[Ho Chi Minh:] Individualism causes laziness, comparison, haughtiness, jealousy, corruption ... Individualism is not human nature" ("Is Vietnam socialist?") [*LO]
[*wa2] "[Throughout history] the relationship between reform and revolution ... produces four tendencies: ... (1) The ones who support the government and regard reform as the substitute for revolution ... (2) The ones who support the government while considering reform a catalyst for revolution ... (3) The ones who protest the government and regard reform as the substitute for revolution ... (4) The ones who protest the government and regard reform as the catalyst for revolution. ... We should endeavor to be the first kind and instruct people from the second, third, and fourth." (Feng, "Periodic ratio of history") [*WA]
[*wb2] "There are basically two forms of socialism: classical socialism and the reformed mode. Stalin mode belongs to the former. ... Both classical socialism and reformed are forms that actually exist in reality. They cannot deny the existence of each other" (Feng, "Is SWCC real socialism?") [*WB]
[*LO] "Is Vietnam socialist?". @Lunaoi. (5 April 2020 / retr. 18 Mar 2026). _Luna oi!_. time 27:27-36:00. [video]. <youtube.com/watch?v=mMubOw5H-yo>
[*WA] "How Does China Today Surmount The 'Periodic Ratio Of History'?" Feng, W.Z. "@swcclectures2031". (3 July 2021 / retr. 18 Mar 2026). _SWCC Lectures_, chapter/section 12-6. [video]. <youtube.com/watch?v=WSOi5O-PXY0>
[*WB] "Is Socialism With Chinese Characteristics Real Socialism?" Feng, W.Z. "@swcclectures2031". (28 June 2021 / retr. 18 Mar 2026). _SWCC Lectures_, chapter/section 603. [video]. <youtube.com/watch?v=62mvMWJHt8g>
[*ORM] "On Revolutionary Medicine" (Guevara 1960). <marxists.org/archive/guevara/1960/08/19.htm>
