Lykourgos posted:What is the correct view on trotsky's military performance and ability during the civil war? I am playing revolution under siege and it is very important that I think the proper, historically accurate thoughts when I see him racing up and down the railroads attacking my brave white armies.
trotsky was notable for resisting any attempts to make the red army a peoples army in the manner that mao did with the PLA. he ran the army with a bunch of former imperial generals, including the old chief of staff, and was extremely strict. you get early conflicts between stalin and trotsky in this period too, as trotsky kept appointing imperial officers to command posts and stalin did not like this.
basically trotsky kind of sucked shit, like this didnt even seem to result in particular success or anything.
babyhueypnewton posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:have you read darkness at noon huey?
no
Haha then shutup
statickinetics posted:yes, this is kliman's major critique of the dominant neoliberalism/financialization narrative advanced by harvey. at the same time, he (as well as alan freeman his colleague) recognize that finance has played an important role in changing the power structure of global capitalism. others, like william robinson, have made pretty compelling arguments that the globalization of production itself and the formation of a truly transnational capitalist class have created a qualitative shift in the productivity technology of commodity production and the power relations between nations as well as the traditional notions of imperialism. this is different than pre-70's "international capitalism", wherein capital is largely embedded in the national structure with relations between sovereigns and into a largely disembedded "globalized capitalism" wherein capital transcends national representatives and seeks to create a global regulation network in the form of transnational governance. the interlocking at the management level of the commodity production chain and the free movement of capital creates serious problems for contestation at the national level for political projects and demands an international workings class response that does not fit most traditional political responses. klassen and carroll have done a lot of work ( http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol17/Klassen_Carroll-vol17n2.pdf ) on this issue.
a more recent critique by kliman of the financialization narrative is here: http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/Kliman-Williams%205.8.12.docx
Samir Amin has some really interesting things to say about the globalization of capitalism and the problems this creates within and among nation-states. I recall reading a small book of his from the '90s in which he almost perfectly predicted the current situation of the EU, don't have it with me now unfortunately. Samir Amin's great.
For me the whole trot thing has always springed (sproing't?) from my belief that complete, total revolution is possible in this world, in all countries. It could happen today, in a very uncontrolled and destructive fashion, if our food security disappears, so our only hope as social creatures is that we can reorganize ourselves before catastrophic circumstances do it for us. There's no longer time for a socialist transition or internationalist campaigns to win one fight for one country at a time.
In fact these are the distractions that hold back revolution. The system now allows the left-leaning bourgeois to win many small battles. Some people are placated by this to the extent that the overall goal (of all-inclusive social organization that exists for the equal welfare of its members) is forgotten. And those who make themselves aware of the goal imagine it unattainable, because every "advance" of human rights or freedom, and not just those buzzwords but even specific and extreme applications of philanthropy like rehabilitating violent offenders by getting them to train seeing-eye dogs, brings the overall goal no closer.
I've started noticing that pop culture only seems "uplifted" or otherwise interesting if it seeps nihilism. In what sense does my education increase my capacity to enjoy it? Academia taught me to better understand my defeat and the defeat of all men, and this lesson reverberates in my head until it seems like if it didn't exist, I wouldn't either. It calls to mind schizophrenics explaining that if their auditory hallucinations aren't real, there is no reason to believe reality is real. The entertainment tailored to everyone like me commiserates. The world is fucked up, it agrees, and we are caught up in forces we cannot control, it adds. Fuck that shit! We are the forces that catch ourselves up.
To this end trotskese is a philosophy of warning. By this i mean that, by constantly focusing on permanent revolution, it unmasks half-measures that do nothing to uplift the common man. To me it's treated by other extreme leftists the same way that police treat their internal affairs officers. The nature of the criticism is the same. TrotsKids are strident and self-important. they're relentlessly critical even when the movement deserves a pat on the back. They claim "true" righteousness in an organization that already stands for righteousness, HELLO?! Their obsession with ideological purity extends to minute points of process because they can't let anything go (like the IA detective who can't break the law himself to enforce it against a dirty cop). Even their willingness to "poach" members from the main, legitimate body of the organization is in common.
But good trotskyism is about reminding leftists what a revolution is, what it's supposed to look like, and more importantly what it's not supposed to look like. It can't be an updated version of the global engine of oppression. It can't be self-serving, and in fact should involve risking ourselves to banishment into the global underclass. And it can't be a simple amputation of existing structures, or any other procedure where today's status determines tomorrow's survival. It does not matter if the entire world is Marxist if nobody in it is willing to abandon their status.
Edited by swampman ()
babyfinland posted:this obsession with trots is the racism of socialism, the method by which socialism justifies its use of the sovereign decision to kill and threaten its own population with war and discipline, expose bare life to death, etc
thats why when you read hueys posts in this thread you cant help but picture a huge skinhead in steel toe boots
words & history dont mean anything
Ironicwarcriminal posted:babyhueypnewton posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
Hmm, I just noticed the ideologies/movement of Trotskyism, Maoism and Stalinism are all based around personalities.
Is this personality worship something unique or inherent to Marxist thought? We don’t talk about Hitlerism or Qutb and even the preppiest neoliberal banker in London or new York probably wouldn’t refer to themselves as a Reaganist or Thatcherist.
Basically: Why does the role of leadership personality play such a prominent role in defining these subbranches of Marxism?
Badiou posted:
From a general point of view, the “cult of personality” is tied to the thesis
according to which the party, as representative of the working class, is
the hegemonic source of politics, the mandatory guardian of the correct
line. As it was said in the thirties, “the party is always right.” The problem
is that nothing can come and guarantee such a representation, nor such a
hyperbolic certainty as to the source of rationality. By way of a substitute for
such a guarantee, it thus becomes crucial for there to be a representation of
the representation, one that would be a singularity, legitimated precisely by
its singularity alone. Finally, one person, a single body, comes to stand for
this superior guarantee, in the classical aesthetic form of genius. It is also
curious, by the way, to see that, trained as we are in the theory of genius in
the realm of art, we should take such strong offense at it when it emerges in
the order of politics. For the communist parties, between the twenties and
sixties, personal genius is only the incarnation, the fixed point, of the doubtful
representative capacity of the party. It is easier to believe in the rectitude
and the intellectual force of a distant and solitary man than in the truth and
purity of an apparatus whose local petty chiefs are well known.Understandable but it’s also so….i dunno, psychotic……*shivers*
I guess it's no different to having Jesus or the Prophet or whatever
thats a really weird interpretation of the badiou quote. it is the opposite of psychotic
statickinetics posted:maybe it's possible to think about capitalism and the political response to it without having to see it through the lenses of stalinism, trotskyism or any irrelevant historical paradigm that only old people who "forgot to die" (heh, zizeK) still cling to??? like almost as if global capitalism is in a qualitatively different form today than it was in the pre-1970's era (let alone since the formation of the USSR) and our analysis of it/political action needs to reflect that? maybe none of this shit matters at all?!!
not really except in the dumbest most banal sense, i.e. U
swampman posted:I know trots suck but The sad fact is that trotskyism inevitably attracts the evangelical type. For a communist to openly espouse Trotsky today, i think, is the only logical response to over 300 years of pointless and bloody revolution in the name of abstract ideals. Every fight for social advances has ended with an intact ruling class - in compromise, and always short of elevating the working class.
For me the whole trot thing has always springed (sproing't?) from my belief that complete, total revolution is possible in this world, in all countries. It could happen today, in a very uncontrolled and destructive fashion, if our food security disappears, so our only hope as social creatures is that we can reorganize ourselves before catastrophic circumstances do it for us. There's no longer time for a socialist transition or internationalist campaigns to win one fight for one country at a time.
In fact these are the distractions that hold back revolution. The system now allows the left-leaning bourgeois to win many small battles. Some people are placated by this to the extent that the overall goal (of all-inclusive social organization that exists for the equal welfare of its members) is forgotten. And those who make themselves aware of the goal imagine it unattainable, because every "advance" of human rights or freedom, and not just those buzzwords but even specific and extreme applications of philanthropy like rehabilitating violent offenders by getting them to train seeing-eye dogs, brings the overall goal no closer.
I've started noticing that pop culture only seems "uplifted" or otherwise interesting if it seeps nihilism. In what sense does my education increase my capacity to enjoy it? Academia taught me to better understand my defeat and the defeat of all men, and this lesson reverberates in my head until it seems like if it didn't exist, I wouldn't either. It calls to mind schizophrenics explaining that if their auditory hallucinations aren't real, there is no reason to believe reality is real. The entertainment tailored to everyone like me commiserates. The world is fucked up, it agrees, and we are caught up in forces we cannot control, it adds. Fuck that shit! We are the forces that catch ourselves up.
To this end trotskese is a philosophy of warning. By this i mean that, by constantly focusing on permanent revolution, it unmasks half-measures that do nothing to uplift the common man. To me it's treated by other extreme leftists the same way that police treat their internal affairs officers. The nature of the criticism is the same. TrotsKids are strident and self-important. they're relentlessly critical even when the movement deserves a pat on the back. They claim "true" righteousness in an organization that already stands for righteousness, HELLO?! Their obsession with ideological purity extends to minute points of process because they can't let anything go (like the IA detective who can't break the law himself to enforce it against a dirty cop). Even their willingness to "poach" members from the main, legitimate body of the organization is in common.
But good trotskyism is about reminding leftists what a revolution is, what it's supposed to look like, and more importantly what it's not supposed to look like. It can't be an updated version of the global engine of oppression. It can't be self-serving, and in fact should involve risking ourselves to banishment into the global underclass. And it can't be a simple amputation of existing structures, or any other procedure where today's status determines tomorrow's survival. It does not matter if the entire world is Marxist if nobody in it is willing to abandon their status.
I enjoyed your post swamp man
catpee posted:Absolute, total victory is a childish fantasy. Some sort of compromise will always be necessary and might very well be desirable. Trotskyism doesn't actually have the role of the "internal affairs", its more like a paralysing fear of any kind of success. Unless the victory is absolute it's never good enough, and since victory never will be absolute their role is usually confined to attacking attempts at improvement. Which brings them into alliance with liberals and the status quo, like BHPN says.
The only acceptable compromises are with the global working class. What leftist movement has the right to make compromises on their behalf? What you call "attempts at improvement" are half measures that distract the bourgeois left from the inevitable revolution. When rapid social change comes, these people will die at the hands of the workers, or they'll have to give up pretense and oppress the workers to preserve their own comfortable positions...
swampman posted:catpee posted:Absolute, total victory is a childish fantasy. Some sort of compromise will always be necessary and might very well be desirable. Trotskyism doesn't actually have the role of the "internal affairs", its more like a paralysing fear of any kind of success. Unless the victory is absolute it's never good enough, and since victory never will be absolute their role is usually confined to attacking attempts at improvement. Which brings them into alliance with liberals and the status quo, like BHPN says.
The only acceptable compromises are with the global working class. What leftist movement has the right to make compromises on their behalf? What you call "attempts at improvement" are half measures that distract the bourgeois left from the inevitable revolution. When rapid social change comes, these people will die at the hands of the workers, or they'll have to give up pretense and oppress the workers to preserve their own comfortable positions...
swampman posted:catpee posted:Absolute, total victory is a childish fantasy. Some sort of compromise will always be necessary and might very well be desirable. Trotskyism doesn't actually have the role of the "internal affairs", its more like a paralysing fear of any kind of success. Unless the victory is absolute it's never good enough, and since victory never will be absolute their role is usually confined to attacking attempts at improvement. Which brings them into alliance with liberals and the status quo, like BHPN says.
The only acceptable compromises are with the global working class. What leftist movement has the right to make compromises on their behalf? What you call "attempts at improvement" are half measures that distract the bourgeois left from the inevitable revolution. When rapid social change comes, these people will die at the hands of the workers, or they'll have to give up pretense and oppress the workers to preserve their own comfortable positions...
1) Why do you automatically presume compromise has to come from the leadership "betraying" the base? The idea that the working class is always ultra-radical and only interested in total, complete revolution is another one of those Trotskyist ideas that has no basis in reality. The base is not always more radical than the leadership.
2) Why do you automatically presume I'm talking about social democracy (compromises with the bourgeoisie)? Even if there is a proletarian revolution compromises will have to be made. I was thinking along the lines of Cuba, the USSR, Mao's China, ... Flawed projects which nonetheless are/were quite successful in some areas. Trotskyists are so afraid of power and the inevitable deviations from the ideal actually having power brings, they end up viciously attacking anything that falls short (ie. everything, because no victory will ever be so total that it conforms to the Perfect Ideal).
catpee posted:1) Why do you automatically presume compromise has to come from the leadership "betraying" the base? The idea that the working class is always ultra-radical and only interested in total, complete revolution is another one of those Trotskyist ideas that has no basis in reality. The base is not always more radical than the leadership.
The sentiment of the working class with regard to radical or revolutionary concepts is irrelevant. Revolution isn't a discrete political event put to referendum by the global underclass. It is defined in the aftermath of power transition by those assuming power. But if we're interested in empowering the proletariat, any power transition that leaves any part of the proletariat subject to exploitation by a ruling class isn't a revolution by our very own standards. What "revolutionary" compromise can you point to in the last few centuries that has improved the conditions or increased the political clout of the global proletariat? (Let alone given them ownership of the land or the means of production!)
You're right about one thing, "total victory is a childish fantasy," because revolution is a process (or a "becoming" as some idiots call it). Looking back from the present, it's blasphemous to refer to past events as "revolutionary" or even as "progress." Exalting today's accomplishments is a masturbatory distraction. Anyone who looks at the state of power relations, even on some morning far into the future when the world is blanketed in a communist utopia, and says "Good enough" is a reactionary and should be hanged.
swampman posted:What "revolutionary" compromise can you point to in the last few centuries that has improved the conditions or increased the political clout of the global proletariat? (Let alone given them ownership of the land or the means of production!)
Um, what? Literally every revolutionary movement ever has had to deviate from the ideal in the face of concrete problems in the real world, in order to defend gains that were made. The NEP, Mao's New Democracy, Cuba acquiescing to the USSR's demands, ... You might not agree and you might be right but there's no guarantee that not compromising would've turned out better/would've been possible at all.
swampman posted:You're right about one thing, "total victory is a childish fantasy," because revolution is a process (or a "becoming" as some idiots call it). Looking back from the present, it's blasphemous to refer to past events as "revolutionary" or even as "progress." Exalting today's accomplishments is a masturbatory distraction. Anyone who looks at the state of power relations, even on some morning far into the future when the world is blanketed in a communist utopia, and says "Good enough" is a reactionary and should be hanged.
I agree eternal improvement should be the goal but I think it's ahistorical and self-defeatist to claim there has never been any progress. If you never accept anything as a step forward you become an isolated radical purist outside of the actual working class movement, which is exactly what Trotskyists are. I understand the chain of thought given that capitalism rules supreme and we're all fucked due to capitalist-induced climate change. Still, progress has been made in the past, even if it was reversed or ultimately didn't manage to threaten global capitalism. It's easy to shit on those victories as not really having achieved anything but I think without those small victories things could've been even worse. I guess that probably isn't a popular opinion here what with the "these are the worst of times, woe is me" sentiment that is so prevalent in this place, but imo it's historically justified.
The case for the USSR being state capitalist is strong enough to be accepted without being beholden to an ideology. It's not a trot position at all, more a rational one. It's also a recurring critique of the Soviet Union, one that acknowledges capitalism as possessing certain features, such as class and class-based ownership of means of production, wage labour, generalised commodity production and so forth. Most of those features were present in the SU, yet socialism is presumed to be the system which changes those relations?
Also It's not correct to lump anarchists and liberals in with trots. Stalinists and Trotskyists share the same Marxist-Leninist lineage and baggage, whereas liberals and anarchists do not, so really, aren't Stalinists closer to trots than either of the latter are, in many respects?
getfiscal posted:the problem i have with state capitalist arguments (which are pretty diverse) is that they tend to gloss over the specific reasons why the soviet union and friends deviated from the classical model. this made sense in the 1950s (when most of these arguments originated) because there wasn't much experience other than stalin's industrialization, but they make less sense as time goes on. the reason why "state capitalism" evolved is because socialism is basically fail ebola.
http://gawker.com/5944931/mitt-romney-dyed-his-face-brown-to-appeal-to-latino-voters
fanny_kaplan posted:Good Effort, but too doctrinaire imo.
The case for the USSR being state capitalist is strong enough to be accepted without being beholden to an ideology. It's not a trot position at all, more a rational one. It's also a recurring critique of the Soviet Union, one that acknowledges capitalism as possessing certain features, such as class and class-based ownership of means of production, wage labour, generalised commodity production and so forth. Most of those features were present in the SU, yet socialism is presumed to be the system which changes those relations?
Also It's not correct to lump anarchists and liberals in with trots. Stalinists and Trotskyists share the same Marxist-Leninist lineage and baggage, whereas liberals and anarchists do not, so really, aren't Stalinists closer to trots than either of the latter are, in many respects?
no
catpee posted:It's easy to shit on those victories as not really having achieved anything but I think without those small victories things could've been even worse. I guess that probably isn't a popular opinion here what with the "these are the worst of times, woe is me" sentiment that is so prevalent in this place, but imo it's historically justified.
Who cares? What does it matter if communists all through history have achieved anything or not? You only boast about historical events because there's nothing good to say about the present. Success exists in the present alone. It's a waste of time and of revolutionary zeal to celebrate past victories when another victory is ever close at hand. This is especially true when a century's work can be undone in a day. It's blasphemous to take pleasure in past advances that have since been undone by retreat. John Brown and Nat Turner are heroes of abolition, but more people are slaves today than ever before in human history, so how dare we invoke their names when we talk about all the great progress that's been made since the scary olden times? The great left revolutions of 1789, 1917, 1949, 1958, they are not worth a shit, the world is worse today, more violent, poorer, more unequal than it was before any of those so they were by definition unsuccessful for the purposes of today's fight for the victory of the people over global capitalism. USA. USA. USA.
Impper posted:no
tpaine posted:did we ever crack this mystery of trostkyism
SOyHyjXchBE
but if a country actually has an economy like that they don't like it, obviously. like lots of social-democratic countries had systems with tightly controlled key industries and dirigisme but it's not like the trots liked that, they actually said it was just capitalism.