statickinetics posted:what doesnt seem true? he certainly doesn't deal with the rate of profit. he believes that crises are fundamentally due to overaccumulation. the problem is that he seeks to explain overaccumulation through limits that are a result of the unevenness of production and not through the chief organizing principal of capital which is the profit rate. overaccumulation becomes its own explanation and the multitude of barriers and limits harvey identifies are not systematic explanations of crisis. brendan cooney's essay on this is probably one of the better critiques ive read:
Brendan Cooney
“The Enigma of The Enigma”
Introduction
The aim of this brief talk is to provide the beginning of a critique of David Harvey’s theory of crisis. But I have to start by saying how humbly I approach this task. Like many people, I am greatly indebted to David Harvey. In many ways Harvey was my first access into the world of Marx. His clear, articulate language, his passion for his subject material, and his patient dedication to pedagogy were a big influence on me, compelling me to dig deeper and deeper into the world of Marx and Marxism. The criticism I offer here is made with the deepest and most sincere respect for his work.
My critique is of three intertwined aspects of Harvey’s work: his rejection of Marx’s theory of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF), his theory of “overaccumulation,” and his use of this “overaccumulation” as a framework for his geographical analysis.
Much of 20th century Marxism is defined by its defeats, both theoretical and political. As much as we have to learn from our elders, we also must remember that they have their origin in a certain time and place and that their approach to Marx is informed by this origin. For Harvey, the time is the 1970′s and the place is the western academy. It is a time and place where Marxists were facing certain theoretical challenges that they were unable to respond to, forcing them to revise or reject key aspects of Marx’s value theory. They were also faced with the need to distance themselves politically from the horrors of Soviet Marxism and Maoism. This led to several distinctive characteristics of what I call here “the 70′s Marxist.”
Aspect 1: Anti-orthodoxy
Disillusionment with the USSR, Maoism, and the like provided space for a critique of so-called “orthodox Marxism,” allowing for a reappraisal of Marx himself, not filtered through the politics of the Soviet state. This combined with a trend of academic Marxism, tracing itself back to figures like Paul Sweezy, who worked to establish more space for Marxian ideas in the academy by developing a non-sectarian Marxist tradition which often borrowed language and tools of neo-classical economics. On the positive side, this has led to some great scholarship and debates on many topics, from dialectics to value theory to the labor process, revealing the great depth and richness of Marx’s analysis, and freeing Marx from the stodgy determinism of the Iron Curtain. On the other hand, there has been too great, and often too superficial, a rush to distance oneself from this so-called “orthodoxy,” often confusing this “orthodoxy” with Marx himself (throwing out the Marx-baby with the orthodox bath water).
Most problematic was the attempt by some to continue the Marxist project without Marx’s value theory, dismissing value as an unnecessary category useful only for “orthodox dogmatists.” (Indeed, the charge of “orthodoxy” is too often used as a substitute for a real argument.) For Harvey, this takes an unusual form. In his 1981 Limits to Capital and his online course on Capital, he seems comfortable with Marx’s value theory. But in his writings on crisis and geography from Condition of Postmodernity to Enigma of Capital, he makes no use of value as a category. The word value doesn’t even occur in the index of many of these books. This gives the impression that he is advancing a crisis theory that is not based in a theory of value. This is reinforced by his frequent use of the same language as the Monopoly School of thought (“price-fixing markets,” “surplus capital absorption,” “overaccumulation,” etc.), a school which advances a surplus-capital theory of crisis that does not require value as a category.
Aspect 2: theoretical retreat
As 70′s Marxists wrestled with their identity in the post-Stalin era, they also had to fend off the theoretical assault of the Sraffians, the transformation problem, and the Okishio Theorem, critiques which they could not find answers to. Those who didn’t abandon Marx altogether often resorted to vague reformulations of the Marxist project which attempted to skirt criticism by taking focus away from the specifics of the critique and focusing on more general Marx-ishness. For the purpose of this essay, what is most important is the Okishio Theorem, which argued that Marx’s theory of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) was invalid. Okishio argued that it was impossible for labor-saving innovations to make the rate of profit fall as Marx had argued it would. The inability of Marxists to find a way to refute the Okishio Theorem led many to abandon Marx’s theory of crisis, and to try to find some way to prove the inevitability of crisis using other aspects of Marx’s analysis of Capital. It was a time for vague work-arounds and soft answers. For Harvey it meant taking focus away from the rate of profit and instead focusing on the growth of capital itself, searching for a multitude of different barriers that could check this growth.
But since these 70′s debates, since Harvey’s Limits to Capital, there has been a rising tide of theorists who have come to question the theoretical assumptions behind the Okishio Theorem and the transformation problem, arguing that Marx’s value theory is consistent and complete, not in need of full-scale revisions. The presence of these new challenges, these new defenses of value theory, demand that we reinvestigate the theories of the past, theories that were forged in an era of theoretical defeat.
As the 70′s Marxists lived through the 80′s and 90′s, they also wrestled with the seemingly infallible permanence of capitalism. Theories often tended to downplay the inevitability of crisis and highlight capitalism’s adaptive strategies. Harvey’s crisis theory is almost wholly focused on the way in which crisis is displaced and avoided rather than on why it erupts.
Aspect 3: do it my own way
It seems almost every book on Marx written in the last 40 years must have as a subtitle, “a reinterpretation,” “a reformulation,” or “a critical appraisal.” Academic careers were made based on the uniqueness of one’s reinterpretation. Putting a distance between oneself and Marx certainly makes one more palatable to the academy. But I suspect that the larger factor in this is the nature of academic careers in general which tend to foster individualism and originality in theories. Harvey puts a lot of effort into tying his theoretical contributions into Marx’s framework. He also sees his work, especially in Limits, as completing aspects of Marx’s project: integrating different models of accumulation that Marx left separate, extending the theory of primitive accumulation, etc. But sometimes one can lose track of where Marx leaves off and where Harvey picks up. If indeed Harvey’s crisis theory was formed in part as a retreat from the Okishio Theorem, then this demands that we pay extra close attention to this sometimes fuzzy line between Marx and Harvey, and ask whether or not Harvey’s extensions and reformulations of Marx are always warranted. Let’s get into it…..
The Geography
Often as an undergrad, I had been told that Marxist analysis was reductive, that it predicted a uniform lived experience, that it proscribed a politics that ignored differences between people, rejecting many forms of struggle to focus narrowly on workplace struggles. Harvey showed that it was possible to theorize a great diversity of experiences of capitalism as well as a great diversity of struggles against capitalism, within a Marxist framework.
This is the real strength of his project. It represents some of the best aspects of the 70′s Marxist, showing that Marxism is an open, developing body of theory, capable of theorizing the continuing evolution of capitalism in all of its complexity and diversity.
But the 70′s Marxist too often threw out the Marx-baby with the orthodox-bath-water. Often times this was the best that could be done at the time, as theoretical defenses of key aspects of Marx’s value theory had not been developed yet. The best thing that could be done was to side-step these criticisms of Marx, developing alternative approaches. Harvey’s work-around is this theory of over-accumulation.
What is missing in his theory?
For Harvey, capitalists are in a constant state of anxiety because they must turn their money into more money. They must constantly find new avenues for profitable investment. But the amount of value that needs to be valorized keeps increasing, and so their task gets harder and harder. Eventually this growth reaches limits. It begins not just to accumulate, but to overaccumulate. The attempts of capitalists to overcome these limits is what particularly interests Harvey. Investments in fixed capital, public works, infrastructure, etc… The entire construction of physical space and the organization of time are bound up in this attempt to deal with the overaccumulation of capital.
“The Marxist argument is, then, that the tendency toward overaccumulation can never be eliminated under capitalism. It is a never-ending and eternal problem for any capitalist mode of production. The only question, therefore is how the overaccumulation tendency can be expressed, contained, absorbed or managed in ways that do not threaten the capitalist social order.” (The Condition of Postmodernity, p.181)
Too Much Explained
This becomes a very powerful tool for Harvey, as it allows him to explain all of space and time, more or less, through the problem of overaccumulation, or as he says in Enigma, the problem of surplus. But the problem is that his theory explains too much. Like his theory of Accumulation by Dispossession, the categories are extended too wide; too much is explained; it’s too easy.
How can the boom in investment that accompanies the start of an accumulation cycle and the stagnation of investment that happens at the end of an accumulation cycle both be the result of over-accumulation? I would think that at the start of a new boom the growth in investment is a result of a healthy profit rate, not some surplus absorption problem. There is no problem absorbing the surplus if profit rates are healthy. We need some other theory that can explain the movement of this profit rate so we know why we get an overaccumulation problem at some times and not others.
Cycles
A theory of overaccumulation, by itself, is a mono-directional theory. Overaccumulation cannot explain overaccumulation. It seems to describe a chronic state of affairs: there is just always too much capital because there is always too much capital. In contrast, for Marx, overaccumulation is a specific symptom of the falling rate of profit. It exists at a specific point in the accumulation cycle, before a crisis. Marx’s theory of the TRPF, like all of his economic laws, contains tendencies and counter-tendencies which make for cyclical patterns.
Now Harvey’s Limits does contain a description of an accumulation cycle, but in order to do so, he needs something besides just the idea of overaccumulation. He must show some limit to capitalist accumulation that creates the problem of surplus. In Limits, 1981, he endorses the theory that high-wages cause the overaccumulation problem, though the argument seems to come out of nowhere and have no relation to any of the previous discussion of crisis in the book. In Enigma, it is low wages that caused the current crisis.
This is not a contradiction for Harvey, but he endorses the idea that any potential limit could cause a crisis at any time. The particular limit we encounter is contingent. What it will be depends largely upon politics for Harvey.
Politics
Motion for Harvey is a political, contingent phenomenon. Again: “The only question, therefore is how the overaccumulation tendency can be expressed, contained, absorbed or managed in ways that do not threaten the capitalist social order” (The Condition of Postmodernity, p.181). So the only question is how actors, mostly states and combinations of capitalists, contain, absorb and manage this overaccumulation. This leads to a theory of crisis that leans heavily on the politics of the ruling class. This is especially strong in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” in which Harvey considers neo-liberalism to be a “class project” of “wage repression” and robbery. Talking about class in this way certainly sounds Marxist at first. But would Marx really ascribe 30 years of economic history to a political theory of the ruling class? How much agency can we allow for politics before we lose track of the whole point of value theory?
Value is what organizes our productive activity so that politics doesn’t have to. Value is what we don’t think about. Politics describes the messy business of people trying to exert control over the law of value and failing. What is most interesting about politics is not the successes of certain political ideologies, but the failures of people to escape the logic of capital.
Andrew Kliman’s recent book on the crisis, The Failure of Capitalist Production, makes an interesting point about the use of neoliberal ideology as an explanation for the economic phenomena of the period: Most of the key institutional and economic features of neoliberalism pre-date the ascendancy of neoliberals into political office. This suggests that perhaps neoliberalism was a class project to justify what capitalism was already doing!
“Little Limits”
If capital is overaccumulating due to a shortage of profitable investment, we need some theory of the growth of capital relative to investment opportunities, or, I should say, relative to profitable investment opportunities.
Historically, theories of overaccumulation are associated with the underconsumption school of thought, which argues that low wages create a situation of not enough consumer demand, which means product can’t be sold, capital overaccumulates, etc. Harvey seems to endorse this thesis in Enigma, even though he critiques the theory earlier on in Enigma and many of his earlier works. (This, I must confess, I find confusing.) His critique I agree with: capital has the ability to generate its own demand through the expansion of capital goods (see Kliman’s new book).
If Harvey rejects the underconsumption argument, then what is the cause of overaccumulation? At his worst, Harvey sometimes seems to suggest that overaccumulation is its own cause and effect. The mere fact that capitalism must constantly grow is used to suggest that this growth will hit a limit at some point. This aspect of his theory seems to have become more blatant since the current crisis. It emerges quite strongly at times in Enigma and in recent speaking engagements. I think it is mostly a result of trying to communicate his ideas to lay audiences. But it has the danger of evoking an “anti-growth” aesthetic similar to the “small is beautiful” politics of primitivists, anarcho-libertarians, apolitical environmentalists and hippies. It borders on vulgar populism. And it has no theoretical meat: he must provide a reason why capitalism can’t expand forever.
Now, Harvey does have a better answer to the question. He often argues that there are multiple limits to capitalist production. This, for him, means that the specific limit operating at any particular place and time is contingent. Many of the limits Harvey talks about have to do with the temporal barriers to production generated by the complex overlapping of different turnover times, transportation, and the use of the credit system to overcome these limits, which generates its own speculative impulses.
This idea of a plurality of limits can seem attractive at first. It definitely gets anti-orthodoxy points due its ability to embrace many different interpretations of crisis. But I worry that it ignores the mechanism by which capital overcomes its limits: profit. Profit reapportions investment to areas with high return, and takes investment out of unprofitable areas. Now, of course this is not always successful for every individual capitalist. Of course there is a lot of unevenness due to all of the factors that Harvey discusses. But it is no good to just stress the limits and ignore the elephant in the room: the profit rate.
It turns out that capitalism is remarkably good at overcoming barriers. The “little-limits” Harvey discusses are good for describing much of the unevenness and violence of capitalist production. But these “little limits” are not adequate to describing a real crisis of the system.
Perhaps it would be useful to be more specific about some of these limits. Harvey lists several in Enigma, devoting pages to elaborating them. What does not emerge from this discussion is any reason why these limits would lead to a large-scale crisis of capitalism. Most of the limits in Enigma are limits to the circulation of capital, not the production of value. This immediately differentiates Harvey from Marx, who argued that the falling rate of profit was a phenomenon of capitalist production, though its manifestations could be seen in circulation.
1. money capital scarcities – which call forth credit (state-finance nexus)
The need for money to lubricate exchange calls for a credit and state-finance nexus to regulate this credit system. Credit can have is own logic which can lead to speculative bubbles. But this is surface froth compared to the speculative bubbles that attach themselves to capitalism in the lead up to a crisis. (There is an attempt in Enigma to embed the concept of speculation deeper into the logic of capitalism. Harvey wants to call all investment speculative, conflating risk and speculation. This is another problematic extension of categories. No time to develop this here.) The fact remains that a credit bubble is not a bubble unless there isn’t enough money to pay back those loans. If money is flowing into speculation rather than production, then this implies there is a problem with the profit rate. If Harvey wants to develop his explanation for the particular character of the state-finance nexus, his argument would be strengthened by an analysis of the profit rate.
2. labor problems – profit squeeze
Harvey does throw some support behind the profit-squeeze theory of crisis to explain the crisis of the 70′s. This is a problematic move on his part and I was surprised to read it. It seems strange to embrace a profit-squeeze theory for the 70′s and an underconsumption theory for the current crisis. Are high wages good or bad for capitalism? It seems that both only matter when the profit rate is falling.
3. disproportionalities
Again, a reference to Morishima and some math nobody understands…In Enigma and Limits Harvey makes reference to disproportionality theories of crisis, mostly to refer to some complex algebra of Michio Morishima that claims to prove that it is impossible for capitalism to achieve balanced investment between wage-goods and capital-goods. I have no way of responding to this as it involves math which is over my head. Harvey doesn’t take the time to explain either. I don’t know if his math is that savvy either.
4. natural limits…which he doesn’t actually see as limits
Harvey goes into a long discussion of ecological limits to capital and seems to conclude that ecology is so much a product of human labor that we can’t really see nature as having any limit to capitalist growth. I would go further and suggest that the environmental crisis and their ensuing destruction are good for capital because they destroy capital.
5. unbalanced technological and organizational changes/viable technology
In Enigma he calls it unbalanced technological and organizational changes, which probably sounds really vague to most readers. In Limits he calls it the inability of capitalist competition to achieve “viable technology.” This concept is a direct descendant of the TRPF. It comes from Harvey trying to put Marx’s argument about profit rates into an equilibrium framework. Marx argued that labor saving technology causes prices to fall and with them long term profit rates. Harvey argues that we should theorize a mix of technologies that achieves a stable profit rate, a viable technology. He then argues that capitalist competition drives the economy away from a viable technology. My response is that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be the TRPF.
6. lack of effective demand
In many of Harvey’s works, he devotes a little time to explaining why lack of effective demand is not an adequate explanation for crisis. His reason is the same reason I would give: that the growth of the demand for capital-goods can sop up any shortage of demand for wage-goods. What he leaves out is this: this growth of demand for capital-goods only solves the problem when there is a healthy profit rate. When the profit rate is low, there is a demand problem for all sorts of goods. Curiously, despite his previous arguments, Harvey embraces the underconsumption argument in Enigma.
7. turn-over time
The complexity of fixed capital formations is a recurring fascination for Harvey. Some of his best geographical insights come from this. The relation to crisis is this: the growth of investment in fixed capital and the built environment ties up capital for a long period of time. Capital loses its mobility. This makes fixed capital likely to be devalued by newer, more efficient investments in other places. Hmmmmmmmm…. Interesting that this is one of the key arguments made for why savings in constant capital are not adequate to forestall the fall in the rate of profit!
Why Harvey rejects the TRPF
In Enigma, Harvey rejects TRPF because it has countervailing influences. Echoing Sweezy, he says that savings in constant capital and rising rates of exploitation make the rate of profit indeterminate. We might find a counter argument to this in Harvey’s own words: “The parallel incentive for individual capitalists to seek economies in employment of constant capital is, by contrast, much weaker. The actual processes regulating technological change under capitalism are indeed systematically biased towards variable-capital as opposed to constant-capital saving. The anarchic nature of inter-capitalist competition prevents a rational application of technological change–’rational’ that is, from the standpoint of sustaining accumulation through a stabilization of the value composition of capital.” (Limits, p. 183)
I think there is more to the argument than this, but for now it’s probably adequate to dismiss Harvey’s undeveloped Enigma critique with this more developed Limits argument. In Limits it is not counter-tendencies that are Harvey’s beef. His beef is obscured by a rather confusing tangle of arguments that seem designed to avoid the Okishio Theorem.
I have a rather detailed critique I have made of Harvey’s take on the TRPF in Limits, but here I will summarize:
Harvey’s chapter (it’s actually a sub-chapter) on the TRPF could be the poster child for the 70′s Marxist. It starts with a hint that there is something wrong with Marx’s theory, though it is very hard from the chapter to find out what this is. It begins with a very thorough, detailed description of all of the different possible criticisms of the theory, all of the counter-tendencies that might raise the profit rate, etc. One by one, Harvey dismisses these critiques, arguing that they are not adequate to forestall a fall in the profit rate. Then comes this very interesting sentence:
“Van Parijs (1980), for his part, uses a proof of Okishio’s (1961) to show that capitalists, under competition, will choose techniques which necessarily reduce the unit values of all commodities (including labor power), and increase the transitional rate of profit to themselves as well as the social rate of profit, no matter what happens to the value composition, provided only that the physical standard of living labor remains constant.” (p. 185)
Now, nowhere does Harvey actually explain what this means or how this argument is proven. We are, I guess, just supposed to take the word of Van Parijs that we should take the word of Okishio. For a reader new to Marx, as I was when I first read Limits, this paragraph produces a good deal of head-scratching. We have just read pages of elaborate details about the TRPF that turn out to be dead ends (failed critiques, counter-tendencies, etc.). Now we are finally given a definitive statement that the TRPF is wrong, and David Harvey, the Marxist pedagogue, does not offer to give his readers any explanation.
This spectral appearance of Okishio becomes a turning point in the text. Okishio seems to be haunting the text like some sort of repressed idea. Harvey doesn’t want to directly confront Okishio. Instead he develops a very complicated and obtuse sidetrack about turnover time, credit, and constant capital that attempts to rescue what it can of Marx’s crisis theory. In the end Harvey concludes: “individual capitalists, acting in their own self-interest under the social relations of capitalist production and exchange, generate a technological mix that threatens further accumulation, destroys the potentiality for balanced growth and puts the reproduction of the capitalist class as a whole in jeopardy.” (p.188)
This appears to be nothing more than a vague restatement of the TRPF. The only difference is that Harvey puts the question in the language of equilibrium states. It is hard to see how recasting the same theory in vaguer language really rescues it from Okishio. If Harvey had just left things here, his work would probably not have been that note-worthy. But, Harvey doesn’t just leave things here. He uses this vague defense of Marx as a springboard for his own theoretical riffing: in the next chapter the camera has panned away from the discussed of the limits to profitability and zoomed in on the issue of the rising surplus. Here the language of overaccumulation begins.
The confusing thing, and it is still confusing to me, is how exactly Harvey’s theory of overaccumulation is supposed to relate to his vague conclusion about capitalist competition creating destabilizing technological mixes. Though Harvey talks a great deal about multiple limits, this is the only real limit in the text which seems like it could be the basis for a theory of overaccumulation. Yet nowhere else in subsequent writings of his on crisis in there any discussion of this destabilizing technological mix….
Conclusion
This strange, ghostly encounter with the repressed spectre of Okishio provides us with a template for the 70′s Marxist:
1. Sraffian critiques of Marx are side-stepped in an attempt to save Marx by being vague.
2. This vagueness becomes a platform for erecting original reformulations.
3. The reformulation takes on a life of its own, and the relation to the original debate is forgotten.
4. The reformulation is conflated or confused with Marx’s crisis theory.
In order to question these theories, we have to interrogate each of these:
4. We must separate Marx’s own theory from those of the “Marxits,” “Marxian,” “Marxoid,” etc.
3. We must acknowledge and understand the original debates that gave rise to these reformulations.
2. We must interrogate reformulations and challenge them to be clear, not evasive.
1. We must challenge Marxists to deal directly with the charges of inconsistency that have been leveled against Marx in the academy.
thats a lot of big communist words for someone who probably wouldnt know how to fire an ak
jools posted:what the fuck are you talking about maggotmaster
im making fun of the op, who is insane
what do u think of this statickinetics
Perhaps in his earlier work (including limits to capital) he gives too much credit to the counteracting factors of the TRPF, but his later theory of multiple and independent points of crisis is important doesn't contradict the general tendency of capitalism towards a profit crisis. In fact, I think he's explicitly endorsed the TSSI approach. this is just kliman being ultra-left and hating anyone who is too new-left (this has it's polemical value but I think is misplaced on harvey, who is probably the most important marxist scientist alive at the moment).
babyhueypnewton posted:harvey, who is probably the most important marxist scientist alive at the moment
wow. i'm right here.
I would recommend people on this forum go to something like it eventually though, it's easy to forget that most people on the left are not self-loathing, mentally ill, and/or trolling for attention if you remain secluded in lf offshoots.
babyfinland posted:http://www.mediafire.com/view/?4qek5xj9lkik1suwhat do u think of this statickinetics
see this is the kind of underhanded trolling that makes discussion impossible. if you'd even take 5 seconds to google (which I'm sure you did, you just posted this anyway) you would have seen that review is garbage not even worth responding to.
http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/condemn-libelous-attack-on-marx-scholar.html
getfiscal posted:i used to go to leftist events a lot but most of the people at them seemed like lunatics. my ex-housemate told me most art things are like that too i guess. like you go and someone's like yeah i want to remake the matrix. and then you laugh and they say what's funny, i think i could make a really good version of the matrix.
every left thing I've ever been to has been exactly the same as anything else, people hanging out, probably drinking, the only difference is you don't have to bite your tongue when people start talking about politics. even when it's super serious the people are normal and the discussion is friendly.
having said that i've hung out with the PSL, various occupyers, and left-wing bookstores/events (including a new-new-black panther thing with the FRSO). I've never hung out with trots or trans-artist-activists so maybe you'vve run into the worst part of the left in canada.
babyhueypnewton posted:babyfinland posted:http://www.mediafire.com/view/?4qek5xj9lkik1suwhat do u think of this statickinetics
see this is the kind of underhanded trolling that makes discussion impossible. if you'd even take 5 seconds to google (which I'm sure you did, you just posted this anyway) you would have seen that review is garbage not even worth responding to.
http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/condemn-libelous-attack-on-marx-scholar.html
someone posted it on facebook. sorry for trying to contribute and participate
i have no idea what your link is supposed to be
babyfinland posted:babyhueypnewton posted:babyfinland posted:http://www.mediafire.com/view/?4qek5xj9lkik1suwhat do u think of this statickinetics
see this is the kind of underhanded trolling that makes discussion impossible. if you'd even take 5 seconds to google (which I'm sure you did, you just posted this anyway) you would have seen that review is garbage not even worth responding to.
http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/condemn-libelous-attack-on-marx-scholar.htmlsomeone posted it on facebook. sorry for trying to contribute and participate
i have no idea what your link is supposed to be
considering the review starts with:
“...Following such reasoning, one could then also argue that the existence of a group of scholars who argue that the theory of evolution is false and that creationism is consistent with empirical evidence, must lead us to reject the claims of evolutionism as unproved and implausible. … This foreshadows the major weakness of this book: a lack of rigor in reasoning.”
I think we can stop there. Either you didn't read the review or you don't care. but really, let's not pretend you won't do anything to slander marxism.
here's kliman's response to sinha and yourself
Today, out of the blue I got a message in my mail box
without any subject from a guy called 'Drewk'. Once I
saw the message, I thought it was one of those spam
from some idiot, so I deleted it, but then I realized
that the senders address is none other than our old
friend Mr. Kliman. So I retrived the message from the
trash to share it with you, so that we all know a
little more about our friend Mr. Kliman. The message
is pasted below in full. Cheers, ajit sinha
From: "Drewk" <Andrew_Kliman@msn.com>
To: sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM
Subject:
Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2004 20:27:58 -0400
Plain Text Attachment
You are scum.
Go fuck yourself.
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ope/archive/0407/0006.html
my opinion of andrew kliman went way up. now if only grover furr would say the same thing to mccain
wow i had no idea this review was such a controversial thing that makes babies cry lol
littlegreenpills posted:i want to go to nuit blanche but still have no friends
make friends at nuit blanche. if someone says they like the art say that you're the artist and make up a story about it. if they say they don't like it, say it's your ex-wife's art and make a story about that. if they have no opinion on the art, move on to someone else.
tpaine posted:getfiscal what is trotskyism
a form of revolutionary socialism that emphasizes the need for democracy in a somewhat liberal sense
tpaine posted:can someone tell me what trotskyism is before i unplug this fucking computer and throw it in the dumpster.
Well, I dont claim to be an expert, but in my opinion, Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, which included his support for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class. His politics differed sharply from those of Stalinism, most prominently in opposing Socialism in One Country, which he argued was a break with proletarian internationalism, and in his belief in what he argued was a more authentic dictatorship of the proletariat based on working-class self-emancipation and mass democracy, rather than the unaccountable bureaucracy he saw as having developed after Lenin's death.
V. I. Lenin and Trotsky were close both ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath, and some call Trotsky its "co-leader". However, Lenin also criticized Trotsky's ideas and intra-Party political habits. Trotsky was also the paramount leader of the Soviet Red Army in the direct aftermath of the Revolutionary period.
Trotsky originally opposed some aspects of Leninism. In his 1914 article “Disruption of Unity”, Lenin wrote, "Under cover of ‘non-factionalism’ Trotsky is championing the interests of a group abroad which particularly lacks definite principles and has no basis in the working-class movement in Russia. All that glitters is not gold. There is much glitter and sound in Trotsky’s phrases, but they are meaningless." Later, Trotsky judged that unity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was impossible and joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky played a leading role with Lenin in the revolution. Assessing Trotsky, Lenin wrote, "Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik."
Trotsky's Fourth International was established in France in 1938 when Trotskyists argued that the Comintern or Third International had become irretrievably "lost to Stalinism" and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power. In contemporary English language, an advocate of Trotsky's ideas is often called a "Trotskyist"; a Trotskyist can be called a "Trotskyite" or "Trot", especially by a critic of Trotskyism.
Contents
1 Definition
2 Theory
2.1 Theory of Permanent Revolution
2.1.1 The capitalist or bourgeois-democratic revolution
2.2 Theory of permanent revolution
2.3 The working class steps in
2.4 International revolution
3 History
3.1 Origins
3.2 Trotskyism and the 1917 Russian Revolution
3.3 The 'legend of Trotskyism'
3.4 Founding of the Fourth International
4 Trotskyist movements
4.1 Latin America
4.2 Asia
4.3 Europe
4.4 International
5 Criticism
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
Definition
The leaders of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in Moscow, 1927. Sitting: Leonid Serebryakov, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Boguslavsky, and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. Standing: Christian Rakovsky, Yakov Drobnis, Alexander Beloborodov, and Lev Sosnovsky.
American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, in his 1942 book History of American Trotskyism, wrote that "Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International." However, Trotskyism can be distinguished from other Marxist theories by five key elements.
Support for the strategy of permanent revolution, in opposition to the Two Stage Theory of his opponents;
Criticism of the post-1924 leadership of the Soviet Union, analysis of its features and after 1933, support for political revolution in the Soviet Union and in what Trotskyists term the deformed workers' states;
Support for social revolution in the advanced capitalist countries through working class mass action;
Support for proletarian internationalism.
Use of a 'transitional' programme of demands that bridge between day to day struggles of the working class and the 'maximal' ideas of the socialist transformation of society
On the political spectrum of Marxism, Trotskyists are considered to be on the left. They supported democratic rights in the USSR, opposed political deals with the imperialist powers, and advocated a spreading of the revolution throughout Europe and the East.
Theory
Theory of Permanent Revolution
Trotsky (raising hand) with troops at the Polish front, during the Polish-Soviet War, 1919
Main article: Permanent Revolution
In 1905, Trotsky formulated a theory that became known as the theory of Permanent Revolution. It is one of the defining characteristics of Trotskyism. Until 1905, Marxism only claimed that a revolution in a European capitalist society would lead to a socialist one. According to the original theory it was impossible for such to occur in more backward countries such as early 20th century Russia. Russia in 1905 was widely considered to have not yet established a capitalist society, but was instead largely feudal with a small, weak and almost powerless capitalist class.
The theory of Permanent Revolution addressed the question of how such feudal regimes were to be overthrown, and how socialism could be established given the lack of economic prerequisites. Trotsky argued that in Russia only the working class could overthrow feudalism and win the support of the peasantry. Furthermore, he argued that the Russian working class would not stop there. They would win its own revolution against the weak capitalist class, establish a workers' state in Russia, and appeal to the working class in the advanced capitalist countries around the world. As a result, the global working class would come to Russia's aid, and socialism could develop worldwide.
The capitalist or bourgeois-democratic revolution
Revolutions in Britain in the 17th century and in France in 1789 abolished feudalism and established the basic requisites for the development of capitalism. Trotsky argued that these revolutions would not be repeated in Russia.
In Results and Prospects, written in 1906, Trotsky outlines his theory in detail, arguing: "History does not repeat itself. However much one may compare the Russian Revolution with the Great French Revolution, the former can never be transformed into a repetition of the latter." In the French Revolution of 1789, France experienced what Marxists called a "bourgeois-democratic revolution" – a regime was established wherein the bourgeoisie overthrew the existing French feudalistic system. The bourgeoisie then moved towards establishing a regime of democratic parliamentary institutions. However, while democratic rights were extended to the bourgeoisie, they were not generally extended to a universal franchise. The freedom for workers to organise unions or to strike was not achieved without considerable struggle.
Trotsky argues that countries like Russia had no "enlightened, active" revolutionary bourgeoisie which could play the same role, and the working class constituted a very small minority. By the time of the European revolutions of 1848, "the bourgeoisie was already unable to play a comparable role. It did not want and was not able to undertake the revolutionary liquidation of the social system that stood in its path to power."
Theory of permanent revolution
Leon Trotsky in exile in Siberia 1900
The theory of Permanent Revolution considers that in many countries, which are thought under Trotskyism to have not yet completed a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the capitalist class oppose the creation of any revolutionary situation. They fear stirring the working class into fighting for its own revolutionary aspirations against their exploitation by capitalism. In Russia, the working class, although a small minority in a predominantly peasant based society, were organised in vast factories owned by the capitalist class, and into large working class districts. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, the capitalist class found it necessary to ally with reactionary elements such as the essentially feudal landlords and ultimately the existing Czarist Russian state forces. This was to protect their ownership of their property—factories, banks, etc.—from expropriation by the revolutionary working class.
Therefore, according to the theory of Permanent Revolution, the capitalist classes of economically backward countries are weak and incapable of carrying through revolutionary change. As a result, they are linked to and rely on the feudal landowners in many ways. Thus, Trotsky argues, because a majority of the branches of industry in Russia were originated under the direct influence of government measures—sometimes with the help of government subsidies—the capitalist class was again tied to the ruling elite. The capitalist class were subservient to European capital.
The working class steps in
Instead, Trotsky argued, only the 'proletariat' or working class were capable of achieving the tasks of that 'bourgeois' revolution. In 1905, the working class in Russia, a generation brought together in vast factories from the relative isolation of peasant life, saw the result of its labour as a vast collective effort, and the only means of struggling against its oppression in terms of a collective effort also, forming workers councils (soviets), in the course of the revolution of that year. In 1906, Trotsky argued:
The factory system brings the proletariat to the foreground... The proletariat immediately found itself concentrated in tremendous masses, while between these masses and the autocracy there stood a capitalist bourgeoisie, very small in numbers, isolated from the 'people', half-foreign, without historical traditions, and inspired only by the greed for gain. – Trotsky, Results and Prospects
The Putilov Factory, for instance, numbered 12,000 workers in 1900, and, according to Trotsky, 36,000 in July 1917. The theory of Permanent Revolution considers that the peasantry as a whole cannot take on this task, because it is dispersed in small holdings throughout the country, and forms a heterogeneous grouping, including the rich peasants who employ rural workers and aspire to landlordism as well as the poor peasants who aspire to own more land. Trotsky argues: "All historical experience... shows that the peasantry are absolutely incapable of taking up an independent political role."
Trotskyists differ on the extent to which this is true today, but even the most orthodox tend to recognise in the late twentieth century a new development in the revolts of the rural poor, the self-organising struggles of the landless, and many other struggles which in some ways reflect the militant united organised struggles of the working class, and which to various degrees do not bear the marks of class divisions typical of the heroic peasant struggles of previous epochs. However, orthodox Trotskyists today still argue that the town and city based working class struggle is central to the task of a successful socialist revolution, linked to these struggles of the rural poor. They argue that the working class learns of necessity to conduct a collective struggle, for instance in trade unions, arising from its social conditions in the factories and workplaces, and that the collective consciousness it achieves as a result is an essential ingredient of the socialist reconstruction of society.
Although only a small minority in Russian society, the proletariat would lead a revolution to emancipate the peasantry and thus "secure the support of the peasantry" as part of that revolution, on whose support it will rely. But the working class, in order to improve their own conditions, will find it necessary to create a revolution of their own, which would accomplish both the bourgeois revolution and then establish a workers' state.
International revolution
According to classical Marxism, revolution in peasant-based countries, such as Russia, prepares the ground ultimately only for a development of capitalism since the liberated peasants become small owners, producers and traders which leads to the growth of commodity markets, from which a new capitalist class emerges. Only fully developed capitalist conditions prepare the basis for socialism.
Trotsky agreed that a new socialist state and economy in a country like Russia would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world, as well as the internal pressures of its backward economy. The revolution, Trotsky argued, must quickly spread to capitalist countries, bringing about a socialist revolution which must spread worldwide. In this way the revolution is "permanent", moving out of necessity first, from the bourgeois revolution to the workers’ revolution, and from there uninterruptedly to European and worldwide revolutions.
This was the position, contrary to that of "Classical Marxism" which by that time had been further illuminated by active life, shared by Trotsky and Lenin and the Bolsheviks until 1924 when Joseph Stalin, who along with Kamenev in February 1917 had taken the Menshevik position of first the bourgeois revolution, only to be confronted by Lenin and his famous April Thesis on Lenin's return to Russia, after the death of Lenin and seeking to consolidate his growing bureaucratic control of the Bolshevik Party began to put forward the slogan of "Socialism in one country".
An internationalist outlook of permanent revolution is found in the works of Karl Marx. The term "permanent revolution" is taken from a remark of Marx from his March 1850 Address: "it is our task", Marx said,
to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. – Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
History
Origins
According to Trotsky, the term 'Trotskyism' was coined by Pavel Milyukov, (sometimes transliterated as 'Paul Miliukoff'), the ideological leader of the Constitutional Democratic party (Kadets) in Russia. Milyukov waged a bitter war against 'Trotskyism' "as early as 1905".
Trotsky was elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the 1905 Russian Revolution. He pursued a policy of proletarian revolution at a time when other socialist trends advocated a transition to a "bourgeois" (capitalist) regime to replace the essentially feudal Romanov state. It was during this year that Trotsky developed the theory of Permanent Revolution, as it later became known (see below). In 1905, Trotsky quotes from a postscript to a book by Milyukov, The elections to the second state Duma, published no later than May 1907:
Those who reproach the Kadets with failure to protest at that time, by organising meetings, against the 'revolutionary illusions' of Trotskyism and the relapse into Blanquism, simply do not understand… the mood of the democratic public at meetings during that period." – The elections to the second state Duma by Pavel Milyukov
Milyukov suggests that the mood of the "democratic public" was in support of Trotsky's policy of the overthrow of the Romanov regime alongside a workers' revolution to overthrow the capitalist owners of industry, support for strike action and the establishment of democratically elected workers' councils or "soviets".
Trotskyism and the 1917 Russian Revolution
Lenin speaking at a meeting in Sverdlov Square in Moscow on 5 May 1920. Original photo with Trotsky and Kamenev standing on the steps of the platform. Later, this photo was censored to remove Trotsky and Kamenev.
During his leadership of the Russian revolution of 1905, Trotsky argued that once it became clear that the Tsar's army would not come out in support of the workers, it was necessary to retreat before the armed might of the state in as good an order as possible. In 1917, Trotsky was again elected chairman of the Petrograd soviet, but this time soon came to lead the Military Revolutionary Committee which had the allegiance of the Petrograd garrison, and carried through the October 1917 insurrection. Stalin wrote:
All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized. – Stalin, Pravda, November 6, 1918
As a result of his role in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the theory of Permanent Revolution was embraced by the young Soviet state until 1924.
The Russian revolution of 1917 was marked by two revolutions: the relatively spontaneous February 1917 revolution, and the 25 October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, who had gained the leadership of the Petrograd soviet.
Before the February 1917 Russian revolution, Lenin had formulated a slogan calling for the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry', but after the February revolution, through his April theses, Lenin instead called for "all power to the Soviets". Lenin nevertheless continued to emphasise however (as did Trotsky also) the classical Marxist position that the peasantry formed a basis for the development of capitalism, not socialism.
But also before February 1917, Trotsky had not accepted the importance of a Bolshevik style organisation. Once the February 1917 Russian revolution had broken out Trotsky admitted the importance of a Bolshevik organisation, and joined the Bolsheviks in July 1917. Despite the fact that many, like Stalin, saw Trotsky's role in the October 1917 Russian revolution as central, Trotsky says that without Lenin and the Bolshevik party the October revolution of 1917 would not have taken place.
As a result, since 1917, Trotskyism as a political theory is fully committed to a Leninist style of democratic centralist party organisation, which Trotskyists argue must not be confused with the party organisation as it later developed under Stalin. Trotsky had previously suggested that Lenin's method of organisation would lead to a dictatorship, but it is important to emphasise that after 1917 orthodox Trotskyists argue that the loss of democracy in the Soviet Union was caused by the failure of the revolution to successfully spread internationally and the consequent wars, isolation and imperialist intervention, not the Bolshevik style of organisation.
Lenin's outlook had always been that the Russian revolution would need to stimulate a Socialist revolution in western Europe in order that this European socialist society would then come to the aid of the Russian revolution and enable Russia to advance towards socialism. Lenin stated:
We have stressed in a good many written works, in all our public utterances, and in all our statements in the press that… the socialist revolution can triumph only on two conditions. First, if it is given timely support by a socialist revolution in one or several advanced countries. – Lenin, Speech at Tenth Congress of the RCP(B)
This outlook matched precisely Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. Trotsky's Permanent Revolution had foreseen that the working class would not stop at the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution, but proceed towards a workers' state, as happened in 1917. The Polish Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher maintains that in 1917, Lenin changed his attitude to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution and after the October revolution it was adopted by the Bolsheviks.
Lenin was met with initial disbelief in April 1917. Trotsky argues that:
up to the outbreak of the February revolution and for a time after Trotskyism did not mean the idea that it was impossible to build a socialist society within the national boundaries of Russia (which "possibility" was never expressed by anybody up to 1924 and hardly came into anybody’s head). Trotskyism meant the idea that the Russian proletariat might win the power in advance of the Western proletariat, and that in that case it could not confine itself within the limits of a democratic dictatorship but would be compelled to undertake the initial socialist measures. It is not surprising, then, that the April theses of Lenin were condemned as Trotskyist. – Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
The 'legend of Trotskyism'
"Bolshevik freedom" with nude of Leon Trotsky. Polish propaganda poster - Polish-Soviet War 1920
In The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky argues that what he calls the "legend of Trotskyism" was formulated by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in collaboration with Stalin in 1924, in response to the criticisms Trotsky raised of Politburo policy. Orlando Figes argues that "The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the Politburo, was in itself a crucial factor in Stalin's rise to power."
During 1922–24, Lenin suffered a series of strokes and became increasingly incapacitated. Before his death in 1924, Lenin, while describing Trotsky as "distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities – personally he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee", and also maintaining that "his non-Bolshevik past should not be held against him", criticized him for "showing excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work", and also requested that Stalin be removed from his position of General Secretary, but his notes remained suppressed until 1956. Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin in 1925 and joined Trotsky in 1926 in what was known as the United Opposition.
In 1926, Stalin allied with Nikolai Bukharin who then led the campaign against "Trotskyism". In The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky quotes Bukharin's 1918 pamphlet, From the Collapse of Czarism to the Fall of the Bourgeoisie, which was re-printed by the party publishing house, Proletari, in 1923. In this pamphlet, Bukharin explains and embraces Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, writing: "The Russian proletariat is confronted more sharply than ever before with the problem of the international revolution … The grand total of relationships which have arisen in Europe leads to this inevitable conclusion. Thus, the permanent revolution in Russia is passing into the European proletarian revolution." Yet it is common knowledge, Trotsky argues, that three years later, in 1926, "Bukharin was the chief and indeed the sole theoretician of the entire campaign against 'Trotskyism', summed up in the struggle against the theory of the permanent revolution."
Trotsky wrote that the Left Opposition grew in influence throughout the 1920s, attempting to reform the Communist Party. But in 1927 Stalin declared "civil war" against them:
During the first ten years of its struggle, the Left Opposition did not abandon the program of ideological conquest of the party for that of conquest of power against the party. Its slogan was: reform, not revolution. The bureaucracy, however, even in those times, was ready for any revolution in order to defend itself against a democratic reform.
In 1927, when the struggle reached an especially bitter stage, Stalin declared at a session of the Central Committee, addressing himself to the Opposition: “Those cadres can be removed only by civil war!” What was a threat in Stalin’s words became, thanks to a series of defeats of the European proletariat, a historic fact. The road of reform was turned into a road of revolution. – Trotsky, Leon, Revolution Betrayed, p279, Pathfinder (1972)
Defeat of the European working class led to further isolation in Russia, and further suppression of the Opposition. Trotsky argued that the "so-called struggle against 'Trotskyism' grew out of the bureaucratic reaction against the October Revolution ". He responded to the one sided civil war with his Letter to the Bureau of Party History, (1927), contrasting what he claimed to be the falsification of history with the official history of just a few years before. He further accused Stalin of derailing the Chinese revolution, and causing the massacre of the Chinese workers:
In the year 1918, Stalin, at the very outset of his campaign against me, found it necessary, as we have already learned, to write the following words:
“All the work of practical organization of the insurrection was carried out under the direct leadership of the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, comrade Trotsky…” (Stalin, Pravda, Nov. 6, 1918)
With full responsibility for my words, I am now compelled to say that the cruel massacre of the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese Revolution at its three most important turning points, the strengthening of the position of the trade union agents of British imperialism after the General Strike of 1926, and, finally, the general weakening of the position of the Communist International and the Soviet Union, the party owes principally and above all to Stalin. – Trotsky, Leon, The Stalin School of Falsification, p87, Pathfinder (1971)
Trotsky was sent into internal exile and his supporters were jailed. Victor Serge, for instance, first "spent six weeks in a cell" after a visit at midnight, then 85 days in an inner GPU cell, most of it in solitary confinement. He details the jailings of the Left Opposition. The Left Opposition, however, continued to work in secret within the Soviet Union. Trotsky was eventually exiled to Turkey. He moved from there to France, Norway, and finally to Mexico.
After 1928, the various Communist Parties throughout the world expelled Trotskyists from their ranks. Most Trotskyists defend the economic achievements of the planned economy in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, despite the "misleadership" of the soviet bureaucracy, and what they claim to be the loss of democracy. Trotskyists claim that in 1928 inner party democracy, and indeed soviet democracy, which was at the foundation of Bolshevism, had been destroyed within the various Communist Parties. Anyone who disagreed with the party line was labeled a Trotskyist and even a fascist.
In 1937, Stalin again unleashed what Trotskyists say was a political terror against their Left Opposition and many of the remaining 'Old Bolsheviks' (those who had played key roles in the October Revolution in 1917), in the face of increased opposition, particularly in the army.
Founding of the Fourth International
Trotsky with Lenin and soldiers in Petrograd
Main article: Fourth International
Trotsky founded the International Left Opposition in 1930. It was meant to be an opposition group within the Comintern, but anyone who joined, or was suspected of joining, the ILO, was immediately expelled from the Comintern. The ILO therefore concluded that opposing Stalinism from within the Communist organizations controlled by Stalin's supporters had become impossible, so new organizations had to be formed. In 1933, the ILO was renamed the International Communist League (ICL), which formed the basis of the Fourth International, founded in Paris in 1938.
Trotsky said that only the Fourth International, basing itself on Lenin's theory of the vanguard party, could lead the world revolution, and that it would need to be built in opposition to both the capitalists and the Stalinists.
Trotsky argued that the defeat of the German working class and the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 was due in part to the mistakes of the Third Period policy of the Communist International and that the subsequent failure of the Communist Parties to draw the correct lessons from those defeats showed that they were no longer capable of reform, and a new international organisation of the working class must be organised. The Transitional demand tactic had to be a key element.
At the time of the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 Trotskyism was a mass political current in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and slightly later Bolivia. There was also a substantial Trotskyist movement in China which included the founding father of the Chinese Communist movement, Chen Duxiu, amongst its number. Wherever Stalinists gained power, they made it a priority to hunt down Trotskyists and treated them as the worst of enemies.
The Fourth International suffered repression and disruption through the Second World War. Isolated from each other, and faced with political developments quite unlike those anticipated by Trotsky, some Trotskyist organizations decided that the Soviet Union no longer could be called a degenerated workers state and withdrew from the Fourth International. After 1945 Trotskyism was smashed as a mass movement in Vietnam and marginalised in a number of other countries.
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI) organised an international conference in 1946, and then World Congresses in 1948 and 1951 to assess the expropriation of the capitalists in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, the threat of a Third World War, and the tasks for revolutionaries. The Eastern European Communist-led governments which came into being after World War II without a social revolution were described by a resolution of the 1948 congress as presiding over capitalist economies. By 1951, the Congress had concluded that they had become "deformed workers' states." As the Cold War intensified, the ISFI's 1951 World Congress adopted theses by Michel Pablo that anticipated an international civil war. Pablo's followers considered that the Communist Parties, insofar as they were placed under pressure by the real workers' movement, could escape Stalin's manipulations and follow a revolutionary orientation.
The 1951 Congress argued that Trotskyists should start to conduct systematic work inside those Communist Parties which were followed by the majority of the working class. However, the ISFI's view that the Soviet leadership was counter-revolutionary remained unchanged. The 1951 Congress argued that the Soviet Union took over these countries because of the military and political results of World War II, and instituted nationalized property relations only after its attempts at placating capitalism failed to protect those countries from the threat of incursion by the West.
Pablo began expelling large numbers of people who did not agree with his thesis and who did not want to dissolve their organizations within the Communist Parties. For instance, he expelled the majority of the French section and replaced its leadership. As a result, the opposition to Pablo eventually rose to the surface, with an open letter to Trotskyists of the world, by Socialist Workers Party leader James P. Cannon.
The Fourth International split in 1953 into two public factions. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) was established by several sections of the International as an alternative centre to the International Secretariat, in which they felt a revisionist faction led by Michel Pablo had taken power. From 1960, a number of ICFI sections started to reunify with the IS. After the 1963 reunification congress, the French and British sections maintained the ICFI. Other groups took different paths and originated the present complex map of Trotskyist groupings.
Trotskyist movements
Latin America
Trotskyist progapanda in Brazil.
Trotskyism has had some influence in some recent major social upheavals, particularly in Latin America.
The Bolivian Trotskyist party (Partido Obrero Revolucionario, POR) became a mass party in the period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and together with other groups played a central role during and immediately after the period termed the Bolivian National Revolution.
In Brazil, as an officially recognised platform or faction of the PT until 1992, the Trotskyist Movimento Convergência Socialista (CS), which founded the United Socialist Workers' Party (PSTU) in 1994, saw a number of its members elected to national, state and local legislative bodies during the 1980s. Today the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL) is described as Trotskyist. Its presidential candidate in the 2006 general elections, Heloísa Helena is termed a Trotskyist who was a member of the Workers Party of Brazil (PT), a legislative deputy in Alagoas and in 1999 was elected to the Federal Senate. Expelled from the PT in December 2003, she helped found PSOL, in which various Trotskyist groups play a prominent role.
During the 1980s in Argentina, the Trotskyist party founded in 1982 by Nahuel Moreno, MAS, (Movimiento al Socialismo, Movement Toward Socialism), claimed to be the "largest Trotskyist party" in the world, before it broke into a number of different fragments in the late 1980s, including the present-day MST, PTS, MAS, IS, PRS, FOS, etc. In 1989 in an electoral front with the Communist Party and Christian nationalists groups, called "Izquierda Unida" (united left), obtained 3,49% of the electorate, representing 580.944 voters. Today the Workers' Party in Argentina has an electoral base in Salta Province in the far north, particularly in the city of Salta itself, and has become the third political force in the provinces of Tucuman, also in the north, and Santa Cruz, in the south.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declared himself to be a Trotskyist during his swearing in of his cabinet two days before his own inauguration on 10 January 2007. Venezuelan Trotskyist organizations do not regard Chávez as a Trotskyist, with some describing him as a bourgeois nationalist and other considering him an honest revolutionary leader who has made major mistakes because he lacks a Marxist analysis.
Asia
In Indochina during the 1930s, Vietnamese Trotskyism led by Ta Thu Thau was a significant current, particularly in Saigon.
In Sri Lanka, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) expelled its pro-Moscow wing in 1940, becoming a Trotskyist-led party. It was led by South Asia's pioneer Trotskyist, Philip Gunawardena and his colleague NM Perera. In 1942, following the escape of the leaders of the LSSP from a British prison, a unified Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma (BLPI) was established in India, bringing together the many Trotskyist groups in the subcontinent. The BLPI was active in the Quit India movement as well as the labour movement, capturing the second oldest union in India. Its high point was when it led the strikes which followed the Bombay Mutiny. After the war, the Sri Lanka section split into the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP). The Indian section of the BLPI later fused with the Congress Socialist Party. In the general election of 1947 the LSSP became the main opposition party, winning 10 seats, the BSP winning a further 5. It joined the Trotskyist Fourth International after fusion with the BSP in 1950, and led a general strike (Hartal) in 1953.
In 1964 a section of the LSSP split to form the LSSP (Revolutionary) and joined the Fourth International after the LSSP proper was expelled. The LSSP (R) later split into factions led by Bala Tampoe and Edmund Samarakkody. The LSSP joined the coalition government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, three of its members, NM Perera, Cholmondely Goonewardena and Anil Moonesinghe, becoming the first Trotskyist cabinet ministers in history.
In 1974 a secret faction of the LSSP, allied to the Militant Tendency in the UK emerged. In 1977 this faction was expelled and formed the Nava Sama Samaja Party, led by Vasudeva Nanayakkara.
Europe
Graffiti in the Basque Country: James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism.
In France, 10% of the electorate voted in 2002 for parties calling themselves Trotskyist.
In Britain during the 1980s, the entrist Militant tendency won three members of parliament and effective control of Liverpool City Council while in the Labour Party. Described as "Britain's fifth most important political party" in 1986 it played a prominent role in the 1989–1991 mass anti-poll tax movement which was widely thought to have led to the downfall of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Almost all of the larger far-left parties in Britain are led by Trotskyists, including the Socialist Workers Party (Britain), the Socialist Party (England and Wales), Respect – The Unity Coalition and the Scottish Socialist Party.
The Socialist Party in Ireland was formed in 1990 by members who had been expelled by the Irish Labour Party's leader Dick Spring. It has had a sizable amount of support in the Fingal electoral district and has a Member of the European Parliament, Paul Murphy, representing Dublin and two Members of the Irish Parliament (Dáil Éireann), Clare Daly, representing Dublin North and Joe Higgins, representing Dublin West.
In Portugal's September 2009 parliamentary election, the Left Bloc won 558.062 votes, which translated into 9,82% of the expressed votes and the election of 16 (out of 230) deputies to the national parliament. Although founded by several leftist tendencies, it still expresses much of the Trotskyist thought upheld and developed by its current leader, Francisco Louçã.
In Turkey, there are some organizations which are IST's section (Revolutionary Workers' Socialist Party), CRFI's section (Revolutionary Workers' Party), Permanent Revolution Movement(SDH), Socialism Magazine(sympathizers of the ICFI) and several small groups.
International
The Fourth International derives from the 1963 reunification of the two public factions into which Fourth International split in 1953: the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI) and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It is often referred to as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the name of its leading committee before 2003. It is widely described as the largest contemporary Trotskyist organisation with sections and sympathizing organizations in over 50 countries. Its best known section has been the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire of France, but today there are also sizeable and influential sections in Portugal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Pakistan and several other countries.
The Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) was founded in 1974 and now has sections in over 35 countries. Before 1997, most organisations affiliated to the CWI sought to build an entrist Marxist wing within the large social democratic parties. Since the early 1990s it has argued that most social democratic, as indeed socialist parties have moved so far to the right that there is little point trying to work within them. Instead the CWI has adopted a range of tactics, mostly seeking to build independent parties, but in some cases working within other broad working-class parties.
In France, the LCR is rivalled by Lutte Ouvrière. That group is the French section of the Internationalist Communist Union (UCI). UCI has small sections in a handful of other countries. It focuses its activities, whether propaganda or intervention, within the industrial proletariat.
The founders of the Committee for a Marxist International (CMI) claim they were expelled from the CWI, when the CWI abandoned entryism. The CWI claims they left and no expulsions were carried out. Since 2006, it has been known as the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). CMI/IMT groups continue the policy of entering mainstream social democratic, communist or radical parties.
Currently, International Marxist Tendency (IMT) is headed by Alan Woods and Lal Khan. The list of Trotskyist internationals shows that there are a large number of other multinational tendencies that stand in the tradition of Leon Trotsky. Some Trotskyist organisations are only organized in one country.
Criticism
Trotskyism has been criticised from various directions.
In 1935, a Marxist-Leninist named Moissaye J. Olgin published a book entitled Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise in which he put forward the idea that Trotskyism was "the enemy of the working class" and that it "should be shunned by anybody who has sympathy for the revolutionary movement of the exploited and oppressed the world over." The notable African-American Marxist-Leninist Harry Haywood, who spent much time in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 30s, stated that although he had been somewhat interested in Trotsky’s ideas when he was young, he came to see it as "a disruptive force on the fringes of the international revolutionary movement" which eventually developed into "a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Party and the Soviet state." He continued to put forward his belief that:
Trotsky was not defeated by bureaucratic decisions or Stalin's control of the Party apparatus -- as his partisans and Trotskyite historians claim. He had his day in court and finally lost because his whole position flew in the face of Soviet and world realities. He was doomed to defeat because his ideas were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people.
The way Trotskyists organise to promote their beliefs, democratic centralism, has been criticised, often by ex-members of their organisations. Tourish, a former member of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) asserts that these organisations typically value doctrinal orthodoxy over critical reflection, have illusions in the absolute correctness of their own party's analysis, a fear of dissent, the demonising of dissenters and critical opinion, overworking of members, a sectarian attitude to the rest of the left and the concentration of power among a small group of leaders.
Some left communists, such as Paul Mattick claim that the October Revolution was totalitarian from the start and therefore, Trotskyism has no real differences from Stalinism either in practice or theory.
In the United States Dwight Macdonald broke with Trotsky and left the trotskist Socialist Workers Party, by raising the question of the Kronstadt rebellion, which Trotsky as leader of the Soviet Red Army and the other Bolsheviks had brutally repressed. He then moved towards democratic socialism and anarchism. A similar critique on Trotsky's role on the events around the Kronstadt rebellion was raised by the American anarchist Emma Goldman. In her essay "Trotsky Protests Too Much" she says "I admit, the dictatorship under Stalin's rule has become monstrous. That does not, however, lessen the guilt of Leon Trotsky as one of the actors in the revolutionary drama of which Kronstadt was one of the bloodiest scenes."
References
^ Lenin and Trotsky were "co-leaders" of the 1917 Russian Revolution: http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/archives/oldsite/2004/RCP-823.htm
^ V.I. Lenin, "Disruption of Unity", 1914
^ "Minutes of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party," 1 November 1917
^ The Transitional Program. Retrieved November 5, 2008.
^ Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus (1993)
^ cf for instance, Trotsky, Leon, The Permanent Revolution (1928) and Results and Prospects (1906), New Park Publications, London, (1962)
^ Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, 1936
^ What is Trotskyism (1973) Ernest Mandel
^ Trotsky, Leon 'The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of The Fourth International' (1938)
^ Figes, Orlando, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, p803, Pimlico (1997)
^ Trotsky, Leon, Results and Prospects, p 184, New Park publications (1962)
^ Trotsky, Leon, Results and Prospects, pp 174–7, New Park publications (1962)
^ Trotsky, Results and Prospects, p183, New Park (1962)
^ Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, ('July Days': Preparation and beginning) p519, Pluto Press (1977)
^ Trotsky, Leon, Results and Prospects, p 204–5, New Park publications (1962)
^ Many would put, for instance, the Committee for a Workers’ International in this category of orthodox Trotskyists. See for instance, Che Guevara: A revolutionary fighter accessed 2007-10-07
^ Trotsky, Leon, Results and Prospects, p 204–5, New Park publications (1962). Trotsky adds that the revolution must raise the cultural and political consciousness of the peasantry.
^ Marx, Karl, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
^ Trotsky, Leon, My Life, p230 and 294, Penguin, Harmondsworth, (1971)
^ Milyukov, The elections to the second state Duma, pp91 and 92, is quoted by Leon Trotsky in 1905, Pelican books, (1971) p295 (and p176)
^ Trotsky, Leon, 1905, Pelican books, (1971) p217 ff
^ This summary of Trotsky's role in 1917, written by Stalin for Pravda, November 6, 1918, was quoted in Stalin's book The October Revolution issued in 1934, but it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in 1949.
^ "Peasant farming continues to be… an extremely broad and very sound, deep-rooted basis for capitalism, a basis on which capitalism persists or arises anew in a bitter struggle against communism." Lenin Economics and Politics in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat, October 30, 1919, Collected works, Vol 30, p109
^ Lenin, Report on the substitution of a tax in kind for the surplus-grain approriation system, Tenth Congress, March 15, 1921, Collected works, Vol 32, p215. This speech, of course, introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was intended to reinforce the basis of the second of the two conditions Lenin mentions in the quote, the support of the peasantry for the workers' state.
^ Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, p285, Penguin, (1966)
^ Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution, p332, Pluto Press, London (1977)
^ See also Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, p 293, Penguin (1966)
^ Figes, Orlando, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, p802, Pimlico (1997). Figes, at Birkbeck, University of London, is one of the UK's leading modern Russian historians
^ Lenin, Collected works, Vol 36, pp593–98: "Stalin is too rude and this defect…becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post…it is a detail which can assume decisive importance."
^ Trotsky, Leon, The Stalin School of Falsification, pp89ff, Pathfinder (1971)
^ Trotsky, Leon, The Stalin School of Falsification, pp78ff, Pathfinder (1971)
^ Trotsky, Leon, The Stalin School of Falsification, Foreword to the Russian edition, p xxxiii, Pathfinder (1971)
^ Serge, Victor, From Lenin to Stalin, p70, Pathfinder, (1973)
^ Serge, Victor, From Lenin to Stalin, p70 ff, Pathfinder, (1973)
^ Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, p381, Pelican (1966)
^ Trotsky, Leon, Revolution Betrayed, pp5 – 32 Pathfinder (1971)
^ "One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all working and exploited people generally" Lenin, 'How to organise competition', Collected Works, Volume 26, p. 409
^ Rogovin, Vadim, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror Mehring Books, 1998, p374. Also see the chapter 'Trotskyists in the camps': "A new, young generation of Trotskyists had grown up in the Soviet Union…lots of them go to their deaths crying 'Long live Trotsky!' " Until this research became available after the fall of the Soviet Union, little was known about the strength of the Trotskyists within the Soviet Union.
^ Alexander, Robert J., International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement, Duke University Press (1991)
^ History of the PSTU
^ Atlas Electoral de Andy Tow
^ BBC News, Chavez accelerates on path to socialism, Nathalie Malinarich, accessed online 19 June 2007
^ http://replay.web.archive.org/20071010152457/http://www.jir.org.ve/article.php3?id_article=211
^ Sanabria, William, La Enmienda Constitucional, Orlando Chirino y la C-CURA
^ Richardson, A.(Ed.), The Revolution Defamed: A documentary history of Vietnamese Trotskyism, Socialist Platform Ltd (2003)
^ Ervin, W E, Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935-48, Colombo, Social Scientists Association, 2006.
^ Y. Ranjith Amarasinghe, Revolutionary Idealism & Parliamentary Politics – A Study Of Trotskyism In Sri Lanka, Colombo (1998)
^ Leslie Goonewardena, A Short History of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party accessed online June 19, 2007
^ The combined Trotskyist vote was 2,973,600 (10.44%) compared to 1,616,546 (5.3%) in 1995
^ Crick, Michael, The March of Militant, p2
^ BBC 'On this day' retrospective is "1990: One in five yet to pay poll tax"
^ Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (1993) pp848–9
^ http://www.legislativas2009.mj.pt/legislativas2009/
^ Olgin, Moissaye J. 1935. Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise. New York: Workers Library Publishers. Chapter Fourteen.
^ Haywood, Harry. 1978. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago: Liberator Press. Chapter Six.
^ Tourish: Introduction to Ideological Intransigence, Democratic Centralism and Cultism: http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/back/WNext27/Intro.html
^ Mattick, Paul. 1947. Bolshevism and Stalinism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1947/bolshevism-stalinism.htm
^ Mattson, Kevin. 2002. Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. p. 34
^ Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (1960). This was later republished with the title Politics Past.
^ Emma Goldman. "Trotsky Protests Too Much"
Further reading
Alex Callinicos. Trotskyism (Concepts in Social Thought) University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Belden Fields. Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States Praeger Publishers, 1989.
Alfred Rosmer. Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism. Republished by Francis Boutle Publishers, now out of print.
Cliff Slaughter. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism: A Documentary History (multivolume work, now out of print)
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