Research talk:x4mer/WhyNotBoth01
Why fight the USSR's last Marxists?
- field, scope, or group [Item]
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/ Trotskyism
(top-level category)1-1-1 -
/ International Committee (Q46,02)1
-1-1
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Prompt
If Trotskyists did not intend to make the Soviet Union an extension of the First World as a step toward later establishing Trotskyism, then why did they take the risk of fighting Stalin and the last few Marxist theorists in the Soviet Union at all costs to make sure all the Stalinist theorists were replaced with Trotskyists?
Say, hypothetically, that Trotskyists had actually been setting up underground organizations in the 1930s, and the aim of those organizations was nothing more than to clear out the existing Communist Party of the Soviet Union and create a new Communist party or federation of Communist parties. Stalin's government hunts down the underground "Trotskyite conspiracy" and puts them on trial so none of the important Stalin-followers will be killed. But every Trotskyist ally has reason to defend the underground movement because in the end all it is trying to do is create a Trotskyist party — something which Stalinist-leaning Marxists have had for a while but which Trotskyists have not actually had. No one including Stalinists can deny that the Trotskyists' actions are logical. Marxists generally operate by creating a Leninist party to lead various regions of workers so the workers can coordinate on strategy and cohere together long enough to defend themselves from external empires. And if Trotskyists believe based on their observations that large parts of the Soviet Union are being led by mere-structures-themselves and clusters of bureaucrats as opposed to workers or even Marxist theorists, it is only natural for them to try to come up with a plan to take back the rest of the Soviet Union that Stalin and his followers do not even have any control over and defeat the portion of the central party which is not even Marxist; in concept, if a country region contained 1/5 proletarian class rule and 4/5 bourgeois class rule, it would be better if it contained two slightly discordant dictatorships of the proletariat taking up 1/5 and 4/5 the area respectively than it would to let the bourgeoisie have control of most of the country. So, why Trotskyists would want to organize a second Communist party against the CPSU is somewhat obvious. People on the outside may accuse the movement of being largely composed of anticommunists and non-proletarians, but if the 1930s Trotskyist movement contains even a few Leninist theorists, which it does, then these theorists operate best working toward a goal of making sure a Trotskyist party is created so that if and when they accumulate workers to the movement the workers are well organized. Trotskyists organizing an underground movement to create the world's first Trotskyist party or multiple parties across multiple country regions makes sense.
The thing that is confusing is why Trotskyists were so focused on getting rid of Stalin and variously insisting that Stalin was not a Leninist or not a Marxist when the real composition of the CPSU was basically a lot of non-Marxists and then Stalin as one of the only people who tirelessly tried to keep distortions of Marxism out of the party. When people like Yaroshenko appeared and tried to portray Bolshevik-style workers' states as being based in what sounded like Idealism and this concept that a Marxist party can simply pass legislation or decide things in the soviets and make society better, Stalin pushed back on that and made it clear that inside one country Marxism is about studying the fine-scale structures that make up society and assemble individuals into an economy where smaller more local chunks of people grow together into a single larger unit through transitions in the small structures to become larger or more robust structures (Economic Problems of the USSR, 1952).
Whether Stalin made a mistake regarding Trotskyists and whether Stalin was a Marxist are not the same question. It could be the case that Stalin was a Marxist who made errors about Trotskyism, and at the same time Trotsky was a Marxist who made errors about Stalin.
So, can Trotskyists really reasonably claim to have a sound epistemology based on only their own understanding of Marxism when deciding that Stalin has not correctly modeled the overall contradiction between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as both movements try to control the region, that Stalin has boxed his model of Marxism into the scope of his own group of followers instead of the world, and 'Stalin's obviously wrong model' is the only issue to be resolved? Could it not be the case that Trotskyists have also failed to understand the way Stalin's formulation of Marxism operated materially and the way the overall contradiction was unfolding? Wouldn't it actually be necessary to create a descriptive model of how each of the two Marxist movements physically behaves "for its own sake" — meaning, understanding Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as amoral material objects that function based on their own internal material processes and motivations as well as according to back-and-forth dialectical interactions where they change and define each other — to truly understand what the big contradiction between the two parties over the region is doing and what the best outcome is? What if the real problem was that both Stalin and Trotsky had failed to create a violet-Marxist / meta-Marxist model which described history as the interaction of not just bourgeois factions versus Marxism but also multiple countable Marxisms that would have to successfully sublate the correct parts of each other to join into a single Communist International?
Why was it acceptable to assume that getting rid of Stalin would not be an act equally as heinous as persecuting Trotsky's movement, or equivalent to regarding a party "winning" the fight over the country as an important first step in its own right that simply has to complete before workers take power?
Motifs or claims in prompt (no AI)
Motifs or claims from response
- The Revolution Betrayed [1] [2]
- Stalinism and Bolshevism (1937) [3]
- Trotsky had a predictive theory of Stalin's Marxism
Subjective themes (no AI)
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