Settled Questions

[Jimmie Higgins]

What, in your view, are the questions and debates in the worker or revolutionary movement that have now been settled by history.

I'd like to keep the political tendency battles out of this as much as possible, so if you think a question is settled but you know that a large and active section of the movement still considers this to be an open question - as much as you can - please resist the urge to list it. For example I would say that "socialism from above" and "socialism in one country" have been definitively proven to not lead to socialism and communism but to something else. However, since there are so many Stalinist here I'm not going to list that.

If a once widespread debate is now fringe like Bernsteinism (see below) - the I think it's ok to list it as long as you can cite what history has settled the question.


My examples:

Bernsteinism: From the early 20th century to today history has shown that the idea that increased prosperity of capitalism does not lead automatically to increased prosperity for the working class. The world economic crisis after WWI showed that the contradictions of the system were not overcome; the world wars and cold war show that capitalist powers were not becoming less war-like because war would interrupt normal profit-making activities.

Third Worldism: After reading arguments by a 3rd worldist in the OI section, I am more convinced than ever that this view is as anachronistic as the belief that the earth is 4,000 years old and dinosaurs hung out with cavemen. The idea that 1st world workers have a stake in imperialism and materially benefit from it has been shown to be totally wrong since the 1970s when the US ruling class went from a "guns and butter" philosophy to the gutting social welfare to pay for imperialism. While imperialism has made the US ruling class much much more powerful since the collapse of the USSR, the US working class has only gotten much more exploited and has lost a lot of ground.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Way to go. I would say that Trotskyism started off as and continues to be a social-imperialist petit-bourgeois ideology that has totally failed to do anything of use to the working class, but has demoralized and defeated workers, but I'm not going to list that since there are so many Trotskyist.

Thanks for not getting the entire spirit of this thing as well as my open and honest attempt not to have this topic just become another tendency debate. Yes, i am a trotskyist and I used the stalinism example as an example of an OPEN question since even though I am convinced that it is a dead-end, there are many stalinists on this website that argue for this or that reason that these strategies could work or that the USSR was really socialist etc, etc.

I think there are a great number of things that have been settled through the experience of the workers movement and while it's good to go back and look at some of it in order to understand the source of modern debates, I think there are plenty of closed debates such as utopian communes as a viable strategy for "showing the rich" a better way to organize society.


As far as the other "settled" questions are concerned, Marxism being a scientific methodology, it ensures that debates continue to happen. We need to continually remind ourselves why Bernstein was wrong and make sure we do not repeat the same errors. So I'd say there are no settled questions and there should not be.No settled questions? Well that's not science then. Since has all sorts of settled debates - every serious scientist believes in the theory of evolution for example even if crazy right-wingers deny it and even if there is considerable debate among scientists about specific details regarding evolution.

[core_1]

I sincerely wish that Stalinism was a ''settled question'', with the answer being that it has demoralised the working class by allowing a small exploitative minority live off the labour of the proletariat while presenting itself as the defender of marxism. I also wish that more revleft users would laugh at the idea of stalin's russia as being 'real existing socialism'.

[Yehuda Stern]

Actually, for Marxists at least the question of Stalinism has been settled: the Stalinist states are obviously capitalist today, and the changes in the early 1990s involved no revolution which changed the ruling class. Therefore those countries were capitalist all along. That is, if you are a Marxist and believe that a ruling class can only be changed through a revolution. How do you call those who don't, again? That's right, reformists.

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

Holy fuck. He stated in the OP that he doesn't want a tendency debate.
He stated that even though he believes it's a settled question he's going to avoid a tendency debate.

And what exactly does the first fucking poster do?


That's bad form. Very bad form. :thumbdown:

By the way, stating that Gravedigger did this as an attempt to avoid a debate with stalinists is just dumb. If he wanted to debate stalinism then there's a billions fucking threads he could have picked from!

This might be hard to understand for someone dumping anarchism and embracing it's exact opposite, but for God sakes can't there at least be one fuckin thread where we don't examine the actions of long dead russians? There should be stickys for trotsky, trotsky v stalin, and then stalin. If you attempt debate on the subject outside this you get the same response OIers do when they try to call for their unrestriction in the middle of political threads.

Or maybe just a thread called "All Followers of Dead Russian Ideologies"

[red cat]

Actually, for Marxists at least the question of Stalinism has been settled: the Stalinist states are obviously capitalist today, and the changes in the early 1990s involved no revolution which changed the ruling class. Therefore those countries were capitalist all along. That is, if you are a Marxist and believe that a ruling class can only be changed through a revolution. How do you call those who don't, again? That's right, reformists.
But then, the Stalinist state of USSR was Leninist previously(if not all along). So another question that has been settled is that Leninism leads to Stalinism.

Another observation; throughout the last century, Trotskyists have failed to make any successful revolutions, and have never led any armed struggle. I think that this has also settled a very important question.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Jeesusfuckingchrist. For a second, I thought about using an Anarchist rather than Stalinist example of something I think is a settled question but is actually a live debate on the left... but I thought - no, some anarchist might accuse me of making a back-handed dig at his/her tradition.

So instead I used a stalinist example thinking that since I'm a trotskyist folks would realize that I obviously don't see Stalinism as a viable option while I also recognize that the existance of many Stalinists on the left indicates that it is not a closed question for the majority of the radical left.

[insert face-palm picture here].

Can we start over? If you want to debate Stalinism vs. Trotskyism or Anarchism vs. Stalinism or Ortho Trots vs. IS trots... go to the appropriate thread(s).

My attempt here was to see where, in general, the common ground was. If someone says history disproved anarchism/trotskyism and a bunch of anarchists/trots disagree, I would not be interested or surprised. If someone says that Bernsteinism or positivism or whatever is dead but other people debate that... well that's a more interesting discussion because I would not expect that.