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Originally Posted by NHIA
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Trotskyists struggle for socialist/communist revolution while putting emphasis to workers power and democracy, and aim for a society with a democratically planned economy, as opposed to a bureacratically planned one like the Stalinists or a market economy like capitalists.
"The Workers' Opposition has come out with dangerous slogans. They have mad a fetish of democratic principles. They have places the workers' right to elect representatives above the party, as it were, as if the party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy .... It is necessary to create among us the awareness of the revolutionary birthright of the party. The party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering in the spontaneous moods of the masses, regardless of the temporary vacillations even in the working class. This awareness is for us the indispensable unifying elements. The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principles of a workers' democracy...." - Trotsky, on page 509 of the Vintage Edition (1965). The footnote for this quote is
Desyatyi Syezd RKP, pp. 192.
"We are now heading towards the type of labour [he stated] that is socially regulated on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker. This is the basis of socialism.... The militarisation of labour, in this fundamental sense of which I have spoken, is the indispensable basic method for the organisation of our labour forces.... Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive?.... This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive.... Compulsory serf labour did not grow out of the feudal lords' ill-will. It was [in its time] a progressive phenomenon." On page 501 of the same edition. The foot note indicates it was made in a report to the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions. The source given is
Tretii Vserossiskii Syezd Profsoyuzow pp 87-96.
"The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers. Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism. Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps." - Trotsky
NHIA, old chum. :glare: If you read the very bit you quoted again, you may notice that I said 'trotskyists', not 'Trotsky'. Just like I tried to explain in another
post in this thread, I'm perfectly aware that during the civil war and in the years immediately after that, the bolshevik leaders (Lenin, Trotsky etc) did divert from democracy in order to do what they perceived as necessary to ensure victory.
Most of their advocates today don't at all defend all of the things they did during those years of extreme struggle for the survival of the revolution. After all, they were only human beings in a
very pressing situation, not gods that always did the right thing.
Some of the decisions Trotsky made were right, others no doubt weren't. This does, however, not negate the fact that he later on was the foremost critic of the bureaucratic development in the USSR and that his followers today always make a point of condemning anti-democratic tendencies within the socialist movement.
In other words, what matters in this context is the ideology he left behind, not all of his actions or everything he wrote.
The CWI, for instance, declares it's support of economic
and political democracy. It supports independent and fighting trade unions, it's leaders are electable and recallable, and if elected to public offices they refuse to take out more than an average workers salary. Etc, etc, the list goes on.
So yeah, you post was a bit pointless.
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Originally Posted by Menocchio
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Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive?.... This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive....
Wow, I was vaguely familiar with Trotsky's views on the militarization of labour, but this...shit.
You have to take into account the context of that sentence. Consider the one after it:
"Compulsory serf labour did not grow out of the feudal lords' ill-will. It was [in its time] a progressive phenomenon." Emphasis on the key words added by me. That's just basic historical materialism from Trotsky: the slave society was an improvement from the hunter and gatherer society, in the sense that it led towards the next form of society, which is called feudalism and in it's turn was an improvement.
Which of course doesn't mean that it in any sense of the word would be a desirable society for humanity today. Just a stage in human progress, a painful step in the development of our species that in turn led to a more advanced society.