It seems like people mostly use trotskyist as a stand in for "anti-communist leftism" or "ultra," but what are the actual thoughts he contributed? Is there anything that is useful today and can be separated from anti-communism and the legacy of trots?
No newspaper memes please. I genuinely want to know.
(Ice pick memes are acceptable)
Edit: thanks for the info everyone. I'm proud of you all.
Trotsky was genuinely a key actor in both the 1905 and 1917 October Revolutions. It is not really possible to read first-hand sources and memoirs in good faith without recognizing this fact. He had recognized, even before Lenin, if I recall correctly, that the conditions in the Russian Empire (uneven and combined development) made not only possible, but necessary a socialist revolution for the carrying out of even the political and economic tasks which historically in the west had been the progressive historical function of the bourgeoisie to carry out. He had, along with Lenin, in contrast to Zinoviev and Stalin, pushed early for not supporting the Provisional Government and pushing for Revolution. It can be argued that he sensibly pushed back the date of the October seizure of power so that it would be closer to the upcoming Congress of Soviets. He also played a key role in the Civil War, which was a mammoth undertaking and deserves undeniable respect from revolutionaries. I'm saying this, btw, as a critic of Trotsky and also as resolutely not a trotskyist. I'll note why below.
It should go without saying but the later general accounts on Trostky by the stalinist USSR were not reliable. Stalin would later write(J. Stalin, About Trotsky, Trotskyism or Leninism, pp. 68–69):
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I have to say that Comrade Trotsky played no particular role in the October insurrection and could not do so, that being president of the Petrograd Soviet, he merely fulfilled the will of the corresponding party authority, which guided his every step.
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Comrade Trotsky played no particular role either in the party or the October insurrection, and could not do so, being a man comparatively new to our party in the October period.
But this is contradicted by what Stalin himself had writtin in Pravda (No. 241.) in an article The Role of the Most Prominent Party Leaders , soon after the Revolution:
- All the work of practical organization of the insurrection was conducted under the immediate leadership of the President of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It is possible to declare with certainty that the swift passing of the garrison to the side of the Soviet, and the bold execution of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the party owes principally and above all to Comrade Trotsky.
One of the reasons (and the most forgiveable I guess) why trotskyists are prone to splits is because they see themselves as continuing the leninst practice of ensuring ideological purity and unity of a vanguard party. This is what they conceive of as their leninist aspect. They generally have the virtue of not caring about electoral politics or current electoral support in non-revolutonary conditions. What they care about is developing a vanguard party which incorporates the (for them) additional theoretical insights of Trotsky, which will be suitable for when the revolutionary conditions actually emerge. Unfortunately this has often devolved into purist sectarianism and alienation from actual working-class organization, as well as cultish issues with several orgs.
The main general theoretical strengths of Trotskyism are:
- Leninism, thus a vanguard party united under democratic centralism.
- Recognition of capitalism as a world system, rather than breaking it down along national lines as if there were several separate, autonomous capitalisms.
- That a genuine communist revolution must therefore be a world revolution.
- There must be a revolution of the western proletariat at the global centres of capitalism (not a uniquely trotskyist view obvs) in order for there to be a world revolution (thus truly succesful communist revolutions in general)
- Internationalism, as a consequence of the above
- They recognize that global capitalism will tend to enter critical, revolutionary moments in the weakest parts of the global chain.
- They sometimes recognize that, precisely in virtue of the fact that revolutions will break out in such conditions, they will suffer due to backward economic conditions and imperialism, and that this can lead to some unsavorary aspects of the socialist governments that emerge out of those revolutions.
I think its also worth noting that Trotsky continued post-exile to see the USSR as a worker's state and the legitimate inheritor of the revolution and state of the soviet peoples. The idea of the USSR as state capitalism (which doesn't make sense, imo; just because you don't have full socialism and classes doesn't mean that it's a capitalist class structure) isn't due to Trotsky, but later British Trotskyists, and this was criticized by more othodox trots. The issues are more with Trotskyists than Trotsky per se imo.
Trotskyists also tend to look almost invariably poorly on Mao and Maoism. They see it as a nationalist-stalinist deviation and necessarily deformations of the worker's states. This leads in practice to a degree of western chauvisim with respect to people's struggles in the Global South. To this effect, they will often cite Mao's earlier texts, such as those during the united front against Japan, where he calls for a tactical alliance with the national bourgeoisie. There is therefore, in practice, a strong strain of ultra-leftism amongst many Trotskyists and a genuine ignorance of the conditions of the Third World / Global South. Many of them until recently were often not very good when it came to other social issues like race, sex, gender and sexuality. They therefore have had some tendencies to class-reductionism.
Another issue is their entryism: it simply failed, imo.
Another issue imo is that they mistake the global system of capitalism for the general mode of capitalism. Hence they do not see local, historically determine variations in capitalist subsystems, say in the colonized global south, in which revolutions might emerge on their own terms. This also feeds into their very stong belief in the essential agency of the western proletariat in the global core for any genuinely possible succesful communist revolution.
One further possible contradiction I see lies in the fact that, on the one hand, they recognise the Leninist and Maoist proposition that revolutions will likely first strike in the 'weakest links in the chain', what Mao called the 'Storm Centers' of global capitalism, while on the other hand they emphasize that in such conditions the type of state which will emerge will likely end up what they call a 'deformed workers' state', under the pressures of economic weakness and imperialism. But if that is the case, how do they expect the necessarily global communist revolution to occur in virtue of these revolutions? They will normally invoke the necessity of the western proletariat, which can often sound like saying that the western working class needs to save the rest from itself. In any case, what is the mechanism that leads from those breaks in the global chains to the needed revolution of the proletariat in the imperialist core?
As someone else has said below, he had some interesting things to say about fascism.
For what it's worth, he was a genuinely excellent writer and speaker, if obviously quite self-conceited and too flowery.
Thanks for the incredibly thorough response. I think I can see now why his ideas are so prevalent in the West, as it seems like it places a lot of importance on the Western proletariat.
I find it genuinely confusing that people with ultra-ish tendencies would look down upon Mao, seeing as he twice tried to establish radical class chance change and worker power through the great leap forward and cultural revolution. You can argue that it didn't work, but Mao himself was very clearly dedicated to the cause of communism.
I think the popularity also has to do with the alienation of the western left from the USSR during the Cold War. Many of those who wanted to still adhere to a revolutionary marxist line found trotskyism ideal or convenient. Others turned to what they took to be maoism, but frankly I get the impression that most of them didn't really have a good idea of developments in China at the time.
Most people who get called ultras by ML's and related tendencies are ideologically part of the left-communist tradition coming out of Italy, Germany and Holland (there are internal differences, like italian operaismo as opposed to council communism, deeply influenced by Rosa and Pannenkoek), or anarchists. Obviously people in these traditions would not be too down with Mao on their own terms, namely because they see the chinese revolution as nationalist and the CPC as stalinist in nature, structure, etc.; but it's also undeniably due to propaganda either explicitly or by osmosis.
During the height of maoist influence in the 60s and 70s there were deffo accusations by orthodox MLs that the new groups proliferating in the former tendency were ultras. I think there are many orthodox marxists, including leninists, who see many of the Maoist period's and Mao's policies as ultra.The maosit response to them was that the soviets were revisionist, and so on and so forth, sniff :zizek-ok:
In addition to the focus on the Western proletariat, I think this particular form of Anglo trotskyism benefits from that ideologically purist, ineffectual aspect. It creates a scenario where you engage with politics in a way that is still quite similar to bourgeois electoralism, the context in which every Western leftist grew up and gained an intrinsic understanding of what it means to be political.
It is a much larger break to accept a lack of purity and appreciate and engage with different experiments in revolution and defense of the revolution. You don't get a clean good/bad, successful/not dichotomy, and yet that dichotomy is required for the individualistic morality of bourgeois electoralism. Irs my impression that this is why western trotskyists are perceived as strident and quickly make enemies: only their party has the capacity to do things right, others are revisionist / capitalist, and there is clearly a very large amount of time spent on deciding which is which.
Yh it's maybe worth noting that there can be a lot of variation between trotskyist groups regionally. Like I get the impression that the culture of South American Troskyism is different to the European. The Br*ts got their own thing goin on.
The more radical,actually Leninist Trotskyists explicitly reject electorialism and are no friends on the Eurocommunists. Honestly I think the anarchists annoy them the most lmao.
What your describing can also be connected to the Christian cultural values of the societies these people come from. To continue the religious metaphor, the reason they emphasize conflict and often split is because they are trying to recreate the original act of Bolshevik-Menshevik split, or in secular terms to carry out the same function of ensuring a disciplined, ideologically secure vanguard party.
It does raise the genuine question of when you do, in fact, have to split. Like what do you and your developing fraction within an increasingly reformist party do?
Again, they are not concerned during non-revolutionary periods with winning electoral hearts and minds. This doesn't mean that they don't think that ultimately what matters is mass politics and that the vanguard party must always be organically linked to the working class. They often do try to maintain these links with, for instance, trade unions. I think there's almost a theory of revolutionary meritocracy behind it where, as revolutionary conditions and situations develop and emerge, the groups most suitably radical - meaning conforming to the Leninist model - will be the ones to win because they preserved their revolutionary status. It's also clearly an attempt to learn from the February-October period in 1917 when the Bolsheviks distinguished themselves and ultimately won broad working class support by reaching a point after which they maintained consistent political opposition to the Provisional Government, unlike the other groups.
I think these are all good points, though having interacted with a lot of American trotskyists, just in terms of parties, most parties have engaged with electoralism, some even trying to get Dems elected. There is a strange strain of vanguardiam that is like a 3-layer levela of obfuscation where they think they can't just say commie things, they instead want to piggyback on socdem popularity. But because they're not good at acting, everyone quickly sees that they're trying to manipulate you. So you get yet another way to have distrust.
I've also seen different parties try to make connections to unions, and there is a tendency for these parties to attemot entryism even there, which ends up usually failing and just pissing people off.
It is a frustrating combination of somewhat effective strategies with outright counterproductive execution, and I think the sticking point really is one of control: not feeling comfortabke building a coalition, insteas the attempt is to get everyone else on the party line, whether the proles realize it or not.
I'll take your word for it, as I've heard it elsewhere from other yankie comrades. It sounds like that applies more to the US context. The European and South American trotskyists are, I think, far less in electoralism mode.
The combination of 'effective strategies and ineffective execution' I think hits much of the nail of the head. When I discuss politics with Trotskyists, avoiding explicit theoretical issues where differences would become pronounced, I'm often in complete agreement as regards strategy, and even tactics and operations, but the executionc can certainly be lacking. It's worth bearing in mind, though, imo, that we're often speaking about deeply ideologically convinced people (like ourselves) who also see no other way of even trying to engage in genuinely radical politics, but where there isn't really much of an institutional structure to normalize effective political praxis, or when there are institutions, they are reformist and anti-revolutionary. I'm not surprised that then when they try to preach the immortal science it can come across as alienating.
For what it's worth, I've noticed a shift in trotskyist strategies where they will not adverstise themselves as hardcore as such as before, without broader far left party frameworks, while building a fraction of hardcore trotskyists within said broader org (in preparation, naturally, for the aforementioned day of revelation and judgement). Their strategy then seems to be nnot such trying to explicitly communicate a party line as to show the contradictions and shortcomings of less radical or unified orgs from within. So it's basically an evolution of entryism, as far as I can tell.
He also played a key role in the Civil War, which was a mammoth undertaking and deserves undeniable respect from revolutionaries. I’m saying this, btw, as a critic of Trotsky and also as resolutely not a trotskyist....
It should go without saying but the later general accounts on Trostky by the stalinist USSR were not reliable.
It's good to hear this from someone who knows more about this than me. I've had enough IRL run-ins with tedious Trots, so I've gone and read some of the more vitriolic critiques of Trotsky from an ML perspective. Even when I've been full of malice towards Trotsky, these articles always seemed to erase Trotsky's contributions to the revolution and overplayed drama that happened before the revolution.
Edit: to not be a sectarian dick, I'll point out that I know many good and comradely Trotskyists who I consider friends.
There are definitely alot of tedious trots who give off more a scent of mormonism than working class materialism, for sure. But I think this is a more common perception of Marxists in the West, in general, than many non-trots are willing to admit. Just check the memes about the local maoist confiscating your phone and gutting you for ordering a pizza. Also, I think some of this criticisms of them are superficial because, at the least, I think there are many genuine marxists who are serious about trying to organize the embryo of a future revolutionary party, and because I can forgive them for others interpreting them as preachy, atheistic versions of jehovah's witnesses (I've met marxists of other traditions who equally give off that impression)., because even if it does say something about how they're lacking in the aesthetics department (we do need more trap and drip), it also says something about the general cynicism of a population in a neoliberal world, although at the end of the day the a good deal of the responsability for people's alientation from radical politics is always ours.
You're definitely correct that there are alot of good, very serious, militant trotskyists out there.
In any case, the western left is at such a low level of development by historical standards that wasting our time on debates about, e.g. trotskyism vs maoist are, for practical purposes, like debating how many angels can dance on the hammer and sickle.
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There was debate of whether Russia, being agrarian and not having many industrial proles, could have communism. Peasants were the biggest class. Some said it needed to develop from feudalism first. Trotsky was one of those who thought peasants were counterrevolutionary because their livelihood is tied up with private property and smallholdings. But he said that's ok we can have revolution anyway because the few Russian proles will unite with a European proletarian revolution. So Trotskyism is very internationalist, against Socialism in One Country.
That's interesting. It seems really antithetical to Mao's view on the peasantry as the lifeblood of a revolution.
Was he against socialism in one country as a matter of principle or rather because he was observing a historical context at the time? For instance, if Russia had a larger proletariat population, would his view be different? Obviously, there's no way of really knowing that but... Still.
I wonder if Trotsky was thinking more about smallholder peasants - someone who owns just enough land to feed themselves + a small surplus, versus in China where it sounds like the people who worked the land tended to have to rent from landlords, idk.
Could be. Mao did observe "rich peasants" as a distinct anti-revolutionary class, so they might actually agree on that front.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm
Ernest Mandel provides a good summary of Trotsky's theory of fascism here (see section 3 for key concepts) - https://www.iire.org/node/1004#sdendnote21sym
I don't know much, but I know that after Lenin's death, Trotsky's left opposition pushed industrialisation, which Stalin opposed. Later the USSR adopted mass industrialisation (as we all know), and this may have weakened Trotsky's base.
I also know that Trotsky was a Menschevic and something of a socdem before the revolution, something he later admitted was a mistake.
As an ML, I personally have no issue with Trotsky pre-exile. Maybe even the purges were a bit much (I don't know enough about this tbh). My big gripe was him working with imperialists post exile, especially at the start of WW2.
I could be a disengenuous dick and mine Marxists.org for quotes from Lenin attacking Trotsky. Yes, they're there in his speeches and letters. The same can be said for Stalin. Revolution is difficult business, and imperfect people make mistakes.
Many of the purges did seem like personal vendetta or a power struggle, unless one believes that 90% of stalin’s and Lenin’s old comrades who formed the USSR were all agents of the west lol
I love seeing alternative models of development like this that don't require ingratiating global capital.
People praise Deng's plan for development because it largely worked, but it has come at quite a cost. I always wonder what an alternative path could have looked like.
(Ice pick memes are acceptable)
Actually an ice axe. The one you use to climb mountains, not the one a bartender uses.
Most of the opposition of Trotsky comes from the fact he kept denouncing the USSR during critical moments of survival and how many of his supporters are genuinely weird and often times conservative leaning. I’m pretty sure the meme about Trotskyism to neoconservativism pipeline meme comes from the fact many prominent neocon thinkers were trotskyists
I know you said no newspaper memes but I'm on my way back from the anti war protest in DC and I got like 10 fucking newspapers so I don't think it's a meme
Pretty cool people though and the papers seem good
