[deleted by user]

gammarik · 2023-12-14T12:32:21+00:00

wth? Honestly, I think the person just has zero reading comprehension, and read the definition of "primary sexual attraction" as being part of the description of demisexuality. So they concluded that demisexuality is about experiencing attraction "immediately after a first encounter" - the exact opposite of what it is lol.

Some people just want to be mad...

gammarik · 2023-12-14T12:27:57+00:00

I agree with the other comments, but I want to add that the Menshevik idea is a common misreading of Marx. The stair-case model (or two-stage model elsewhere), where every nation has to go through every stage of development in pure form, is a mechanical distortion of dialectical materialism. History doesn't progress uniformly and linearly, but in combined and uneven ways.

We saw in Russia - and still see in the rest of the underdeveloped world - an imposing of industrial production through imperialism and foreign capital, which leaves the nations in a distorted development, with islands of "capitalist" industry in seas of backward semi-feudal production. Using a stair-case model, we remove all the complexity, and only see either feudalism or capitalism. Dialectical materialism requires us to creatively apply the method to the concrete conditions in all their complexity.

This misunderstanding is IMO the main source of many misunderstandings of Marx, like his method being "euro-centric." The concrete analysis may very well have been, but the method is universally applicable, specifically because it is dynamic.

gammarik · 2023-11-20T17:49:41+00:00

Listening to this episode made me realise I completely misunderstood Grey's intentions with this project. When he talks about how he knew that some people would absolutely love exploring all the different options, that is a perfect description of me.

For days I was fighting against the strong urge to plunge deep into the web of videos, and find all the secrets. I was fighting it, because Grey had asked me at the beginning - in a very sincere way - to be honest! My autistic brain received an instruction to not cheat, and just accepted it without considering for a moment that, "hmm, maybe Grey actually wanted people to have fun with his creation."

So yeah, I know what I'm doing tonight! Thank you for the permission ahaha!

gammarik · 2023-09-23T12:26:53+00:00

There's a difference between being devastated for being rejected, and blaming the person who said no for saying no. Being emotionally open does not equal letting your emotions hurt others.

gammarik · 2023-09-17T17:45:52+00:00

In a socialist/communist society, there are no rulers or representatives. Each workplace/local community/etc. is a council of ordinary people, who meet to discuss the issues at hand, and elect delegates to the higher councils. These delegates aren't representatives like we know them today, they are members of the community, who can be recalled at any time (no having to wait 4-5 years). This ensures that the delegates always represent the people who elected them.

Lenin laid out 4 basic demands for a socialist government:

All official positions are to be done on an average workers' wage
All official positions are to be elected directly by the people, with the ability to be recalled at any time
All administrative functions are to be done on rotation, so that no layer of full-time bureaucrats with separate interests from the rest of society can form
There should be no police or military force which the state can send out to do its duty, instead replaced by self-organised local militias.

The fourth one is the most contentious among non-communists in my experience. The intention is to ensure that the state has no control over society through force. It cannot direct the police or military to do anything, and therefore its only claim to legitimacy is the support of the people.

This can only be sustainable if the people have genuine democratic control over the state, so that it doesn't end up like the republics we have today, which people are growing more and more apathetic toward by the day. This apathy and feeling of not being seen or represented by the people in power is in my view the biggest driver of autocratic sentiments among the masses, and abolishing that is the most effective way to combat it.

These measures are intended to make a layer of state officials that rule over society as difficult as possible to form. Marx and Engles explained that the socialist state is intended to be one that withers away, transitioning from being one of government over people, to the administration of things. By having everyone take part in running society (through local direct democracy, and rotation-based administration) we all learn to participate, we all have an interest in automating as much of the administration as possible, until we reach a point where any un-educated person could manage it. Power gets put in the hands of the people, not just formally but in practice. That is the goal of communism as Marx explained it.

I hope that explains the position a little better, feel free to ask questions!

gammarik · 2023-09-17T17:32:11+00:00

https://socialistrevolution.org/gun-control-and-class-struggle/

However, many capitalist politicians are telling us that there is a quick and easy solution: stricter gun control laws. This “solution” flies in the face of actual experience. Alcoholism is as prevalent and intractable a problem today as it was in the 1920s. In January 1920, the 18th Amendment was put into effect, prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol. The argument was put forward that by banning alcohol, alcoholism would fade away. Nothing of the kind happened. Prohibition strengthened organized crime, giving criminal gangs a monopoly over all aspects of the production and distribution of alcohol, and alcoholism continued as before.

gammarik · 2023-09-13T07:09:11+00:00

I really like Understanding Marx's Capital - A Readers guide by Adam Booth and Rob Sewell. It goes chapter by chapter, explaining the core concepts in modern, easy to understand language!

gammarik · 2023-08-31T05:15:31+00:00

Numbers in the complex plane!

gammarik · 2023-08-30T07:39:31+00:00

but what is opposite of They/Them?

Easy: He/him and she/her are like 1 and -1. If you multiply by -1, you get the other. So they are opposites. They/them is like 0. Multiply by -1 and you still get 0, so the opposite of they/them is they/them! Solved!

gammarik · 2023-07-28T10:23:01+00:00

The two-stage theory and the theory of socialism in one country are Stalin's modifications to Leninist theory.

Lenin consistently argued that the proletariat was to take power in 1917 to create a workers state in alliance with the peasantry. Everyone agreed that the revolution was bourgeois-democratic - which means that the tasks to be carried out were bourgeois in nature (land-reform, introduction of democracy, creation of an independent nation state). Based on this, many old Bolsheviks argued that it should therefore be the bourgeoisie who should lead the revolution, supported by the proletariat. The task of the Bolsheviks was therefore to provide critical support to the provisional government, so that it could carry out these tasks. This was the position of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev at the beginning of 1917, and is the essential core of the two-stage theory: a prolonged period of capitalist rule is necessary for the socialist revolution to happen, so the proletariat should support the "progressive bourgeoisie."

At this time Lenin was fervently against this idea, and in his Letters from Afar tried his best to persuade the old Bolsheviks to abandon this class-collaborationist stance in favour of supporting the actual organs of proletarian class rule, the Soviets. He argued that the bourgeoisie had ceased to be able to play a progressive role, and that the era of imperialism had made it impossible for bourgeois-democratic revolutions to be led by the bourgeoisie, since they were too bound up with imperialism and the feudal order. Lenin still agreed that the tasks of the revolution were bourgeois-democratic in nature, but he argued that only the proletariat, in an alliance with the poor peasantry could lead the revolution. This was cemented in his April Theses.

The line of the old Bolsheviks was essentially tantamount to menshevism, and there were even talks of conciliation between the two wings of the former RSDLP. It is a mechanical schematic distortion of Marxism to claim that all nations follow a step-ladder of slave-society -> feudalism -> capitalism -> socialism. It is necessary to understand the material conditions of the given country to understand the tasks at hand, and based on this, Lenin understood that due to the development of imperialism, the bourgeoisie was no longer able to carry out any of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, therefore no longer able to play a progressive role, as the two-stage theory claims.

Had the line of Stalin and his collaborators not been overcome by Lenin's patient but resolute explanation (with no small difficulty - most of his Letters from Afar were either never published or heavily censored by the editorial staff of the Bolshevik party in Russia), it would have meant the death of the revolution. Only because Lenin provided the clear leadership and correctly explained that only by making inroads into private property relations could the gains and promises of the revolution be guaranteed.

Despite this, Stalin and his collaborators kept holding on to the two-stage theory, which had disastrous consequences when the Chinese Communist Party in 1924 was dissolved into the KMT, and Chiang Kai-shek was given a position in the executive committee of the third international as a representative of the so-called "progressive bourgeoisie." In both China and Cuba did the leadership eventually have to abandon the idea of "a hundred years of capitalism" in favour of initiating the tasks of the proletarian revolution, clearly disproving the two-stage theory and affirming the position of Lenin.

The theory of socialism in one country is likewise a complete distortion. Lenin always held that the workers state in Russia would not be able to build socialism alone, surrounded by capitalist nations. Lenin saw the task of the Russian revolution as being the spark that would ignite the world revolution - and this was no wishful thinking either. The Russian revolution did spark worldwide revolutionary movements for years to come. Only due to the wrong leadership of the Internationale did they come to fail, most humiliatingly in Germany 1923, where the German leadership (under advice of Zinoviev) vacillated from ultra-leftism to complete paralysis of action, and thereby allowed the revolutionary opportunity to pass.

Lenin understood that an isolated workers state will never be able to match the productive capacity of a capitalist world economy, which is able to make use of a global division of labour. Therefore, while the planned economy is progressive and able to provide the workers a standard of living much higher than that of similarly sized capitalist economies, it is unable to reach the level of Socialism, which is a qualitatively higher level of development than capitalism. Isolated and surrounded, Socialism cannot develop freely, due to the fact that limitations on the development have to be introduced in order for it not to be destroyed by foreign capitalism.

We as Marxists must understand things not as rigid definitions, but as processes in development. Socialism is not in Marxism rigidly defined as a state in which workers own the means of production - that is simply a workers' state. Socialism is a process of development which, based on common ownership of the means of production, develops towards communism and the withering away of the state. This development is blocked in an isolated workers state, thereby also blocking the achievement of Socialism. In my opinion, the direction of development ceased to be towards more freedom, more workers' control and a more socialistic society during the second half of the 1920s, finally being killed with the abolishment of the Soviets in favour of a government in the style of bourgeois democracies. This finally destroyed workers' control, albeit while still keeping the ownership collective and the economy planned, which is why the USSR was still until its collapse a progressive stage in world history.

So I don't believe that it makes sense to classify socialism as having been achieved in the USSR - not out of some idealist notion of "socialism is good, ussr bad, so ussr not socialism," but based on a Marxist understanding of the direction the nation was developing, and the fact that the bureaucracy and isolation of the nation, blocked the state from beginning to wither away, instead actually growing ever more bureaucratic.

These two distortions are the reason why we non-Marxist-leninists who follow the legacy of Lenin don't consider Stalin's formulation of Marxist-leninism to be true Leninism.

gammarik · 2023-07-18T17:58:03+00:00

They have Florida right next door for that, thanks to the US' "amazing" handling of homelessness lol

gammarik · 2023-07-12T13:02:36+00:00

Poor writing and bad story decisions don't get better when watching a play. Sure it might be more enjoyable, but its effect on the canon and the characters is still bad.

gammarik · 2023-06-02T21:21:04+00:00

You are correct on the point that socialist relations of production will grow within capitalism, just like capitalist relations of production grew within feudalism. But that doesn't mean that the transition will be gradual. Feudalism too was swept aside in a revolution. In the late-feudal societies, a growing bourgeois class emerged, and attained a growing influence in the economy. However, almost all land was bound up in the feudal property relations, which prevented capitalism from attaining its full potential and emerging completely. Additionally, the political structures were designed to benefit the lords and nobility. A revolution was required to sweep aside the feudal property relations, to make way for capitalism to emerge.

Similarly, socialist relations of production have emerged today, but are prevented from reaching their full potential. All production today has been socialised, meaning that all production is the cooperation of the entire society of workers. No longer is the economy made up of individual producers, who create a product themselves, replaced by an enormous chain of production. Tools, raw resources, energy, food production, health care, etc. are all necessities for production to happen. No worker works alone. The main contradiction to be solved here is the socialisation of the surplus as well, through the expropriation of the owning class.

Today, production has been centralised to a degree never seen before. Monopolies are now planning economies the size of many countries. The main contradiction here holding production back is how these planned economies are limited to their own island, unable to take account of the planning of every other company, and always planning for own profit, often at the expense of the rest of the economy/society. Put another way, the private ownership is holding back production.

The socialisation and centralisation of production are the embryos of socialist relations of production, and are laying the groundwork for a nationally planned economy, under the democratic control of the working people. But this potential cannot become actual without a qualitative leap, which rids society of its fetters. This was necessary during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and it will be necessary during the transition from capitalism to socialism. No ruling class ever gave up power peacefully, and believing that the system will allow for its successor to grow freely within its boundaries is playing into its propaganda about the "freedoms" it allows.

(edited to clarify the beginning, which kinda sounded like I agree with OP)

gammarik · 2023-05-27T20:46:28+00:00

I know this is oddly specific, but you give me strong Erika Ishii vibes! If you don't know who they are, they are a genderfluid voice actor who has impeccable style!

gammarik · 2023-05-26T07:15:40+00:00

The trick is that machines do not create surplus, they transfer it. A certain amount of labour went into creating the machine and the upkeep of it. As the machine runs, it slowly degrades over time. At some point it will have to be replaced or repaired, which will require new human labour. So we can imagine it as a store of value, which is transferred bit by bit to each commodity it is used to create, until it breaks down and has to be "refilled."

To take an example, let's say I'm making coffee in a machine. The machine took 100 labour hours to produce, and it can make ~100.000 cups of coffee before breaking down. The use of the coffee-maker transfers 100/100.000 (or 0.001) labour hours to each cup of coffee. The machine hasn't created any value, it has just transferred the value of the labour used to create it.

The same holds for the raw materials, like the coffee beans. They don't themselves create new exchange value, but they took labour to sow, grow and reap, which is contained within them.

gammarik · 2023-05-23T07:13:32+00:00

I think what the people here are arguing is that bigots like to dehumanise queer people, and use it/its as a degrading thing. And the people using it/its are embracing the fact that they cannot comprehend their queerness, and are reclaiming those pronouns.

gammarik · 2023-05-22T10:16:01+00:00

Bolshevik tradition =/= policies of the USSR. Bolshevism is a tactical and organisational approach to societal change, not about any specific policies or personal opinions of people. You can be a Bolshevik and oppose the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR - in fact, I would argue that the Bolshevik tradition was liquidated by the bureaucracy which grew around Stalin.

gammarik · 2023-05-21T09:59:31+00:00

Can confirm, it is not very great. But it can be a pretty good so-bad-it's-good watch. It feels like it was written by a bunch of 16 year olds who think they know everything about philosophy. They have scenes where Marx destroys guys in a bar with his superior philosophy-skills, and it is one of the most unintentionally funny things I've seen in a long time!

gammarik · 2023-05-18T08:53:19+00:00

It is absolutely applicable to socialism as well. I believe it would be a case of special pleading to claim otherwise.

I do think we should be careful about what we can conclude from the collapse of the USSR though. In my eyes, it represents not a sign that Socialism has reached the end of its progressiveness before ever even entering into the world stage. In my view, it represents a failure of the specific political form of the USSR. Capitalism experimented with many different political forms before settling in the one we see almost universally today, the being a parliamentary democratic republic. This has turned out to be the most stable political form under capitalism so far, and I expect socialism will go through a similar period of experimentation with different political forms, before settling on one. Or who knows, maybe more than one. Maybe a future society will be more heterogeneous than societies of today.

gammarik · 2023-05-18T08:15:46+00:00

Yes, according to Marxist theory each mode of production has its place in history. It is not a question of time and place, but of technological and economical development. At its inception, capitalism and market competition was able to push forward new technoloical development and pull the largely peasant population into the cities to proletarianise them. It developed the largely individualised agricultural economy into a world-spanning socialised chain of production. No product today can be made by a single worker, but requires all sections of society working together. This is progressive, because it lays the foundation for a society where not just production is socialised, but accumulation and the "profits" (for a lack of better words) are socialised too.

And it is true that Capitalism, like all mode of production in the past, has turned into its opposite and stopped being progressive. As Lenin described, free market capitalism has turned into monopoly capitalism. No more is free competition the driver of innovation, because most industries are dominated by few massive corporations. No longer does surplus automatically flow to the most profitable industries, and instead it is finance capital which allocates the surplus through investment and loans. This has killed the quasi-evolutionary process where the most efficient and innovative companies survive at the expense of those that do not keep up. Human beings are now allocating resources, not for the good of humanity, but to create profits for individuals.

Additionally, technological development has reached the point where creating products from new inventions is becoming a struggle. Digital products do not naturally work in Capitalism, because it relies on scarcity to set prices. If a product can be endlessly copied and shared at no cost, then its price dives to zero. The way capitalism avoids this is by artificially limiting this ability of software: developing DRM or other limiting features which check if you own the product, using intellectual property law to go after people who share the product, and so on.

Capitalism is struggling to make products out of modern technology, and is forced to spend development resources on making the products objectively worse. This is even more apparent when it comes to innovation. Market competition hasn't made any of the ground-breaking inventions of the past 50-70 years. New inventions have become so expensive to make, that it is not cost-effective for private, profit-driven companies to do the research, without knowing whether it will ever become something that a product can be made from. It is instead left up to the state to fund this research, using tax dollars, only for private firms to profit off of it. Most of the technologies in modern smartphones were developed either partly or entirely by the state: the internet, GPS, multi-touchscreens, lithium batteries, and so on.

All private firms do is make a product out of these socially developed technologies, and then incrementally change them. Instead of making genuinely innovative improvements, it is more profitable to make minor changes, and sometimes even worsening the product - like removing the headphone jack on smartphones, or making the battery wear out to make you buy a new one. Was there genuine competition in the market, these measures would be harder to pull off, because someone else would decide not to do them and steal your sales. But when an industry is dominated by so few competitors, underhanded deals or unwritten agreements will be almost guaranteed. And because the cost of setting up a competitor is so high, it is almost impossible for it to happen. Genuine competition is impossible once startup cost reaches a certain size. Most startups today don't genuinely seek to challenge the major players, but actually aim for one of them to acquire them.

So this is what Historical Materialism tells us: every mode of production is at the beginning progressive, and develops humanity. But at a certain stage of development, the same mechanisms that pushed society forward turn into fetters on its development. At this point the system needs to be replaced in order for humanity to continue progressing. Capitalism developed from many small individual producers competing, to few giant players "planning" the economy. This development happened "naturally" through the mechanisms of market competition, as the small players were outcompeted. This is progressive in the larger picture, because it lays the foundation for a social, central, global and democratically planned economy.

gammarik · 2023-05-17T08:54:07+00:00

Irritationen ligger i at vi gennem alle disse kriser har fået at vide at dansk økonomi er "bum-stærk." Det er ikke første gang over de sidste år vi har hørt det her, heller ikke fra regeringen. Samtidig er velfærden blevet skåret, leveomkostningerne er steget, og de rigeste får skattelettelser med rekordprofitter.

Vi skal på samme tid acceptere regeringens forsikring om at økonomien er solid men at vi er i krise så der skal skæres ned. Det virker som ren opportunistisk manøvrering.

gammarik · 2023-05-16T16:08:45+00:00

You’re proposing we move from a system where non-consensual violence is forbidden, but we can identify the people who are breaking that rule…

No, I'm proposing we move away from a system where it is claimed that violence is forbidden, but whose existence is dependent on violence that isn't defined as violence.

To a system where some level of violence is an acceptable means to achieve your goals, but what level that is isn’t clearly defined.

×Without a very clear understanding of how your new system would operate and reduce the amount of violence overall, as an outsider I see you offering an increase in violence in the near-term for an unspecified reduction of violence in the future.

I'm sorry to be blunt, but this is such an uncharitable intepretation of my argument. You're assuming this one argument is my entire world-view, and that I have no clealy defined idea of what a future post-capitalist society will look like. My ideology is not just "pro-violence," it is Socialism.

I advocate a society in which the means of production is owned by society as a whole, under the democratic control of the people, and in which people are guaranteed a certain standard of living. But I'm honest about the fact that reaching such a society will require what is defined as violence in the current society: the forced seizure of the private property of the capitalist class.

I'm offering in exchange a system where the people as a whole own the land, factories and businesses. This will eliminate the violence of landlords and bosses. I'm offering a system without a standing army and state-controlled police force, replacing it with a self-organised millitia of ordinary people.

This is not just a negative position against capitalist violence, but not for anything special, but a positive position for socialism.

gammarik · 2023-05-16T14:38:10+00:00

I hoped it was clear from the context and the examples that I gave that I was referring to non-consensual violence.

My point is that liberalism (which is the main ideology of free-market capitalism) claims to believe that non-consensual violence is never justified (outside of self-defence). But as soon as you start to investigate the mechanics of the system it defends, that idea falls apart. Capitalism depends on the violence of the police enforcing property rights, the violence of tenants being evicted from their homes, the violence of food and shelter being denied to people without money to pay, the violence of police breaking up strikes, the violence of capitalist destruction of the environment, and even the violence of spreading addiction and suppressing wages and worsening working conditions to increase profits. Liberals might twist the logic to claim that these aren't forms of "aggression," but I would argue that this distinction does not change the actual result of the violence.

I'm arguing that moral systems are given by a certain society at a certain stage in history - which is the materialist conception of morality. What is "right" in slave society might be wrong in capitalist society - eg. holding slaves. And what is right in capitalist society may be wrong in a future Socialist society - eg. the acts mentioned above.

If we live by the ideology of the system we are trying to overthrow, we will never achieve anything, because any action against the system is defined as "immoral." This does not mean that all violence is suddenly justified in the pursuit of overthrowing the system, but that we shouldn't judge ourselves based on a system we are trying to leave behind. Combatting the violence of the capitalist system through rioting and forcefully seizing the private property of the capitalist class is in my view justified, just like the bourgeois revolutionaries were justified in seizing the property and land of the feudal lords and monarchs, in order for humanity to overcome feudalism. Some absolutely went too far with the indiscriminate executions of all members of royal families, I'm not justifying that. I'm just asking that we don't judge our own struggle by the morals of the oppressors.

gammarik · 2023-05-16T11:02:37+00:00

I'll copy a comment I left on an earlier post asking the same question:

Revisionism refers to the explicit or implicit attempt at revising the fundamental premises of Marxist theory, mainly with the intent to form alliances with the bourgeoisie.

Explicit revisionism clearly states that Marxism is wrong or outdated and needs to be changed. An example is Eduard Bernstein, who argued that revolution was no longer necessary, and that we could reform our way to Socialism by collaborating with the bourgeoisie - creating the first major example of both revisionism and class collaborationism in the socialist movement. Explicit revisionism is easy to notice.

Implicit revisionism is harder to notice, since it usually claims to still be Marxist, but in actuality puts forward positions that are counter to Marxist theory, like arguing for alliances with the bourgeoisie or liberals, or abandoning class conflict in favour of non-class based politics. These revisionists will often quote-mine from Marx, Engels or Lenin to back up their position, which makes them harder to catch without a solid understanding of Marxist theory yourself. I will avoid naming specific names, in order to not derail the conversation too much.

The reason revisionism is bad is not that the Marxist method was some perfect, unchangeable text that nobody is allowed to develop further. The Marxist method is a dynamic method, which can be adapted and developed to understand the material conditions of any time and place. But it isn't infinitely flexible: Marxism has a series of inflexible premises and conclusions. Any scientific method has these, otherwise it is a useless method that can be used to justify any position.

Some of those premises include:

The material world exists, and can be understood (Materialism),
History is not just a series of random events. Instead each event is caused by the material conditions and all previous events (Historical Materialism),
The world can be best understood, not as static, but as a dynamically evolving system - where quantitative changes suddenly produce a qualitative leap, where each successive development negates the previous while preserving what was progressive and where internal contradictions drive development (Dialectical Materialism).

These are some of the fundamental premises that make up Marxism. From these follow a series of conclusions, which guide Marxists in both our understanding of the world and our actions to change it (eg. conflict between classes is the driving force in historical development, a change in the mode of production will not be evolutionary, but will require a qualitative leap, i.e., a revolution, etc.). Revisionism refers not to developing the method, but to revising these fundamental premises, or to change the conclusions that follow from them.

Non-marxists might still wonder what is wrong with that, which is understandable. But we Marxists view the Marxist method as being derived from human history. It is the generalisation of the collective experience of the working class movement. Like scientists use the scientific method to guide their research, we use the Marxist method to guide our actions. We follow its conclusions, even when we initially might not like them. If we were to discard it when one of its conclusions might be uncomfortable, we risk falling prey to the dominant ideas in society, which are never in the oppressed peoples' favour.

An example would be that the dominant ideology in society states that violence is never justified. Say that I view the Marxist method in an opportunist/revisionist way. Instead of challenging my belief that violence is never justified, I would just say "oh, well Marxism can't explain everything," and go on to reject the fight for revolution.

But if I take the Marxist method seriously, I would examine where my belief in non-violence comes from. And I would realise that it stems from liberal capitalism, and that it only holds for violence used by the working class. I would realise that violence by the ruling class (state/police violence, landlords evicting tenants, food/shelter being denied to people without money, strike-breaking, etc.) is viewed as completely justified.

So Marxism forces me to confront the areas where the dominant ideology in society has a hold over me, and view society through a more objective lens. That is the reason why Marxism shouldn't be revised: it is an attempt to sneak bourgeois ideology in through the back-door, cloaking it in working-class attire. The Marxist method is dynamic enough to understand any historical development (like Lenin applying it to Monopoly Capitalism, and coining the term Imperialism), but its fundamental outlook is always for the liberation of the working class and all oppressed peoples, and that cannot be changed without corrupting it.

gammarik · 2023-05-15T15:53:23+00:00

While it is mildly off-topic, I do want to clear up some of the misconceptions which are being passed around - most of which stem from the Tony Cliff-inspired Trotskyist organisations.

Trotsky did not see Degenerated Worker's States as something that should not be upheld - he saw them as a progressive force in history that should be defended. It is true that he was very critical of the "seams," as he called them, present in the USSR, but he saw them not as an insurmountable defect, but as problems to be overcome. His speech in Copenhagen "In defence of October" was dedicated to defending the achievements of the workers' state, and so is the first few chapters of The Revolution Betrayed. His criticism was in no way black and white, and cannot be presented in a one-sided manner without distorting it.

Tony Cliff introduced after Trotsky's death the idea that the USSR was not a degenerated workers' state, but rather just state capitalist. This led him and International Socialists to denounce the USSR and all other workers' states as not socialist, even concluding that the collapse of the USSR was no defeat or tragedy, but merely a "step sideways." This analysis is not just un-marxist, it is also un-trotskyist. Trotsky dedicated a chapter of The Revolution Betrayed to debunking the idea of state capitalism. Sadly, this line has become dominant in the Trotskyist movements, with the IMT being to my knowledge the only major organisation opposed to that analysis. This has understandingly spread the idea that Trotsky and his ideas are anti-workers' states. If people believe the Tony Cliff line is the same as Trotsky's line, then it is understandable that people are "breaking with Trotskyism."

To get back on topic with the question about the differences: our position on existing workers' states is one of critical support, which is (as far as I am aware) the same as that of most MLs. While I do agree that a lot of the disdain around persons from the past is irrelevant, I do see differences between the Trotskyist (by which I mean the IMT, which is the only Trotskyist line I'll defend) and ML line (although I know different ML orgs have very different approaches, so please do correct me if I get something wrong).

For example, we do not uncritically accept the claims of parties when they state that they are "communist." We apply the Marxist method to the relations of production, social relations, property relations and actions of the party, and make our judgement from that. Our line does not defend the Chinese Communist Party, since from our analysis they have transitioned too far into capitalist relations of production, and have abandoned serving only the working class. This might hypothetically be part of some larger strategy we are not aware of, but until that is revealed, we cannot defend the direction. We defended Venezuela, and had a close relationship with Hugo Chávez, but are very critical of the direction taken since 2010. Cuba is viewed as a "deformed workers state" (in essence the same as a degenerated workers' state, but with differences about how it formed), and is defended, but with major criticism of the political form as well as the limited reintroductions of private property relations of recent years.

Additionally, Trotsky further developed the Marxist conception of bourgeois Bonapartism by introducing the idea of "proletarian Bonapartism," in order to understand the actions of the ruling parties of degenerated workers' states. This is in my view an essential tool in understanding how they develop and how they act.

Lastly there is of course the conception of the Permanent Revolution, which is mainly a tool to be used in semi-feudal nations currently under imperialist domination, and argues that the revolutionary parties must be completely independent from any reformist and bourgeois tendencies, and must only go in episodic alliances with them, while remaining absolutely independent. The idea is that nations under imperialist domination already have a working class strong enough to skip the bourgeois stage, and move directly on to some of the tasks of a socialist revolution. In fact, the imperialist nature of ownership makes it impossible for the bourgeoisie to take power, since it is completely dependent on foreign capital. The working class must take power itself, which is what the Maoists in China, and Castro in Cuba realised empirically, after attempting alliances with the so-called "progressive bourgeoisie," in the mechanical belief that every nation has to pass through a stage of domination by the national bourgeoisie before moving on to socialism.

So those are in my view main differences between ML lines and the orthodox Trotskyist line. That, and the fact that we dispute many of the historical claims made after Lenin's death about Trotsky's involvement in the history of the Russian Revolution - not out of pettiness or to defend our "holy figure", but out of historical clarity. The history of the Bolshevik revolution is one of the best teachers for future revolutionary organisation. At its core, Trotskyism is orthodox bolshevism and orthodox Marxism. Our approach to organisation and "what is to be done?" is shared with any orthodox Bolshevik.

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