I know a lot here hate Trotsky, but how many of you hate the ideology of Trotskyism as a stand alone, and why?

its not that I hate trotskyism its just irrelevant

Attached: trotsky.png (1738x3346, 1.03M)

lmao at all these marxists not even understanding what permanent revolution is

I like Trotsky, but dislike most Trots.

invading half of europe before you're ready

At least trotskyists have the WSWS, which is by far the best socialist news out there. Stalinism led to bureaucrats slowly bleeding out all the gains of the Russian Revolution and turning the socialized property forms into capitalism as Trotsky had predicted decades before.

Trotsky looked at the long road unlike the opportunist Stalin who thought that killing off all of his former comrades and genuine Marxists and allying with the capitalists to put down workers revolts during the revolutionary WW2 era would somehow lead to socialism.

Trotsky lived through four of his sons killed, his closest friends murdered, and the revolution he co-led go through degeneration yet one of his last writings was this

"My high (and still rising) blood pressure is deceiving those near me about my actual condition. I am active and able to work but the outcome is evidently near. These lines will be made public after my death.

I have no need to refute here once again the stupid and vile slander of Stalin and his agents: there is not a single spot on my revolutionary honour. I have never entered, either directly or indirectly, into any behind-the-scenes agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class. Thousands of Stalin’s opponents have fallen, victims of similar false accusations. The new revolutionary generations will rehabilitate their political honour and deal with the Kremlin executioners according to their deserts.

I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all.

However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate has given me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great suffering, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try and avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.

Leon Trotsky.
Mexico February 27th 1940 "

In contrast Stalin's wife killed herself perhaps over guilt of living with a good man turned monster and Stalin himself perished a depressed man, urinating all over himself.

I'll end with this, Trotsky will win because his conception of socialism is the logical reasoning of Marxism and because Marxism will prevail so will Trotsky

I always see these quotes being used as an argument but I never really saw any substance in them. They're just "Trotskyism is bad because Trotsky is bad because bad". Saying that you support the legitimate government of the ally you're relying on, doesn't mean anyone else is "2stupid4marxism".

I'm just sick of all the lies about him.
People keep repeating he helped the Nazis, but the only proof usually offered is from Nazis.
How am I supposed to trust what Nazis have to say?

The "muh bureaucracy" argument is really week. How would it be possible to administer such a diverse and massive country as the USSR without a bureaucracy?

I guess you think if Trotsky came to power, magically a bureaucracy wouldn't be necessary?

If Trotsky came to power, nothing would change. Stalin would be exiled to Mexico and write polemics about the "Trotskyist bureaucracy" destroying the revolution. Then he would have gotten icepick'd by a Trotskyist agent.

Well, he did start a whole other International.

"Bureaucracy" for Trotsky refers to the lack of democratic accountability and workers control, not burger conservative "muh bloated bureaucracy"

How do you think Trotsky would have run things differently? I'm trying to figure out how phrases like democratic accountability and workers' control would look like in applied practice.

That’s an anti Marxist conception. The question isn’t about whether Trotsky or Stalin is in power as Trotsky himself said, it’s a question of which social force holds power. Stalinism took away all the power of the soviets and turned it into a labor management tool, rid the vanguard of all genuine Marxists, and gave ultimate power to the bureaucracy because for these groups of people, international socialist revolution and democracy was not in their interests. They could manage their privileged positions in society by ridding the USSR of its revolutionary content.

What Trotsky fought for was not for him to be made leader but for the Russian proletariat to overthrow the bureaucracy, bring back democracy and support revolutionary vanguards throughout the world. What Trotsky wanted was for the workers to hold power as was always intended since the time of Marx himself

Realistically, how could "the workers" - hundreds of millions of people - hold power? Wouldn't you agree that there has to be a decision making hierarchy for the effective functioning of society?

What would happen if the workers in, say, a steel plant democratically voted to increase the price of their steel - negatively affecting the workers in a nearby tractor factory? Musn't there be a central authority to unite the disparate interests of a huge diversity of proletarians?

Lenin’s temporary ban on factions was made permanent under Stalin which gave the Stalinists impetus to imprison and kick out any sort of principled opposition. Democracy was effectively killed as the core tenets of democratic centralism was violated.

Stalin himself arose under a period of immense demoralization as millions of the brightest workers and marxists perished in the civil war and the economy was ruined, this gave impetus to the bureaucrats(themselves elected by the soviets) to peddle lies about “socialism in one country” which is what got the stalinists into power and due to the ban on party factions, any principled Marxist opposition was wiped out and debates which would have raged among the workers was effectively shut out leading to the rise of a bureaucracy which effectively neutered the Soviets and took any meaningful power out of the hands of the working class leading to the greatest betrayal of Marxism in history

If you really care about this, read revolution betrayed as Trotsky goes much more in depth.

Can you name an example where democratic consensus was deliberately overruled by Stalin? In what way did he took power away from the Soviets and gave it to unelected bureaucrats?
It wasn't a lie, it was reality. There was objectively no way for the revolution to spread, if Trotsky were sent to Germany there is no guarantee that a revolution would have been successful there. The KPD and the Spartakus League never had that much power. And mind you that Stalin did spread socialism all over Eastern Europe and Korea. China became socialist too.

I mean even if you think Trotsky's criticism of ML is all correct, there is reason not to choose MLM over Trotskyism as the former has a better track record and seems to be more dynamic and less crusty.

no reason*

cant agree for the realm of foreign policy

Stalin: indirect support of all communist movements around the world, Soviet supremacy among communists, pragmatic relations with Capitalists

Trotsky:?

this is just inane feels with no substance tho
maoism of any sort does not have a good record, its got a substantially worse record than generic soviet ML of which its just a shitty ripoff of. That you would describe it as 'dynamic' just tells me you're buying into their propaganda fetishising supposed spontaneity and 'the masses' which is all superficial garbage. Please try to restrain yourself from making trite comments like that in the future and try to assess things with some sort of materialist and marxist lens in mind.

sure do that, if you like being in bizarro cults of collage graduates

Well they're just talking about How Trotsky is bad not Trotskyism

Trotskyism is bad because it have never been successful

Maoist parties have historically not only come to power, they are also waging people's war right now in the Global South and have recently taken over the government in Nepal after waging a decade of people's war there.

Trots have literally achieve nothing in all of their existence, most of their parties are really averaged and don't have any approach except electoralism and distributing newspapers. I'm not even a Maoist but if I thought ML wasn't the end of all things I'd become a Maoist before I become a Trot. I'll miss out on the autism about ebul Stalin as well which is a result of a personal rivalry of Trotsky rather than any criticism in content.

It is funny though how Trots can't argue against MLM and throw a hissy fit everytime because their one-trick-pony about hurr durr bureaucracy and degenerated worker's state doesn't work on them.

averaged = overaged

wut?

Stalinism didn't spread socialism, it contained it. "Socialism in one country" is an incredibly opportunistic distortion of Marxism because Marxism has always asserted that the socialist revolution would need to be international in scope to defeat capitalism because capitalism itself was an international system.

Stalinists enforced the no-strike pledges during WW2, led the betrayal of the Catalonian workers, and supported bourgeois nationalist regimes all throughout the third world. At a time when class struggle was intensifying, the role of the stalinists was to give support to the capitalist regimes because they knew that any genuine working class revolution would lead to revolts within their own state. In fact the history of the USSR under Stalinism shows forceful breakdown of workers protests. During the Great Terror, Stalinists turned the Soviet Unions into pawns of the party as no degree of unsafe working conditions or low pay could be fought against as the party dictated the union. Look at what happened in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, a genuine workers movement was forcefully crushed by the so called "socialist" USSR.

They acted as strikebreakers for the capitalist regimes because the bureaucracy wanted to make sure that its position was secure. In the same fashion their "spread" of socialism over Eastern Europe and Korea was of a purely opportunistic character because the capitalists had blocked them out of international trade and were the USSR to survive, it needed the resources of periphery states. Not to mention the Eastern European and NK were NOT socialists. The working class ultimately did not have final say and the states themselves were bureaucratically dominated modeled after the USSR. Simply look at what happened to all of these states that you call socialist. The Eastern European states devolved into capitalism and became suppliers of cheap labor to the advanced capitalist European nations. North Korea turned into a repressive regime which can barely provide for its inhabitants. China is now one of the foremost Capitalist powers with a rapidly growing bourgeoisie.

This is because none of these states were able to assert the primacy of the proletariat, in the case of China for example, it was the "bloc of four classes", a completely anti-marxist conception. Secondly, none of these states appealed to the international proletariat. They didn't build vanguards around the world and they didn't appeal to workers in times of revolutionary uproar, the role of the Stalinists was to actually hold back revolutionary upsurge.

I'm from Nepal. Maoists have not changed the country for better at all and are instead censoring the internet and turning more repressive by the day. Retards like you seem to think that just because something calls itself a communist or socialist state and has a red banner, its somehow representative of the working class.

Trotsky was pretty staunch tbh, just because he lost out people think they can attribute to him all their own personal critiques of actually existing communism and be like "if only based trotsky had been in power stalin wouldnt have murdered 42 billion kulaks". How many of them sincerely believe in permanent revolution in the way Trotsky imagined? You think these pussies really wish the USSR had violently exported leninist communism all over the globe? No. If that had been done they'd be the first ot believe the imperial lies about it that would have been told.

How is this a bad thing? The internet is just a tool of capitalist market expansion

Workers should have access to all the information in the world. What the Maoist government is doing is solidifying its power so that the Nepalese people are cut off from the outside world. The government is actively modeling itself after China, which does not allow its workers to strike, is incredibly capitalist and repressive. I'd rather not have my country turned into another sweatshop, have the peasants forcibly removed from their land and have our mountains turned into tourist hotspots

Fucking retard, you wouldn't even be posting here if it wasn't for freedom of speech and press
You know you can have both socialism and freedom right? Stop modeling your ideals after retarded shit

Lmao what
The internet is the ultimate anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian tool out there. Its not specifically capitalist or communist, it has infrastructure for anything. It's like calling a road a "tool of bourgeois business exchange and proletariat exploitation".

What almost no one here realizes is that Permanent Revolution doesn't mean what you think it is. While Trotsky himself probably would've been more interventionist and had a more agressive foreign policy than Stalin, Permanent Revolution according to trotskyist theory simply means that Trotsky thought you could "skip" over a mode of production if necessary. I don't remember too well if he meant it as instead of going straight to socialism from a semi-feudal society or have a small capitalist mode of production alongside a socialist one in a state capitalist economy (basically NEP, what the soviets ended up doing) but since it was limited and only for a short amount of time it would kinda be considered as skipping the proper industrialized capitalist stage.

Here's a more detailed explanation if you don't mind reading too much:

Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution (TPR) may be his most misunderstood theory. Oftentimes it is conflated with his criticism of Stalin’s Socialism in One Country strategy for building the Soviet Union from feudal agricultural backwater to industrial superpower. The point of this post isn’t to talk about the Soviet Union however, as TPR doesn’t have much to do with the USSR at all Actually that isn’t necessarily true but I’ll get to that at the end of the post.

All the TPR means is that in countries that experience combined and uneven development (basically developing countries that have large segments of pre-capitalist production with pockets of advanced capitalist production), the bourgeoisie is gonna be too comfy in the hybrid system to have their own revolution to go full capitalism. The example of combined and uneven development in Russia that Trotsky was working with was the fact that most of the country was peasant based agriculture, but at the same time the largest factories in the entire world were steel works in Petrograd. Because of this, the Russian bourgeoisie was doing mighty fine under feudalism, so while they had some complaints about their political rights they had no material incentive to support a revolution to fully establish capitalism.

So the proletariat and the peasantry will instead be the revolutionary group that take a revolution straight to socialism, skipping the capitalist stage altogether. The “Permanent” part of PR comes from the proletariat and peasantry taking the initial revolution that overthrew feudalism in Russia and established the bourgeois Provisional Government, and pushing through to socialism.

The success of that revolution is then dependent on other countries that have more widespread advanced capitalist production having their own revolutions to sustain socialism. So the internationalism Trotsky uses to later criticize the USSR does ties into the theory, but the main point is how to base your strategy as a revolutionary socialist organization in a largely pre-capitalist society.

How TPR ties into how to organize in a pre-capitalist society can be summed up by saying that socialist orgs don’t limit themselves. A rigid interpretation of the Marxist analysis of history is that feudalism/pre-capitalist societies must transition to socialism through a period of capitalism building up the Means of Production. Don’t get me or Trotsky wrong, that rigid process was necessary for the first capitalist countries such as England, France, and Germany. But TPR means that we can skip that capitalist mode of production in other countries as long as the socialist revolution spreads. So if you are a comrade in a non-imperial country, push for full socialism. Don’t artificially limit yourselves to supporting capitalism because y’all don’t have fully sufficient Means of Production. Doing so can make the working class lose faith in your politics and throw water on a potential ignition of revolutionary activity.

You missed the most important part, that Revolution can only succeed if it’s the proletariat that is the leading class. It’s not the peasants and proletariat leading the revolution, it’s the proletariat and it alone.

Trotsky would have been more democratic and less ruthless than Stalin
Stalin was more democratic than Stalin and his ruthlessness is bourgeoisie propaganda
Trotsky would have been less democratic and more ruthless and that is a good thing

Trotsky is based, fuck ☭TANKIE☭s

Because he's a faggot that's why I hate him.

Attached: gayorgy.jpeg (1200x886, 162.67K)