Results 1 to 20 of 36
Trots Against Democracy?
I was appalled yesterday to read a number of posts by self-identified Trotskyists flirting with supporting the Chinese government’s proposed repressive measures against pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. This is a situation where class lines seem quite clear. It was reported today that thousands of Hong Kong workers have gone on strike in solidarity with the protests.
Meanwhile, when the Stalinist bureaucracy is not scheming of ways to suppress pro-democratic dissent on the streets of Hong Kong, it is clamoring for ways to privatize even more of its economy, accumulate even more capital, and strengthen its relations with big Western businesses.
What's striking about these self-identified Trotskyists is the way in which the principles they are fanatically committed to defending deviate so much from Trotsky's own principles. For him political substitution was never a principle. An event like Kronstadt might be necessary at a time, in 1921, when the party was in his view "a genuine organization of the proletarian vanguard" that needed to be preserved in the interests of stimulating revolutionary political activity by the masses in the future. It was inexcusable to him by the middle of the next decade, when he believed that the Stalinists, whose interests were driven by their pursuit of bourgeois-individualist norms of distribution, were at the forefront of a right-ward movement to restore capitalism.
He was a creative, at times brilliant, thinker who always insisted on analyzing the concrete, and placing the revolutionary agency of the masses at the center of his political perspective. With his self-professed epigones, it is nationalization that stands at the center.
Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution espoused that decaying capitalism placed the bourgeoisie in structural antagonism to political democracy. Mass democratic movements were dangerous since capitalism was no longer developing from the ground up in opposition to earlier modes of production. It was being imposed from the top-down. In best-case scenarios, the bourgeoisie might proactively institute democratic governance as a strategic cudgel against international capitalist rivals, but only in cases where the working class had been temporarily demobilized and defeated. That way, workers would not be able to learn through ongoing struggle that the implications of the way the bourgeoisie would attempt to set democratic procedures on a firmly anti-democratic social basis.
Trotsky understood this. He understood what his followers on this forum do not. This is why by the Revolution Betrayed, he had come out in favor of multi-party elections of the same kind that Hong Kong's workers are now striking for. He realized that vanguards and revolutionary parties were the product of workers mobilized in struggle, learning from their successes and mistakes. For the Trotskyists in the thread about Hong Kong, those same workers are an untrustworthy mob wanting a free lunch.
The ICL has made a tradition of justifiably critiquing reformist socialists for fighting for various democratic measures and reforms now, and suspending the fight for socialism until the "sweet by-and-by." It makes a similar mistake in its strategic analysis of the Chinese bureaucracy. In their clutches, Trotsky's call for a political revolution of the masses has become a cover for a thoroughly reactionary policy of stabilizing Stalinist leadership, of politically supporting crackdowns on militant workers. All this decades after Trotsky had discarded any illusions that Stalinism was capable of acting in way other than an obstacle to workers revolutionary political agency.
Firstly, I didn't know China was "Stalinist" anymore. I kind of though Stalinism and Maoism went out when Deng Xiaoping came in, and started throwing reforms around everywhere he could, and was basically like, "We're done with Maoism, guys, we're done with it." (Not an actual quote by the man.) So I think it's more accurate to just call them straight up Capitalists, if we go by how they maneuver in the world, than Stalinists.
As for the rest, I just got back so I haven't seen any of these posts by Trotskyists, talking about the demos in Hong Kong.
"We are free, truly free, when we don't need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths."
- Ricardo Flores Magón
"I am resolved to struggle against everything and everybody."
- Emiliano Zapata
Where are these posts? And why haven't you provided any quotes so that we can judge for ourselves?
"Ah, yes. You again." - Five Year Plan to Rafiq.
"I simply stated that I'm aware you have a penchant for mistreating the people you discuss with. It doesn't need to be proven and I don't care if you don't believe it, because it is true regardless." - communer to MEGAMANTROTSKY
*My avatar containing a pair of bellbottoms is intended to show solidarity with former RevLeft user Five Year Plan.
He's referring to some fringe right-wing Trots.
(870 thanked this post).
It's amazing how these people form thoughts -- China, a workers' state.
Stalinists and Maoists > right-wing Trots.
pew pew pew
Yeah...this Trotskyist doesn't agree with Vivala's position.
"Ah, yes. You again." - Five Year Plan to Rafiq.
"I simply stated that I'm aware you have a penchant for mistreating the people you discuss with. It doesn't need to be proven and I don't care if you don't believe it, because it is true regardless." - communer to MEGAMANTROTSKY
*My avatar containing a pair of bellbottoms is intended to show solidarity with former RevLeft user Five Year Plan.
Since when did Trotsky call for this? Or are you confusing him with George Soros?
Trotskyists are for workers political revolution, not imperialist-orchestrated "color revolutions."
Stop reading Nahuel Moreno and start reading The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
Except when they start supporting China....then they are just capitalist appologists calling for enrichment of the bourgeoisie...
If you had read Trotsky instead of just selectively twisting his words to support anti-worker repression, you'd know that Trotsky frequently used the phrase revolution of the masses synonymously with working-class revolution. What class do you think the vast majority, the masses, of people in Hong Kong belong to? The petty-bourgeois peasantry?
I am pretty sure that Permanent Revolution includes more than just workers, you are merely just an elitist corrupt trot and the reason for my leaving of the idea.
Alright, so a couple of things need to be pointed out. First, there is no official ICL position on the Hong Kong events yet. My opinion is not representative of an organisation I am not a part of (I believe the same goes for comrade VL4).
Second, the ICL has never taken an abstract anti-democracy stance nor has it ignored democratic demands in the deformed workers' states. But at the same time it has not allowed itself to be swindled by nominal pro-democracy rhetoric from rightist and anti-communist movements.
The ICL, for example, considers Tiananmen to have been an "incipient workers' political revolution". This despite the popular image of Tiananmen as a pro-American, pro-capitalist manifestation, and the presence of a small minority of liberal students. But Tiananmen and related disturbances were led by workers, socialist workers and socialist students. They were not successful - they were not entirely consistent and they were not able to act as a revolutionary group might - but they are a far cry from these Hong Kong protests, which as far as I can tell (and I freely admit that I haven't been able to keep up with the events) are led by petit-bourgeois types, anti-communists and vicious anti-Han racists.
As for Trotsky, well, what was his position on anti-communist pro-democracy movements? Just recall his statements about the civil war in Finland - the one he predicted would happen after the Red Army invasion. He did not side with the pro-democratic rightists once, he could not dream of it, in opposition to Shachtman and Burnham.
As for parties, Trotsky advocated freedom for proletarian parties. When he said that the ban on oppositional parties was a necessity of the civil war, he was talking about the ban on Internationalists, Popular Communists etc. - not the Kadets and Octobrists. Likewise, he considered multiple parties to be necessary in non-emergency situations because of, as he said, "little strata" in the proletariat - not the petite bourgeoisie or the haute bourgeoisie. I think it is quite a stretch to imply that, when Trotsky was talking about the need for multiple parties, he was talking about the Union of Archangel Michael!
Last, if we do not support these protests, that does not mean we give political confidence to the Chinese Stalinist government, who do more than anyone else to undermine the Chinese deformed workers' state. As Trotsky said, the defence of the workers' state means political revolution. But not a political reaction - not cutting off the gains of the revolution to spite the bureaucracy.
Any Trotskyist who thinks these protests are reactionary is confusing authoritarian capitalism for a "worker's state" and pro-democracy protests as "neoliberal capitalists". Both sides do not challenge market paradigms, but one side is using truncheons and state brutality to defend capital and the other isn't.
I have seen no evidence to show that the protests are being determined by petit bourgeois interests over and above the interests of the proletariat. As for "vicious anti-Han racists" I have heard of anti-mainlander sentiment in the protests but as far as I know Cantonese people from Hong Kong are considered amongst the "Han nation". As much as anything else one major motive behind the protests is a perceived failure on the part of the Chinese government to live up to promises of full suffrage for Hong Kong, as the CCP instead chooses to hand-pick candidates that fit their political and economic interests in the city.
Trotsky was advocating that position in a proletarian state ruled by a proletarian party. I think the demands in a society run by a Capitalist party masquerating as a Communist party which brooks no opposition from any class, proletarian or otherwise, would be quite different.
Any gains of the Chinese revolution, whatever they were, are long gone.
Last edited by Sinister Cultural Marxist; 2nd October 2014 at 20:44.
Socialist Party of Outer Space
The ICL, for one, doesn't buy into the hysteria over "neoliberalism". Capitalism is capitalism, and the "old" social democracies were no less anti-worker. But that's besides the point.
The ICL analysis of China is given, among other articles, here, with some guff about a Soviet Tibet that's been dropped shortly after the article was published.
No, I don't consider your statements to be the official line of the ICL or its sub-grouplets, but I think your and LaCuarta's flirtations with the potential actions of Comrade Jinping's police forces are totally consistent with the Spartacist political tradition.
What the protestors are demanding at the present moment is the opening of electoral system to permit participation by parties outside of the Chinese Communist Party. It is possible to support this position, while also politically supporting any number of non-Communist candidates or platforms. This is where I would expect a Trotskyist to point to the united front, which permits revolutionaries to fight alongside non-revolutionaries for the same reforms. Sometimes even non-working-class elements get involved. That doesn't alter the nature of the reform being fought for when on the one hand you have the most militant workers, and on the other you have either a state capitalist government, or more optimistically, a Bonapartist bureaucracy that can only be removed by force.
It is to be expected that some workers are fighting for those reforms for entirely reformist, perhaps even bourgeois purposes. Supporting their struggle for the reform isn't swindling them. It's supporting their struggle with an understanding that it is through struggle that workers learn and become revolutionary. There was no swindling involved when communists struggled under their own revolutionary banner for African-American voting rights in the southern United States in the 1960s alongside liberal workers who may have harbored illusions in the capitalist system.
In keeping with Spartacist tradition, struggles for reforms must be led by revolutionaries from the start or you advocate abstention. Tim Cornelis identified you as an ultra-right Trot. He's wrong. On this matter you manifest the worst tendencies of the ultra-left.
His position was not to abstain from pro-democracy movements until they were led by a Leninist leadership. His position was to build the Leninist leadership through struggles like those for multi-party elections, while he and his comrades simultaneously struggled to build the revolutionary party through that struggle.
Right. Trotsky was not interested in multi-party elections out of a misguided liberal compulsion to create a level playing field for all political views. He was interested in them as a slogan with which to draw workers to the political program that he thought would be the most effective in struggling for the political reform: that of the Fourth International. Reactionary elements of the population might and in the 1930s did try to exploit the movement for their own purposes.
This did not compel Trotsky to oppose it, or to abstain from it, or to dismiss it publicly. In line with his understanding of permanent revolution, he believed that popular struggles for democracy were structurally antagonistic to capital and their political representatives in the era of monopoly and imperialism. The Soviet Union's bureaucracy, a gendarme shaped disproportionately by international capital, was not exempt from that analysis.
You're right. It doesn't mean that you are giving confidence to the Chinese Stalinist government. It does mean you are breaking with the precedent Trotsky set in a situation where it actually would have been far easier to argue that the state resided on a working class basis. I do find it humorous how you try to paper over this clear revision by invoking Shachtman and Finland. Don't let it stop you that those talking points are at best tenuously related to what is under deliberation.
i don't know how you can't call for something like the political revolution of the masses and call yourself a Marxist. that you equate that with liberalism is awfully bizarre.
Last edited by Creative Destruction; 2nd October 2014 at 22:15.
I wouldn't say Finland is irrelevant, quite the contrary. Trotsky had no illusions about the Stalinists - in fact he explicitly notes they will "strangle the workers" - and while he hoped that the civil war would lead to a political revolution, he refused to make his support for the "Red" side conditional on the possibility of a successful political revolution. He took a position that was directly opposed to the forces fighting for bourgeois democracy. Likewise in Poland.
In fact, it is in connection with Finland that Trotsky wrote:
'The key to this tangle of confusion rests in the fact that the statement, “We have never supported the Kremlin’s international policy,” is an abstraction. It must be dissected and concretized. In its present foreign as well as domestic policy, the bureaucracy places first and foremost for defense its own parasitic interests. To that extent we wage mortal struggle against it, but in the final analysis, through the interests of the bureaucracy, in a very distorted form the interests of the workers’ state are reflected. These interests we defend – with our own methods. Thus we do not at all wage a struggle against the fact that the bureaucracy safeguards (in its own way!) state property, the monopoly of foreign trade or refuses to pay Czarist debts. Yet in a war between the USSR and the capitalist world – independently of the incidents leading up to that war or the “aims” of this or that government – what is involved is the fate of precisely those historical conquests which we defend unconditionally, i.e., despite the reactionary policy of the bureaucracy. The question consequently boils down – in the last and decisive instance – to the class nature of the USSR.'
And this is, I would say, pretty much how the ICL approaches the problem. You see the bureaucracy as merely representatives of imperialism - but how Trotsky actually put it was that they were intermediaries between imperialism and the workers' state. They were a contradictory caste - far from being simple lieutenants of the imperialists, they were influenced both by the demands of world imperialism and the pressures arising from the nationalised economy of the workers' state. The same, the ICL contends, goes for the Chinese bureaucracy. We can't say that we oppose their policies in the abstract.
Now, it is obvious, particularly taking into account the history of movements like Solidarnosc, that amorphous pro-democracy or anti-austerity etc. movements, without something approximating a revolutionary socialist programme, inevitably turn into anti-communist movements aiming at the destruction of the workers' state. That is why the ICL opposes them. Not because they oppose movements for reform that are not led by revolutionaries - this is obviously not the case if you look at their work in the US.
As for whether this deviates from the programme of the revolutionary Fourth International, just recall that there were a lot of abstract calls for "democracy" with no class content coming from various left groups in the thirties and fourties - from the Menshevik faction around Dan, from some of the proto-councilists, from the London Bureau and so on. Trotsky refused to work with any of these groups and polemicised against them.
The more China become like Hong Kong the worse it will be for all Chinese workers.
This is incorrect. In my understand of Trotsky's view, which is the basis on which I have criticized you and VivaLaCuarta, the bureaucracy was sandwiched between the working class and international capitalism, and between socialistic property relations and bourgeois distribution norms. Where you depart from what Trotsky wrote and understood was that being sandwiched between two things doesn't mean that an entity is immovably neutral regarding or equidistant between those two things.
By the 1930s Trotsky had begun to argue that the CP of the Soviet Union had degenerated to the point where it needed to be removed forcibly by the working class through a political revolution on the masses. The reason this was important was that the bureaucracy was growing ever more distant from the working class, to the point where a section of the bureaucracy would sooner rather than later begin to try to reintroduce bourgeois capitalism back into the core of Soviet economy. This is also why he dropped the term centrism in his description of the Stalinist bureaucracy at that time.
It is in that context that you need to understand Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution, the role of democratic rights in that conception, and how those democratic rights relate to monopoly capital either direct or through the intermediary of a bureaucracy operating ever more fully under its sway.
It's pretty misleading to bring up how Trotsky didn't align himself politically or enter a political bloc with small non-revolutionary propaganda groups when what we're discussing is how revolutionaries relate to mass movements for bourgeois-democratic reforms. The record of where Trotsky stood on that issue is clear, no matter how many side-issues you try to bring up as a distraction.
No, I'm not saying that. I am saying that being "sandwiched" means it is subjected to pressures coming from both sides. This will not manifest itself as neutrality, but as a confused and contradictory policy, occasionally taking one side and occasionally another, depending on the balance of forces and other factors.
And yet, as late as the forties, he still maintained that "in the final analysis, through the interests of the bureaucracy, in a very distorted form the interests of the workers’ state are reflected". This of course does not contradict his statements about the reactionary nature of the bureaucracy - in fact it provides the framework in which they are to be understood. But this statement underlies the need to defend the accomplishment of the workers' state even if that means being "on the same side" as the bureaucracy from time to time, and even if it means being against those forces (such as the Mensheviks) who fought for abstract democracy without class content.Originally Posted by Izvestia
But - and this is a serious question - why do you think Trotsky never put the question in that form? Why do you think he fought against the London Bureau, for example? It doesn't at all seem consistent with what you seem to be insinuating.Originally Posted by Izvestia
An object can be internally contradictory, but be overwhelmed by one side of the contradiction, as the Soviet bureaucracy was in the 1930s, causing it to move decisively back toward capitalism and ever more away from the working class. Ergo the change of language about Stalinist centrism, the new call for multiparty elections, and all the rest. Your understanding of Trotsky's view is just as I said above. You think the bureaucracy was riven by a contradiction with two sides pulling it equally, with the effect being a kind of neutrality toward both poles. It's all a wonderful way of setting up how the bureaucracy really could do progressive things, like set up its own workers states. That's not how Trotsky viewed it.
Yes, Trotsky viewed the nationalization of the means of production as the result of workers' revolutionary agency from the October period. He also believed that the Soviet bureaucracy was actively undermining that conquest, through inability to plan effectively because of the lack of democracy, and through how the resultant chaos was encouraging segments of the bureaucracy to maintain their growing level of bourgeois distributional remuneration through a more stable system--a new bourgeois system.
He fought against those propaganda grouplets for the same reason the ISO fights against the ICL, and the CWI fights against the ISO, and the IMT fights against the SWP-US. That is a separate question from how to relate to mass movements for desirable reforms. That question was settled over a decade before at the first Comintern congresses.
Last edited by Sharia Lawn; 3rd October 2014 at 00:29. Reason: Typos
Well then I agree to a point with ICL although neoliberalism is a more sophisticated form of capitalism
I've read a part of this but I'm not wholly convinced.
That is plausible for the Soviet bureaucracy, but not the Chinese bureaucracy. The Chinese bureaucracy is no more accountable to the interests of the proletariat than the bureaucracy of a social democracy, or even the US.
I think it was the failures of the Polish state which was really most culpable in the anti-communist nature of the Solidarnosc movement. The fact is that the workers encountered a state which was not accountable to them, which did not listen to their interests and was not seen as very credible. I think the issue with Poland was how the working class there had become so lacking in political consciousness by the 70s, and the only culprit I can think of is an incompetent so-called "worker's state" which failed to show the workers the benefits of their model over liberal capitalism.
Solidarnosc was different however since it was a movement of workers within state industries. The Hong Kong protests are not those kinds of protests - of course, state industry is not so prevalent.
First, I think you mean the 30s right? (for obvious reasons)
Second, I see no way in which one can maintain that the bureaucracy of China is the bureaucracy of a "worker's state". I see no way in which the PRC is a "worker's state" aside from sheer aesthetics or from metaphysical superstition. The Chinese state is basically a Capitalist autocracy which claims to be "essentially" socialist. Well, we're "actual" socialists and we don't believe in mysterious essences which are not reflected in the structures of the material world. If the PRC is a worker's state, then so was France under Emperor Napoleon, Germany under Bismark, or any other highly bureaucratic Capitalist state
