Critiques of Trotskyism

I can't put my finger on what it is, but every time I read an article by a Trotskyist, I can tell because it kind of sucks. What are some critiques of Trotskyism, that I can hopefully use to help form a better analysis than "it sucks"?

I read a good critique of tony cliff's trotskyism on the ICC website. Left coms write the best marxist critiques IMO, since anarchists and stalinists don't really use marxism in their attacks.

you're just saying that because you're on the same board as me, lol

I think it's impossible to ask for critiques of Trotskyism because it's incredibly important where you're coming from; an ML critique will be completely and totally different from a left com or anarchist critique. Also it's hard because there isn't really any "trotskyism" in codified form at all.

And tbh if you just get a nice critique of Leninism, there won't be any questions left to ask about Trotskyism either, so just go with that:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/index.htm

There's a lot to read there, and most of it is really short and simple, so hf.

Well I've been talking to some people from the ISO (which is influenced by Tony Cliff) so I guess by Trotskyist I mean the "International Socialist Tendency"

If I had to propose a critique of trotskyism, I would say that trotskyism is a form of left-wing communism, but not like "it's left-wing". No, rather like "infantile disorder", as Lenin said. That's why I don't value the so-called "left com" critiques. So, this is stupid to read Tony Cliff, because he was a trotskyist.

If you want to know why it sucks, you should start reading what Lenin said about Trotsky himself.

You can also read what I wrote there, which is not written in a perfect English.

My problem is the invocation of tawdry articles written in the '30s, all of which bear no resemblance to anything happening today.

And yes, you can use Marxism in an argument, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good or helpful to use it. I recall lending Horne's history of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege and Commune of Paris and the latter's subsequent collapse to a comrade, and he got back to me a fortnight later saying it was a "bourgeois history" because it didn't say anything from a Marxist perspective (by which I assume he means Whig, but proletarian in the lieu of the "middling" classes) and was therefore a false account, despite being very well researched and largely unbiased. An apparent lack of non-Marxist sources in their writings confirms, to me at least in part, an almost a priori view of the world amongst its lieutenants; where what is predicted never really comes to pass, because the analysis is shockingly put and largely ignorant of self-critique.

My critique is just a matter of ideological disagreement, but I don't like how Trots a) generally write off the USSR post-Stalin (Hitchens' style) and b) call Stalin's USSR something akin to fascism, even though by many political and socioeconomic indicators that was not the case, and Stalin ended up using many of Trotsky's ideas on political economy. I have pretty much the same problem with Stalinists, Maoists and Hoxhists actually. They generally revere the Stalin period as they've built it up in their heads and call the USSR post-1956 revisionist (in a negative sense), state capitalist, social imperialist, etc., while by the same political and socioeconomic indicators there were few substantive differences between the late Stalin period and what came after.

I don't really associate with Trots in my day to day, and if I do I'm not likely to bring up Stalin v. Trotsky, so up until recently I've kind of been lulled in a state of apathy toward them. This is probably because I've been reading and agreeing a lot with Dagoth Ur here on SE, and thinking that his Trotskyism seems a rational form. He has problems with the history of the USSR sure, but instead of calling it fascist, he just criticizes individual policies and circumstances. He's also able to give Stalin his due with certain policies, and doesn't believe that Trotsky would have been able to do better in every single situation. In response it's got me reading more about Trotsky and his role in the revolution and the formation of the Soviet government, and made me give him 'his due' in my mind. Anyway, that's how I felt until recently, when I started reading the 'Can Somebody explain 'Socialism in one country'' thread, and remembered how Dagoth is the exception, just like Stalinists willing to recognize Trotsky's contributions are the exception.

You shouldn't let Daft Punk color your view of Trotskyism at all. You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of the "Democratic Trot" who thinks Trotsky was all about immediate democracy and that everyone but Lenin and Trotsky were anti-socialist wreckers in disguise. He also falls for the infallible Lenin shtick and so many other pitfalls that make up anti-Stalinism. I mean any "Trotskyist" who would claim the USSR is the enemy to the working class, or even more laughably fascist, has completely lost his senses. It takes a significant effort to ignore Trotsky's adamant support of the USSR as THE worker's state.

That said I do not refer to myself as a Trotskyist anymore for several reasons. First and foremost I agree with Sam Marcy that Stalinist falsification regarding Trotsky and his ideas (especially Stalin's usage of them) has been so thorough and complete that there is no hope, or even value, in trying to rehabilitate an ideology centering around a country that no longer exists. Evidence of this comes from Trotskyism itself. So often they regard Trotskyism as simple anti-Stalinism (which is a Stalinist claim), or they adopt all sorts of bourgeoisie idealist notions that have been attached to Trotskyism as libel (instant democracy, et al).

Really the best critique of Trotsky is examining just how frequently they agree with Stalinists.

I'd like to bring up a work that presents a thorough critique of Trotskyism,for those interested:

Moissaye J. Olgin
Trotskyism:Counter-Revolution in Disguise

http://www.marxists.org/archive/olgin/1 ... /index.htm

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First, Trotskyism is a theory of the so-called “permanent revolution”, which is but another name for the theory that it is impossible to build socialism in the Soviet Union.

Second, Trotskyism means lack of confidence in the Bolshevik Party allegiance, in its unity, in its hostility towards opportunist elements, which leads to the theory of the “co-habitation of revolutionaries and opportunists, of their groups and grouplets within the fold of a single party”.

Third, Trotskyism means distrust in the leaders of Bolshevism, an attempt at discrediting them, at besmirching them. With a prophetic understanding Stalin points out the dangers of Trotskyism.

Purposefully pigeon-holing your enemy's positions does not qualify as a critique.

I'm not sure i understand you.Can you reiterate?
This book was written in 1935,it of course didn't cover modern "strains" of and tendencies within Trotskyism.

He sets up a view of Trotskyism, untrue to reality, which he then attacks. On all three points he's using a politicized caricature of Trotskyism.

Point one: permanent revolution justified revolution in Russia it didn't say it was impossible.
Point two: calling them opportunists isn't a point
Point three: it makes sense that Stalin (who came up with these points) would be mad that Trotsky was a constant thorn in his side. Stalin removing this thorn was a huge mistake especially for himself.

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Point one: permanent revolution justified revolution in Russia it didn't say it was impossible.

Correct me if i'm wrong,but didn't Trotsky and Co. claim in the 20s that socialism in Russia would be impossible without revolutions in Germany and so on? What good is a Revolution that doesn't have a real perspective?

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Point two: calling them opportunists isn't a point

It's,IMO,quite important (in this context) to remark on Trotsky's "career" and how many times he switched sides.

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Point three: it makes sense that Stalin (who came up with these points) would be mad that Trotsky was a constant thorn in his side. Stalin removing this thorn was a huge mistake especially for himself.

Trotsky and Co. became a "thorn" to practically the whole Party,it's not like Stalin himself kicked him out or something.
Besides,many Bolsheviks disliked Trotsky (and for good reasons) years before 1927.

Loz wrote:

Correct me if i'm wrong,but didn't Trotsky and Co. claim in the 20s that socialism in Russia would be impossible without revolutions in Germany and so on? What good is a Revolution that doesn't have a real perspective?

Yes, but that idea predates the left opposition and trotskyism. It began from Lenin's arrival in april 1917 onwards, with an ecstastic Trotsky now on board and a Stalin forced to change his ways, though IMO he never really abandoned them.

But still that definition (strange I was about to bring it up when I saw dagoth's post) is a far cry from what 'permanent revolution' is. You don't think it's a bit of absurd reduction?

Loz, both men switched 'sides', but only one remained consistent in ideas. Trotsky remained pretty consistent in his ideas from 1905 onward, which found a home in Lenin's new bolshevik party. Stalin remained a Bolshevik member for longer than trotsky, but it was only after a period of zig-zags and betrayals in the 20s and 30s did they become concrete, culminating in 'marxism-leninism'. While he remained consistent in the sense that he never really broke from the guiding ideas of his leadership of the bolsheviks prior to Lenin, these were introduced and even revised somewhat under a new guise during his leadership. So for simplicity's sake, I'll refrain from calling him consistent, I'd say perhaps opportunist.

It's hard to speak of the party as a whole because in that time there was a rabid factionalism with some sides engaged in a give and take relationship. The stalinist 'centrists' sided with the right opposition when the trotsky and the left were 'a thorn' and their ideas antithetical to others. Then the stalinists tossed out Bukharin and the rightists when they were no longer convenient, and their ideas posed a danger (admittedly Bukharin's ideas kinda bordered menshevism). Indeed, Stalin had embraced a 'trotskyism without trotsky' where he used some of the left-wing bolshevik strategies and ideas after their defeat to industrialize, though not as they were intentioned to be.

I personally believe the conflicts were inevitable because of the introduction of radically transforming ideas Lenin brought with him. There was bound to be ideological conflict eventually, it was merely suppressed under Lenin, and after his death it wracked the party. Previously silenced and hidden views suddenly came out in the open and began bargaining with each other in power bids. The ideas lenin turned onto the bolsheviks in 1917 were fading into obscurity as the ideas and formations of the new party factions, never truly erased after Lenin's arrival, soon dominated. They were all right-wing deviations, coinciding with Leninism's relationship to pre-april bolshevism, which robbed Leninism of its radical nature and turned it into something of a national narrative, or abandoned it altogether. All the meaningful things that separated bolshevism from menshevism were forced to retreat into the left wing of the party.

Also, it doesn't make a fragging difference of the majority of the party disliked him or not, especially considering the make up of it at the time. Lenin didn't have many favorable views of the top bolsheviks either. Are you going to dismiss them all, too?

Loz is right. The theory of the Permanent revolution says that you can't build socialism in USSR without a revolution in advanced capitalist countries, but because you don't have the material conditions in USSR to build the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", the necessary step between revolution and socialism. Lenin already disagreed with this theory in 1905.

Every Bochevik thought, of course, that they would lose the war against capitalist forces without some help coming from abroad. They underestimate their own potential but the question of class alliances inside the Soviet territories was remaining.

Conscript, who hates so much "absurd reductions" says that Trotsky "remained pretty consistent in his ideas from 1905 onward". This was not Lenin's opinion :

"Trotsky, on the other hand, represents only his own personal vacillations and nothing more. In 1903 he was a Menshevik; he abandoned Menshevism in 1904, returned to the Mensheviks in 1905 and merely flaunted ultra-revolutionary phrases; in 1906 he left them again; at the end of 1906 he advocated electoral agreements with the Cadets (i.e., he was in fact once more with the Mensheviks); and in the spring of 1907, at the London Congress, he said that he differed from Rosa Luxemburg on “individual shades of ideas rather than on political tendencies”. One day Trotsky plagiarises from the ideological stock-in-trade of one faction; the next day he plagiarises from that of another, and therefore declares himself to be standing above both factions. In theory Trotsky is on no point in agreement with either the liquidators or the otzovists, but in actual practice he is in entire agreement with both the Golosists and the Vperyodists."

This is what Lenin called opportunism.

Lenin quotes are a double-edged sword, OP-B, especially considering the changes in the relationship between Lenin and Trotsky over decades down to years. Regardless, prior to April 1917 Trotsky was one of the few who believed the revolution would and should start in Russia, and held on to the logic behind it for the rest of his life. That was my point.

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The theory of the Permanent revolution says that you can't build socialism in USSR without a revolution in advanced capitalist countries, but because you don't have the material conditions in USSR to build the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", the necessary step between revolution and socialism.

Actually, it states any alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry cannot be realized without the proletariat acting as a revolutionary vanguard leading the peasant masses, and no socialist struggle can be introduced without it being that way. February taught us this, October executed this. Stalin later reversed in favor of the old bolshevik idea of a DDOTPP, which formed the basis for the later 'socialism in one country' theory, the peoples' democracies, the nuttiness of Maoism, and other deviations.

Trotsky in "What is the permanent revolution?" wrote:

The Comintern's endeavor to foist upon the Eastern countries the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, finally and long ago exhausted by history, can have only a reactionary effect. Insofar as this slogan is counterposed to the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it contributes politically to the dissolution of the proletariat in the petty-bourgeois masses and thus creates the most favorable conditions for the hegemony of the national bourgeoisie and consequently for the collapse of the democratic revolution. The introduction of this slogan into the program of the Comintern is a direct betrayal of Marxism and of the October tradition of Bolshevism.

Indeed, prior to April 1917 Lenin had a different view of a revolutionary peasantry, consistent with Stalin's, but he later abandoned this in favor of Trotsky's thesis on the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry.

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Lenin already disagreed with this theory in 1905.

Of course, Lenin considered revolution in Russia out of the question until 1917. However, the nature of the october revolution and the years following constituted a permanent revolution.

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Actually, it states any alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry cannot be realized without the proletariat acting as a revolutionary vanguard leading the peasant masses, and no socialist struggle can be introduced without it being that way.

If we understood the Permanent revolution as you do, we would conclude it has no connection to worldwide revolution at all, which is obviously wrong. Trotsky refused any kind of alliance. He tried, of course, to explain his opinion, but the conclusion was : We simply think that [the idea of a ‘proletarian and peasant dictatorship’] is unrealisable (Trotsky, 1905). It means that, because he refused class alliances, Trotsky was against any step called "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

Your own quotation of Trotsky is very clear, he thought such a slogan was opposed to the "dictatorship of the proletariat". And you explain yourself that this slogan was wrong, so at least everybody on this forum will recognize that you disagree with "the old bolshevik idea of a DDOTPP".

If it was necessary to add more evidences, here is one : "Between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is not and cannot be any intermediate stage, that is, no democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants."



This is the drawing I made to explain this democratic stage.

Is it true, then, that Lenin agreed with Trotsky in 1917? No, this is a trotskyist lie. He wrote, long after 1917, in "The Renegade Kautsky":

"The question which Kautsky has so tangled up was fully explained by the Bolsheviks as far back as 1905. Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution as long as we march with the peasants as a whole (DDOTPP). This has been as clear as clear can be to us; we have said it hundreds and thousands of times since 1905, and we have never attempted to skip this necessary stage of the historical process or abolish it by decrees. Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the “whole” of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one"

"On the other hand, if the Bolshevik proletariat had tried at once, in October-November 1917, without waiting for the class differentiation in the rural districts, without being able to prepare it and bring it about, to “decree” a civil war or the “introduction of socialism” in the rural districts, had tried to do without a temporary bloc with the peasants in general, without making a number of concessions to the middle peasants, etc., that would have been a Blanquist distortion of Marxism, an attempt by the minority to impose its will upon the majority; it would have been a theoretical absurdity, revealing a failure to understand that a general peasant revolution is still a bourgeois revolution, and that without a series of transitions, of transitional stages, it cannot be transformed into a socialist revolution in a backward country."

Quite clear.

The October revolution couldn't be a "Permanent revolution" according to Lenin, because, according to Trotsky, "Permanent" means that there is no stage : ""The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution."

I already explained that to TIG, because he said exactly the same calumnies about Lenin agreeing with Trotsky in 1917:
http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=49859&start=40

It is certainly useful to critique Trotskyism by poking holes into Trotsky's actual theories and his own historical actions, but I think it's also very worthwhile to look at the concrete actions of Trotskyist organisations today. And then things become very difficult, because there is so much diversity between Trotskyist organisations, both theoretically and practically, that you can hardly paint them all with one brush. You can't exactly analyse the French Trotskyists during WWII as described by OP-Bagration in the same way as The Militant in the UK in the 1970s, or the Cliffites today.

One thing I've noticed is that it's common to label Trotskyists as ultra-lefts, and this could be true if you look only at public statements. Over here, one would find it difficult to work with them in a trade-union environment for any amount of time before hearing them generalise most everyone involved as "union bureaucrats". Because of course they know everything so well, and it's their job to get in there and tell the great unwashed how the world really works, and anyone who doesn't understand must be a bureaucrat.

However, it's also good to look beyond the radical posturing and see how opportunism rears its head at the most inopportune times. It is very typical that the people who often take an ultra-leftist position are the same people who avoid the word "communism" for opportunistic reasons, the same people who state that "the workers aren't ready yet" in all sorts of situations, the same people who will readily dissolve into social-democratic parties, the same people who will make permanent alliances with all kinds of reactionary "community leaders", etc. Radicalism and opportunism, they have both goods in store and find an application for both. That is the one thing that all (mainstream) Trotskyist currents seem to have in common with each other.

Despite the fun of rhetoric you've pretty well underscored many of the reasons I no longer identify as a trotskyist and reject the political programme of the entire trot movement (inasmuch as that can be called anything other plain anti-Stalinism).

What I also find strange is that, in theory, only a minority of Trotskyist tendencies have entryism as a policy these days. Yet where I live, the sections of three major Trotskyist tendencies (CWI, USFI and IST) have all attempted to work within a social-democratic party within the last 10 years, even though all of these oppose entryism on paper (correct me if I'm wrong). How does that even work?