User:RD/9k/ Trotskyist characteristics (Q28,92)

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2892. Socialism can have Trotskyist characteristics / Trotsky's Bolshevism would have Trotskyist characteristics / If Trotskyists successfully created a workers' state, its emergence from the countable culture consisting of Trotskyite history, Trotskyite oral tradition, and Trotskyite-to-Leninist allegiances would cause it become a particular new thing of socialism with Trotskyist characteristics -> this comes from the claim that Trotskyism is a countable culture. if it's the case that Trotskyism is a countable culture, then it is approximately similar to any sovereign national population such as China or Cuba. and if that is the case, then socialist transition in China will have Chinese characteristics, and socialist transition created by Trotskyists will have Trotskyist characteristics. of course, the other implication of this is that when there are plural Marxisms in a country, one of them will want mainstream Marxist-Leninist characteristics and one of them will want Trotskyist characteristics and one of them will want Gramscian characteristics. I think this hypothesis actually explains a lot about why movements that should be able to unify together end up fighting each other: they all already have characteristics and end up containing incompatible characteristics. worse, capitalist-aligned ideologies can have "characteristics" too. the Democratic Party and the Republican party can be countable cultures with national history and be glued to their favorite characteristics that realize their particular national ideology. if the United States was one countable culture which didn't break into multiple just because people had different positions on issues everything would be easier but it clearly consists of multiple countable cultures so distinct they have more reason to be separate structures than the House and the Senate do, or than some of the individual states do. the whole premise of the United States has been wrong from the beginning, and you can see this without any Marxism or appeals to the proletariat.
      it's probably worth noting: I think this statement is almost heresy inside Trotskyism. I still don't understand why it would be, I mean the more you dislike Stalin the more you benefit from realizing Trotskyism and Stalin's Marxism are plural Marxisms and that Trotskyism has never actually been very big, it's always been a small Marxism more the size of socialism-in-one-country than the size of an imminent world workers' state. that's Trotskyism. why do they think the eventual world workers' state is Trotskyism when the clash between mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism by itself has made that impossible?

Evidence within objections to Stalin

4002. Stalin's Marxism isn't Leninism / He calls it Marxism-Leninism, but it isn't really Leninism / Marxism-Leninism (disputed theory) -> components: the most correct Leninism is Trotskyism, Stalin Thought is a revisionist Leninism
4202. The Fourth International was an act of filtration / Leon Trotsky sought to regroup the best militants from the Stalinized Communist International [1] -> god I wish I had as much confidence as a Trotskyist, this shit (pronounced redacted) is hilarious
      I may think Trotskyists are wrong but I will never call them names as people because within the bizarre things they claim there is this certain kind of optimism in the face of impossible odds that is weirdly admirable and it's like, why would I crush their dreams. I refuse to do to them what they do to other Marxisms. if the future of Communist Internationals is anarchies composed of named Marxisms, so be it.
4043. Socialism-in-one-country is basically Existentialism with countries -> Ted Grant
4230. Stalin built the country wrong / Stalin's government built the country with structures that are bad although we are not specifying what the actual error is -> what The Revolution Betrayed kept sounding like to me in every chapter. I know the real reason it sounds like something was missing is because of the Trotskyite conspirators' lies, while the point of the book is no deeper than Q42,36 "I am sick of eating rat bread". even so, I always think about how the first time I tried to read this thing I assumed what was missing was an accompanying description of the inner Particle Theory of Trotskyism. I didn't want to believe that Trotsky could be both wrong and not even smart, so I kept trying to figure out what he believed to be correct, because, hey, even if the structure of Trotskyism didn't make a lot of sense, maybe we could all learn from it. I was so surprised to learn that Trotskyists really don't think like that at all.
4004. restore the soviets
4231. Ministries existing means there is no democracy -> one of the strongest arguments that Trotskyism actually is a distinct form of Leninism with its own idea of a workers' state Stalin could be (supposedly) preventing. still not a very strong argument said Trotskyism is possible, of course. appears in: "Trotsky's mistakes"
4006. State capitalism inevitably evolves to uncontained capitalism -> Hayashi
4037. Pigs theory -> the motif of models of workers' states that center around "bureaucrats" or experts taking the country away from the people. you sometimes see "Pigs theory" in Maoism independently of its appearances in Trotskyism. so with only that much information it's vaguely possible Che Guevara also came up with "Pigs theory" on his own without having to be drawn toward Trotskyism. the fact he only knew so much about Leninism only makes that more likely, I mean, look at how Trotsky barely understood it and came up with Pigs theory. the bigger question is, is "Pigs theory" actually right? I feel like in some ways it can be true but the way Trotskyists formulate it it never is. I feel like if it's true it's probably much more complicated how it comes to be and how to prevent it. for one, I'm almost half convinced that populations like China and even Cuba have figured out how to have a "Pigs theory" structure safely although the Soviet Union did not.
4038. Pig state -> the motif of a republic which is primarily run by a limited number of specialized experts who eat up large salaries while, archetypically, everyone else remains peasants or low earners. people are under some kind of illusion that this is caused by Communism, when it absolutely isn't, and even Animal Farm acknowledges that.
      it's quite arguable that both the United States Congress and universities operate like Pig states. "pig" being such a negative word usually, this sounds like far more of an insult than it actually is. all this really means is that the United States population is constantly churning and re-inventing and requiring experts to make decisions for everybody else and constantly send new experts through extensive training to keep doing this, when the predictions of Marxism didn't think it would shape up this way because eventually the experts would just have made all the stuff and people would only be copying the same things over and over much more cheaply. a few things really are that way, like 15-year-old books and the CD-ROM standard. but many things are not because people just keep subjectively deciding on new frameworks and The Pigs keep fighting each other over university time, thesis defenses, which inherently prejudiced thing is less prejudiced, shareholders or customers, totally subjective interpretations of the Constitution where really nothing even makes any coherent sense any more, these angry arguments over which incredibly-difficult-to-test hypothetical science ontology is more scientific, and overall, it's like the whole point of capitalism is constant culture war where The Pigs, foolishly convinced it will be safe if they only present their own side in the most calm and rational possible way, are the ones that lead each side of it. science is like democracy? sure, in a totally backhanded way. democracy is a bunch of capitalists endlessly fighting over subjective cultural pronouncements and by now science is just like that too. Liberal-republicanism isn't just the government of capitalism, in a way it literally is capitalism. there isn't really a place where capitalism ends and government begins. it takes something like abolishing parties and creating a single party-nation to even begin ending capitalism and the influence of capitalism.
4302. East Germany was too small to be Trotskyism -> relatively likely to be the answer you actually get. East Germany small, Trotskyism big. this has never been a satisfying answer to me because it doesn't explain how any group of countries ever gets big enough to form Trotskyism without inevitably forming into unacceptably small "Stalinisms" first.
4303. East Germany did not have the correct internal structure to be Trotskyism / East Germany had the wrong internal structure according to Trotskyists -> derived Trotskyist proposition. some Trotskyists talk about "bureaucracy" and how they don't like the way government ministries and central party structures are put together to unite a country. this would lead to the prediction that Trotskyists look at East Germany and do not like East Germany's internal structure. if this statement about Trotskyism is true, then it implies that Trotskyists have a particular internal structure they require a country to have after expropriating the bourgeoisie or they will not believe the country is in socialist transition. it also vaguely implies that everything Trotskyists say about creating a worldwide civilization and going beyond one country is irrelevant fluff because what they really actually believe is that socialist transition depends on the internal structure of individual countries and each workers' state that has existed is bad because it has gone through transition wrong. a Trotskyism that believed this intentionally and was perfectly honest about it could become a molecular Trotskyism.
4235. The internal shape of a workers' state leads to buffer state conflicts / There is something about the internal activity of a workers' state which can cause it to participate in international war or not, and this is why Stalin's bloc was struggling over Poland instead of preventing a "world of Alert" scenario -> statements like this are wild when you think about it, because it's like, Trotsky almost accidentally invented MDem and then didn't. if there was actually something inside the Soviet Union which caused it to have to fight imperialist blocs, that would be implying that restructuring the Soviet Union in a specific way changes its outward behavior, which would be claiming that there are multiple possible Bolshevisms. you see this pop up a number of times in Trotskyism, and it's basically never delivered on at any time.

Trotskyism as nationality

4012. A Trotskyist group is a countable culture / Any particular Trotskyist group is a countable culture -> seems weird to say until you have to explain to mainstream Marxist-Leninists how Trotskyite conspiracies happen materially — why they aren't trivial to stop and yet why it's not productive to just mark the people in them Evil.
4013. Trotskyist groups are a safe space for Trotskyist identity -> this sounds like a joke until you realize what it actually means, at which point it sounds more reasonable. this is operating on the definition of "safe space" as a Social-Graph System or Social-Philosophical System that people dive into in order to be accepted and not to be questioned on basic facts of their individual identity; under this definition, things such as a Christian church or a Muslim mosque may qualify as a safe space for Christian or Muslim identity, due to the fact that within that space a particular religion is condoned or practiced consistently. thus, this is the claim that Trotskyist groups exist partly to be a loose "congregation" of Trotskyist theorists where Trotskyist theories are condoned and practiced consistently, rather than being rejected from "Stalinist spaces". the Trotskyist theories in question do attempt to do what Marxist theories should do, to unite groups and mobilize workers, yet at the same time, when a group is founded it must explicitly make a choice on whether Trotskyist theories are allowed at all or perhaps preferred, versus whether they are fundamentally rejected from the group. this necessity to either accept or reject people who align with the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy, or modern Trotskyism, creates a fundamental cultural divide between different Marxist organizations similar to the divide between a Marxist organization in one country versus a Marxist organization in another country, or between a movement for White transgender people inside the United States versus a movement for Black subpopulations inside the United States — Trotskyists are their own countable Culture, as much as Ukrainians are distinct from Russians. the matter of how Trotskyist identity as a countable Culture interacts with "other" demographic identities is not necessarily well understood. there are only two small thoughts I can offer on that: A) look at a British Trotskyist group, and you will probably observe that its members fail to see outside a White, British perspective, for instance often failing to quite understand what is going on for Black subpopulations in the United States and why they frame things the way they do, based on what locally-preferred ideologies (often anarchism or some Fanon-based non-Marxist theory). B) this same problem didn't necessarily exist for Trotsky's circle of people, who at the very least understood Jewish subpopulational struggles, even if they were baffled in their own way by United States racism. so, there are times when Trotskyist identity clashes with racial subpopulation identity, although it does depend on the quality of theorists admitted to a Trotskyist group.
      this + ?? = Trotskyism is the prototypical oppressed group.

Ideology codes

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