Trotskyism

[Ziemowit Rus]

May I aska a rather noobisque and a bit silly question?

I'd like some of you guys to explain the core idea of Trotskyist ideology and practice. I know all the smudge about anti-Stalinism and global revolution, but I'm rather sure it doesn't end there. What kind of society would be a trotskyist one?

I'd also appreciate if someone here could give some more details about anti-Soviet ideas of Trotskyist movement and their global goals: what were the major defects of soviet system and how the Trotskyist movement is going to create global socialism? What would happen to the whole concept of 'state'?

Thanks in advance already :)

Regards,
Ziemowit

[Yehuda Stern]

Well, the first thing you will find out when you ask that question here is that there are dozens of answers to it. But I will sum up the world view of my organization, the Israeli ISL:

1. First of all, the concepts of anti-Stalinism and global revolution aren't a smudge to us. Our opposition to Stalinism has begun, historically, with the rightward movement of the Stalin faction of the Soviet CP and its supporters worldwide. The original Trotskyists sought to defend Marxism from the revisions introduced by this faction. Arguably the most important principle they have defended was that socialism cannot be built in one country, but can only be established as a world system. That is why Trotskyists accentuated the need for an internationalist revolutionary outlook.

2. I'm not sure what you mean by "Trotskyist society." The world revolution has three phases: in the first, the revolution has won only in one or in some countries in the world. This is the stage in which workers' states are set up. These states belong to the capitalist age in that the law of value (the working laws of capitalism) still operates in them, and many concepts of bourgeois right still apply, but they are a gateway to the socialist age. In these states, political power is in the hands of the workers, who use this power to twist the law of value in favor of the masses.

Next comes the socialist stage, after the revolution has won all over the world. In that stage states and classes still exist, but seeing as the need to defend the revolution from counterrevolution is no more, classes begin to disintegrate, and due to this, the state. This is a process which ends in the communist age, where there are no classes are states, and the old slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can be actualized.

3. As for critcism of the USSR: we believe that Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a deformed workers' state holds true only up until the late 1930s, when the left opposition was smashed in the USSR. Workers' control of industry has already been destroyed, and the defeat of the opposition signalled that the bureaucracy has been able to transform itself into a stable ruling class, although qualitatively backwards in relation to western imperialism. Unlike the Cliffites (British SWP), we do not believe that Stalinism was a crisis free system or that it was fundamentally different from western capitalism. But this last point is very unique to us, and most "Trotskyist" groups have preferred to cling on to the old definition of the USSR (which they have distorted as well) and revise most of Trotsky and Lenin's important works on other subjects.

[Q]

With the first two points I don't disagree with with Yehuda Stern, so I won't go into that. But as for the third point I do disagree. We of the CWI are of the opinion that the USSR always remained a degenerated workers state or proletarian bonarpartist regime, which both mean that while there was a socialised and planned economy that the bureaucracy wasn't owner of (hence why we disagree that the Stalinist bureaucracy became a ruling class), the bureaucracy was however in such a position of power it could skim off the surplus in society for paying its own privileges. This bureaucracy didn't have a class basis in society, so it had to use totialitarian methods to cling to power.

This leaded to the conclusion that we called for a political revolution to get rid off the bureaucratic parasites of USSR society.


I'd also appreciate if someone here could give some more details about anti-Soviet ideas of Trotskyist movement and their global goals: what were the major defects of soviet system and how the Trotskyist movement is going to create global socialism? What would happen to the whole concept of 'state'?
We aren't anti-Soviet. Soviets (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/s/o.htm#soviets), or workers councils, are organs of working class rule and is far more democratic than possible in a capitalist state.

I guess that you're talking about the Stalinist regime though and would therefore be happy to link you to The Revolution Betrayed (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm), an indepth analysis on the character of the bureaucratic degeneration we got to know as Stalinism.

On the question of world revolution, I'd like you to link to another major book: Permanent Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/index.htm). This basically gives the analysis that socialism can only work on an international schale if it ever wants to defeat capitalism and leave it behind in the dustbins of history. To be able to do that, we are trying to build internationals pf revolutionary parties like the CWI for example. Besides building our own organisation, we are also tasked in the current period to rebuild the workers movement in general, as the old social-democracy can no longer function as such because of their betrayal to the working people and the subsequent leaving of the workers from these parties.

To the concept of the workers state, I'd like to say this: a state is by definition an apparatus of class oppression. In the bourheois state we see a small minority of the population oppressing the vast majority (capitalists > working class), this leads to high amounts of bureaucracy, police enforcement and corruption. In a workers state by contrast there is the oppression of the capitalist class by the working people. So, the vast majority over a small group. This can only happen in a direct democracy, within the structures of the workers councils (soviets). Once the class has ceased to exist, the soviets can historically no longer exist as a state either (this, with the notable exception of a bonarpartist regime as explained earlier, which is in the core a very unstable form of state).

I hope I helped a bit, welcome to the forums :)