Research talk:5¢/ICFI/WoodsIntroducingRCI
What is the Revolutionary Communist International proclaimed by the former International Marxist Tendency of Alan Woods?
- field, scope, or group [Item]
Links
Nickel usage or significance
- (fill in later)
Motifs or claims (Woods)
- RCI founding manifesto
- World Perspectives: Crisis, Class Struggle, and the Tasks of the Communists (Socialist Revolution)
- Global capitalism finished its progressive role in 2024 / Only now has global capitalism exhausted its historically progressive role of developing the means of production (Alan Woods, 2024) [4] -> not exactly wrong, but probably setting the boundary a bit too late. arguably it was actually done in about 2000, after the internet had been invented but before LLMS. maybe you could peg the end of big capitalism to 2008, when there was a speculation crisis so big it hit both the United States and Japan.
the one thing I know with a bit more certainty is that we now live in a world shaped by the petty bourgeoisie in global multicapitalist hell. - It wasn't time for a Fourth International in 1917 / Global capitalism has not been developed enough to create a successful Fourth International until 2024; this is to imply that there were not the right material conditions for Trotskyism in 1917 -> claim accidentally implied by Alan Woods.
this.... wow, this is complicated. if you're not talking about the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of China had a lot of trouble getting started and creating a workers' movement and then ended up turning into Dengism. so there could actually be a decent claim that it wasn't time for Trotskyism to form in China until about 2000. but it's much harder to say that it wasn't time for Trotskyism to form in the Soviet Union, because of how it had that unusual structure of many separate nations in a supranational federation that has hardly ever been seen since. that is a bizarrely Trotskyist country structure, particularly when the country is so big, with such a great overall area. so I would hesitate to say that there weren't conditions for Trotskyism between about 1900 and 1930. that might have been the previous time there were! as World War II developed that kind of put a damper on the conditions for Trotskyism and shifted the conditions to be more favorable to Stalin's Marxism and Dengism for about 20 years, until in about 1960 after all the pressure and actual physical occupations across places like Germany and Korea there was nothing but Dengism. I think it's denying World War II to say there have been great conditions for Trotskyism this whole time, but I think there was a notable change around 1960 where the conditions for Trotskyism became better, partly because Trotskyists were becoming more successful at expelling blatant non-Trotskyists from their own organizations.
I hate to say that part of that might actually be because Israel was founded in 1948 and the United States started disproportionately focusing on Israel, giving Trotskyism more room to breathe because it wasn't as important as "the arab menace". I don't think the United States ever actually became committed to peace; I think it just shifted to different wars that affected some people less. Trotskyism is a little dangerous in that it always has a setup phase before you can even do anything and global conditions can just win and destroy your parties before you've even quite stopped the Fourth International from forming right oppositions. but given about 20 years of "peace" for everybody but Palestine the conditions become better. - a new revolutionary tendency out of the shattered fragments of Stalinism
- Crises of world imperialism will bring about international permanent revolution (?) without an actual consciousness in the body of workers of how to develop the Fourth International -> yeah. this is everything Alan Woods says in a nutshell.
I'm marking it red because in some senses this is similar to the mistake that kept me from siding with Trotskyism though not the same
hmm. I'm gonna need to read over the RCI's two perspectives documents to figure out if they are even saying 'international permanent revolution' because that makes a big difference in what swatch they are
Motifs or claims (Pablo)
- The Militant Tendency aimed to use the Labour Party for a complete transformation of society (Haston, Marsden) -> well, Haston said it himself, so if he represents them accurately, yes.
- A global war between the First World and the Second World will make the Soviet Union shape up and put the Stalinists back in control (1949) -> it really didn't. interesting hypothesis, I mean I think to some extent Stalin would have stood behind that one, but it really didn't pan out. [5]
Motifs or claims (Grant)
- The Fourth International wasn't adapted to the end of World War II -> this... you could argue this from several angles. a better one might be that it wasn't ready for the end of WWII because it wasn't ready for the beginning of WWII, which is the time it actually should have been setting up.
- Pablo is one of us after all (Grant 1950) [6] -> true but in a terrible way because both parties tended to weirdly lean back into Idealist economics and abandon Materialist models of history.
- The development of mass centrist groupings in the Stalinist and social democratic parties is inevitable (Grant 1970) -> hmm, there is some actual thought there. I mean, looking at it as the non-Marxist parties, sure, maybe, getting people out of those parties when you can is what will actually work as far as those parties are concerned. but in that case it does arguably look more like a Third International.
- Either the Labour party will produce Marxists and turn the Militant Tendency into an International or the Labour party will nationalize big corporations [7] -> this statement somehow manages to be wrong twice over rather than actually finding a viable alternative in the dilemma
- Stalinists can fix the USSR (Grant 1990) [8] -> who? where?? he's several decades too late. he should have been there in 1953.
- Any mass movement is a friend of the Communist International; if Venezuela has mass support it's basically socialism -> oh boy. he really doesn't even understand "Stalinism". that's making no distinction between Stalin's Marxism and Dengism and also the Labor Party. god he is like, the social-democrats from 1930 that stood by for posters of Roosevelt and Stalin everywhere instead of the social-democrats from today. why is this man stuck in 1930.
- parties of unified Marxism -> the motif of creating "left blocs" which are conglomerates of various separable factions. honestly? this is probably better than just infiltrating the labor party. [9] because groups like this eventually tend to split productively and produce one particular fraction that's slightly better. so, Woods slowly leveled up toward Materialism, just like Cannon and the RCP, but much slower.
- The Labour Party has a far greater historical weight and much deeper roots within the working class than Syriza ever had [10] -> oh my god no it doesn't. historical weight? the USFI bloc kept trying to use the Labour Party and never got anywhere. popularity is another thing, but it still only believes a bunch of people are willing to flock together and say "I believe that everybody" statements that don't transform anything.
and that worked for two years before it failed. amazing.
Motifs or claims (Marsden)
- The IMT has always said that Stalinist states were inevitable -> I genuinely don't think that's true. I remember them talking about Stalinists as 'a betrayal' like anyone else. I know that Trotsky had moments of trying to apologize to everyone at the last minute by saying Stalinist parties had to happen based on the conditions — we don't really hate Third World countries / we didn't really mean to create Stalin's Marxism instead of Trotskyism — and I remember the IMT repeating that. the position that's basically Cannon's position that it seems like Trotsky only upheld a little begrudgingly. so I don't think you have proof they've broken away from Cannon there
- The death agony of capitalism had begun by 1938 (Trotsky, The Transitional Programme) -> that seems a bit subjective. how did capitalism become so good at overtaking Germany, Russia, and Cuba from all sides if it was already dying? I think Woods is a little closer there. I think the thing neither of these articles captures is that there are really actually two layers of capitalism and one of them may have died in 1938 but the other one based on tiny islands and dividing capitalists into two-party systems has been going until about 2008.
- crisis of revolutionary leadership (Trotsky 1938)
- All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet 'ripened' for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception (Trotsky 1938)
fervent perfidious enemies + end of history = this. - The proletariat can transform a crisis of humankind into a crisis of revolutionary leadership (Trotsky 1938)
- Ted Grant gave up on countering the Soviet bloc because he assumed that Stalinist states exterminating the Fourth International meant the Fourth International really was ahead of its time
- Ted Grant did not correctly read Trotsky's prediction about an explosion of Trotskyist parties during the war as conditional; he did not properly entertain the concept that the Trotskyist International must defeat the Stalinist parties to be born -> okay. I mean, I'm willing to listen to any explanation of why on earth nothing happened
- Struggle will decide (Trotsky) / Each historical prognosis contains a unity of opposites (Trotsky) [11] / Where are the estates? (question; sense)
- We have based our entire judgment upon the incapacity of Stalinist methods to effect the world overthrow of capitalism; we have explained the impossibility of overturning capitalism on a global scale "by any means whatsoever" (Mandel 1949) -> he has a point. Eastern Europe really did not last compared to even East Germany.
- Either the Soviet Union succumbs to the bureaucracy and restores capitalism or crushes the bureaucracy and transitions to Trotskyism (Trotsky 1938, "The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch") -> half of that statement is definitely correct.
- A cluster of Mensheviks attempting to transform center-Liberal parties (Labour Party) will not get anyone closer to the Fourth International; it is necessary to build a Marxist party which can join the Fourth International (Cannon 1953) [12]
- After taking over the Liverpool city council, Militant allowed the Tories to suppress worker uprisings (1980-1985) -> I believe that. I wasn't quite believing what they said about China but knowing how bad at Marxism the overall USFI cluster was I actually believe this one.
- Militant was defeated by the representatives of global capitalism, and lost because it was isolated -> well that's ironic. claims to be more solid than the Fourth International, attempts Trotskyism in one city while surrounded by capitalism.
- Stalinists will never control the bureaucracy (Trotsky) [13]
- When Taafe and Woods split apart, this happened because Woods wanted to continue an incorrect line -> oh no. this is bringing back terrible memories of "Jake" wanting to build up one of the US third parties when nobody wants to do that and everybody wants to be an anarchist. while claiming to be different from the IMT. so is this really a crimson error? is Woods... red? as many bad things as they say about The Stalinists I never would have guessed that. maybe that's why I liked listening to them despite knowing not everything in their talks was correct. them, "Jake", and me were all the same swatch color, all three superficially trying to be different from each other, all the same.
- After failing with a party of unified Marxism, Woods went back to the Labour Party -> well that was predictable.
- Alan Woods has just now broken with Menshevism / He focuses almost exclusively on a belated recognition of the discrediting of the social democratic parties that his tendency for decades insisted were the instrument for achieving socialism -> the resemblance between Woods and someone from the historical RSDLP realizing only after the party splits that the Bolsheviks "might" be right (but debatably still not understanding Bolshevism) is uncanny. many signs in here that Woods is possibly a little better than Joe Biden but is barely good enough at Marxism to maybe be a Stalinist. it's not so much his focus on national versus international, it's that the red swatch and the orange swatch can sometimes legitimately represent levels of understanding Marxism and he just barely joined the Bolsheviks.
Subjective themes
- Replace the Fourth International with a Second International / The Fourth International should be replaced by an international consultative centre embracing all left wing currents (Haston) -> isn't what he says practically just a Second International?? the First International was arguably tilted toward anarchism but the Second was led by the Mensheviks so logically, if you let people who use the Labor Party form an International you get a Second International. Idealist economics, but without even any of the revolutionary rhetoric of supposedly being able to do things like create a Liberal republic over a monarchy
- Trotskyists cannot model Stalinism / Pierce Stalinism or bust / Trotskyists are exceptionally bad at envisioning a world where a Fourth International coexists with Stalinist states; most visible or well-known times a supporter of Trotskyism has attempted to come up with a compromise where Stalinist states keep existing it has simply amounted to such things as disappearing into the British Labor Party or letting the Fourth International be destroyed in Europe and then assuming the victory of the Third International meant the Fourth International was a century too soon; this is to imply that Trotskyist organizations in general will not survive attempts to correctly model Stalin's Marxism, and any such attempts may actually lead to their destruction [14]
- The "Revolutionary Communist International" (International Marxist Tendency; RCI, IMT) is about as Marxist as China — abundant reference to theorists with good ideas on top (Trotsky, Stalin, Mao), blue organization (Labour Party, cluster of corporations) on the bottom -> having to judge them from their talks and not knowing their actual history I really had no idea, because all I knew was that their talks sounded better on the surface than the Dengist course I'd found. this clears a lot of things up.