Ridiculous fucking take. Denying socialists their history except in failures and bitter losers like Trotsky is to deny socialism altogether except in academic journals and fantastical futures that can never happen because any successful Marxist movement will instantly be treated the same as Marxist movements of the past, smeared the same way and called "Stalinist" and so on.
The Soviets did not have an alliance with the Nazis, they were quite concretely stalling the Nazis so they could survive the inevitable attack and ultimately defeat them. Stalin and co had correctly identified Hitler and the Nazis as the immediate mortal enemy of the Soviet Union years before the Pact was made.
The way that people try to take that one fucking "military parade" and turn it into a red-brown alliance when it was the Soviets removing the Nazi military from a city that the Pact forbade them from entering -- which incidentally meant saving a large portion of the residents of that city from genocide as they were evacuated from the frontlines! -- is disgusting anticommunist revisionism.
Then again, you used "campism" unironically to describe supporting the Soviet Union, so I don't know why I am bothering. Trotsky should have been killed rather than exiled, the world would have been a much better place
Im not a trotskyist, and im not deny soviet sucess not even saying the nazis are in a alliance with the soviets the assumption of bad faith is palpable but I guess I wanted to underline the nuance of the situation, but yeah I'm not understanding, do you know what campism is? Third campist period, campism describes both tendency of leninism.
not looking for confrontation, a lot of yougener leftists I saw on this site seem to know theory but not the context of the theory example saw a really nice poster who though inevitability theory wasn't something that got dropped in the 1950 by almost everyone.
The other change iv seen is trotskyist back in the day used to call them selves leninists or ml, I found it really strange when my grandson started calling him self a ml but had stalinist positions, but honestly I use to be a type of trotskyist in the late 1970s then I developed my own opinions left the movment, did some moist stuff in the 1980s but yeah for some reason stalinist really don't like being labeled correctly kinda like trotskyists in the 1970s and 1980s.
So maybe this reaches you maybe it dosent, the old left in this country fucked up, we tryed to import theory and rarely tryed to understand the assignment. Assume good faith always.
do you know what campism is? Third campist period, campism describes both tendency of leninism.
"Third campism" is an invention by Trotsky in his project to slander the Soviets and tar them with the same brush as the Nazis. Literally if you go back and look at his writing, the first camp is the old-style western imperialists, including the US, and the second camp is not just the Soviets but also the Nazis. I can't tell you what a miserable prick he was, but unlike you he directly said that the Nazis and Soviets were in an alliance (though he allowed that the Soviets did not like the arrangement).
example saw a really nice poster who though inevitability theory wasn't something that got dropped in the 1950 by almost everyone.
It was something not upheld by Marx in the first place, I think he makes this clear in the Critique of the Gotha Program. People who thought that were morons, a thousand times more so if they kept believing it after the first atom bomb dropped and demonstrated just how easily the "mutual ruin" of a failed class war could produce the destruction of the human race.
The other change iv seen is trotskyist back in the day used to call them selves leninists or ml, I found it really strange when my grandson started calling him self a ml but had stalinist positions
"Stalinism" is largely an invention of Trotsky and his ilk again to tar their Soviet contemporaries. Stalin never called himself anything but a Marxist, a Leninist, and terms that are a subset of those. He had some minor stances on highly theoretical issues and he disagreed with Lenin on specific practical issues (especially the national question), but he did not have an overarching critique of existing theory like Lenin did, he did not have his own Marxist theory in any significant way, any kind of unique approach, he was just in the then-unique position of needing to actually apply Marxism to statecraft. Stalin was an ML. We can disagree about if he was a good one or a bad one, in what respects he failed to properly apply his ideology and what respects he was flatly wrong about, but he was an ML.
Like "campist," "Stalinist" is much more a name for Trots to call MLs than it is something anyone self-identifies as.
My understanding of third campist period, was it was a period of time before ww2 where hard c communist decided to not work with socialists,
If you take a close read of marx I think he still thinks communism is enviable, but as I hope you know marx isn't always consistent he sometimes even contradicts him self a lot, I still think he believes it even if it isn't stated in the way he crafts his arguments that.
But also you probley where not alive their was an entire thing in the 1950-1960 from hal draper, he translated a whole mess of early bolshveck writing and he's kinda at the center of that debate at that time.
As far as the Trotsky goes he's a dumb ass for trying to send russian speakers to soviets to overthrow the goverment, this is were the stalinist accuse him of being a fascist sympathetic which is a causality of the split. I take the orthodox position that russia could not get the goods because it wasn't a mature captilist power all bets are off after the German revolution dosent work for me.
All the rest of this aside I really don't care either way what I'm trying to do is get people to stop fetishism for the soviets because my generation did it with trotsky and yes I understand why the new generation are in a stalin fan club its attempt to invert the shitty cold war thinking and I commend that, I really do. But its not enough it not enough it didn't work for the new left in the 1960s and the really tragic aspect of this is the x generation didn't really have a left because of the nu left in the 1960s, I got sucked into that and regretted it deeply. All I want to really say is we need to rethink we can't use the bolshvek model here in the states, we need to pull from the past but we can't just reproduce the same structure we can't just import anymore, matter of fact we need the young leftist to learn from our mistakes please I am almost begging. Your seem like you have a good head on your sholders I hope you continue to grow and learn and I learn from us be better then us.
If you take a close read of marx I think he still thinks communism is enviable, but as I hope you know marx isn't always consistent he sometimes even contradicts him self a lot, I still think he believes it even if it isn't stated in the way he crafts his arguments that.
The argument is that if humanity is to persist they will tend towards communism by the very nature of class antagonism, but he is clear that in any engagement the proletariat can lose and he would surely agree that humanity can go extinct, with that being made much easier by war, such as revolutionary war. There is no magic force from the future pulling us toward it, there is only what people tend to do in certain positions.
But also you probley where not alive their was an entire thing in the 1950-1960 from hal draper, he translated a whole mess of early bolshveck writing and he's kinda at the center of that debate at that time.
Yup, I have zero awareness of any of that.
As far as the Trotsky goes he's a dumb ass for trying to send russian speakers to soviets to overthrow the goverment, this is were the stalinist accuse him of being a fascist sympathetic which is a causality of the split.
I will again remind you there is no such thing as a Stalinist, but beyond that let me say Trotsky obviously is not a fascist sympathizer. He is, on the otherhand, an active collaborator with just about any force of reaction whose ear he could pull (even the fucking HUAC!) and the more I read about it the more catastrophic the destruction caused by the opposition bloc seems.
I take the orthodox position that russia could not get the goods because it wasn't a mature captilist power all bets are off after the German revolution dosent work for me.
You won't get very far with classical Marxism. No one will tell you Russia wasn't disadvantaged for being a feudal backwater, but classical Marxism doesn't account for imperial exploitation and therefore does not understand that revolution is wildly unlikely to ever be feasible outside of the third world. Given these facts, Tsarist Russia was one of the least disadvantaged places socialism could take hold in.
You will be waiting for Godot if you are trying to get a socialist revolution whose popular basis is the labor aristocracy.
All the rest of this aside I really don't care either way what I'm trying to do is get people to stop fetishism for the soviets because my generation did it with trotsky
These two are not remotely similar. The Soviet Union was a socialist project, Trotsky was a wrecker and a useful idiot of perhaps the highest degree in world history. Weeping over a do-nothing right-collaborator is not a good use of time. The Soviets should be criticized (and I do have concrete criticisms), but they give you something to learn from beyond a personal level in a way that Trotsky is not because they have the distinction of having ever succeeded at doing something worthwhile, whereas Trotsky's greatest claim to fame is merely helping that at one point before trying to destroy it over sour grapes. The history of Trotskyists in the US (at least that I know of) is one of useful idiocy verging on functioning as controlled opposition.
All I want to really say is we need to rethink we can't use the bolshvek model here in the states, we need to pull from the past but we can't just reproduce the same structure we can't just import anymore, matter of fact we need the young leftist to learn from our mistakes please I am almost begging.
Of course we can't import it. It's possible some of these conversations hit on your learned associations pretty hard and they distort your view a little. I believe we should broadly embrace Soviet history and learn from it just as we should the history of Cuba, Albania, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, China, Laos, Korea, Burkina Faso, and so on. Very few people are mono-maniacal about the Soviets, it's just that Stalin was especially important and also especially vilified by liberals, like Mao, and so merits more extensive argument than, say, Thomas Sankara, who they hadn't even heard of and thereby haven't been engaged in smearing.
I have every intention of learning from your generation's mistakes, but to me that means recognizing American imperialism as the foremost force that I, as an American, should seek to oppose.
Can I recommend you a pod cast episode, i really think you got what it takes even if we don't always see eye to eye on stuff, I am really glad I got to text at you, its called Diving into the Wreckage 7.2: Principles and Heuristics i think even if you don't agree with everything it says you got what it takes to make use of it.
Looks like it's paywalled, but that's fine, it'll just take me a little longer to get around to (there are a bunch of podcasts that I need to reappropriate the patreon feeds of). Thanks for the recommendation
I can give it to you for free https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_j5Apq16mjFwYm53RtmNRkIMNe2yvSRQ/view?usp=drivesdk I don't really know how to do computers that good.
i hate the new podcasts especially the one where he called the molotov ribbentrop pact an alliance omg
Removed by mod
Ridiculous fucking take. Denying socialists their history except in failures and bitter losers like Trotsky is to deny socialism altogether except in academic journals and fantastical futures that can never happen because any successful Marxist movement will instantly be treated the same as Marxist movements of the past, smeared the same way and called "Stalinist" and so on.
The Soviets did not have an alliance with the Nazis, they were quite concretely stalling the Nazis so they could survive the inevitable attack and ultimately defeat them. Stalin and co had correctly identified Hitler and the Nazis as the immediate mortal enemy of the Soviet Union years before the Pact was made.
The way that people try to take that one fucking "military parade" and turn it into a red-brown alliance when it was the Soviets removing the Nazi military from a city that the Pact forbade them from entering -- which incidentally meant saving a large portion of the residents of that city from genocide as they were evacuated from the frontlines! -- is disgusting anticommunist revisionism.
Then again, you used "campism" unironically to describe supporting the Soviet Union, so I don't know why I am bothering. Trotsky should have been killed rather than exiled, the world would have been a much better place
Im not a trotskyist, and im not deny soviet sucess not even saying the nazis are in a alliance with the soviets the assumption of bad faith is palpable but I guess I wanted to underline the nuance of the situation, but yeah I'm not understanding, do you know what campism is? Third campist period, campism describes both tendency of leninism.
not looking for confrontation, a lot of yougener leftists I saw on this site seem to know theory but not the context of the theory example saw a really nice poster who though inevitability theory wasn't something that got dropped in the 1950 by almost everyone.
The other change iv seen is trotskyist back in the day used to call them selves leninists or ml, I found it really strange when my grandson started calling him self a ml but had stalinist positions, but honestly I use to be a type of trotskyist in the late 1970s then I developed my own opinions left the movment, did some moist stuff in the 1980s but yeah for some reason stalinist really don't like being labeled correctly kinda like trotskyists in the 1970s and 1980s.
So maybe this reaches you maybe it dosent, the old left in this country fucked up, we tryed to import theory and rarely tryed to understand the assignment. Assume good faith always.
"Third campism" is an invention by Trotsky in his project to slander the Soviets and tar them with the same brush as the Nazis. Literally if you go back and look at his writing, the first camp is the old-style western imperialists, including the US, and the second camp is not just the Soviets but also the Nazis. I can't tell you what a miserable prick he was, but unlike you he directly said that the Nazis and Soviets were in an alliance (though he allowed that the Soviets did not like the arrangement).
It was something not upheld by Marx in the first place, I think he makes this clear in the Critique of the Gotha Program. People who thought that were morons, a thousand times more so if they kept believing it after the first atom bomb dropped and demonstrated just how easily the "mutual ruin" of a failed class war could produce the destruction of the human race.
"Stalinism" is largely an invention of Trotsky and his ilk again to tar their Soviet contemporaries. Stalin never called himself anything but a Marxist, a Leninist, and terms that are a subset of those. He had some minor stances on highly theoretical issues and he disagreed with Lenin on specific practical issues (especially the national question), but he did not have an overarching critique of existing theory like Lenin did, he did not have his own Marxist theory in any significant way, any kind of unique approach, he was just in the then-unique position of needing to actually apply Marxism to statecraft. Stalin was an ML. We can disagree about if he was a good one or a bad one, in what respects he failed to properly apply his ideology and what respects he was flatly wrong about, but he was an ML.
Like "campist," "Stalinist" is much more a name for Trots to call MLs than it is something anyone self-identifies as.
My understanding of third campist period, was it was a period of time before ww2 where hard c communist decided to not work with socialists,
If you take a close read of marx I think he still thinks communism is enviable, but as I hope you know marx isn't always consistent he sometimes even contradicts him self a lot, I still think he believes it even if it isn't stated in the way he crafts his arguments that.
But also you probley where not alive their was an entire thing in the 1950-1960 from hal draper, he translated a whole mess of early bolshveck writing and he's kinda at the center of that debate at that time.
As far as the Trotsky goes he's a dumb ass for trying to send russian speakers to soviets to overthrow the goverment, this is were the stalinist accuse him of being a fascist sympathetic which is a causality of the split. I take the orthodox position that russia could not get the goods because it wasn't a mature captilist power all bets are off after the German revolution dosent work for me.
All the rest of this aside I really don't care either way what I'm trying to do is get people to stop fetishism for the soviets because my generation did it with trotsky and yes I understand why the new generation are in a stalin fan club its attempt to invert the shitty cold war thinking and I commend that, I really do. But its not enough it not enough it didn't work for the new left in the 1960s and the really tragic aspect of this is the x generation didn't really have a left because of the nu left in the 1960s, I got sucked into that and regretted it deeply. All I want to really say is we need to rethink we can't use the bolshvek model here in the states, we need to pull from the past but we can't just reproduce the same structure we can't just import anymore, matter of fact we need the young leftist to learn from our mistakes please I am almost begging. Your seem like you have a good head on your sholders I hope you continue to grow and learn and I learn from us be better then us.
The argument is that if humanity is to persist they will tend towards communism by the very nature of class antagonism, but he is clear that in any engagement the proletariat can lose and he would surely agree that humanity can go extinct, with that being made much easier by war, such as revolutionary war. There is no magic force from the future pulling us toward it, there is only what people tend to do in certain positions.
Yup, I have zero awareness of any of that.
I will again remind you there is no such thing as a Stalinist, but beyond that let me say Trotsky obviously is not a fascist sympathizer. He is, on the otherhand, an active collaborator with just about any force of reaction whose ear he could pull (even the fucking HUAC!) and the more I read about it the more catastrophic the destruction caused by the opposition bloc seems.
You won't get very far with classical Marxism. No one will tell you Russia wasn't disadvantaged for being a feudal backwater, but classical Marxism doesn't account for imperial exploitation and therefore does not understand that revolution is wildly unlikely to ever be feasible outside of the third world. Given these facts, Tsarist Russia was one of the least disadvantaged places socialism could take hold in.
You will be waiting for Godot if you are trying to get a socialist revolution whose popular basis is the labor aristocracy.
These two are not remotely similar. The Soviet Union was a socialist project, Trotsky was a wrecker and a useful idiot of perhaps the highest degree in world history. Weeping over a do-nothing right-collaborator is not a good use of time. The Soviets should be criticized (and I do have concrete criticisms), but they give you something to learn from beyond a personal level in a way that Trotsky is not because they have the distinction of having ever succeeded at doing something worthwhile, whereas Trotsky's greatest claim to fame is merely helping that at one point before trying to destroy it over sour grapes. The history of Trotskyists in the US (at least that I know of) is one of useful idiocy verging on functioning as controlled opposition.
Of course we can't import it. It's possible some of these conversations hit on your learned associations pretty hard and they distort your view a little. I believe we should broadly embrace Soviet history and learn from it just as we should the history of Cuba, Albania, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, China, Laos, Korea, Burkina Faso, and so on. Very few people are mono-maniacal about the Soviets, it's just that Stalin was especially important and also especially vilified by liberals, like Mao, and so merits more extensive argument than, say, Thomas Sankara, who they hadn't even heard of and thereby haven't been engaged in smearing.
I have every intention of learning from your generation's mistakes, but to me that means recognizing American imperialism as the foremost force that I, as an American, should seek to oppose.
Can I recommend you a pod cast episode, i really think you got what it takes even if we don't always see eye to eye on stuff, I am really glad I got to text at you, its called Diving into the Wreckage 7.2: Principles and Heuristics i think even if you don't agree with everything it says you got what it takes to make use of it.
Looks like it's paywalled, but that's fine, it'll just take me a little longer to get around to (there are a bunch of podcasts that I need to reappropriate the patreon feeds of). Thanks for the recommendation
I can give it to you for free https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_j5Apq16mjFwYm53RtmNRkIMNe2yvSRQ/view?usp=drivesdk I don't really know how to do computers that good.
campism 💀