Against Trotskyism

Made in collaboration with the I.C.A, which is doing a video series about different ideologies' perspective on Trotskyism. This is my segment on the Marxist-Leninist position on Trotskyism. The full video from I.C.A. will be linked when it is completed.

I.C.A. Social Media:

Sources:
At the Closing Session of the Tricontinental Conference by Fidel Castro -

Soundtrack (Added By Request):

[nepoleon]

I used to be a Trotskyist but I became a ML, the one thing I want to say about Trotskyists is I find more often then not they are just worried about revolutions failing and are simply misinformed on many subject. I feel the best way to deal with this is to talk with them and try honestly to welcome them and be kind to them instead of just being like “hahaha Trotsky was killed with an ice axe” every time they show up.

[Gray-drri]

One of the key ideas of Permanent Revolution is inherently against the very first point: that one can skip capitalism as a country can go from feudalism to socialism. I recommend citing Trotsky himself to make your points, rather than using random observers.

[gking]

The emphasis on names and ideology, rather than material ideas and the context in which they occurred, gives all of this a tinge of high schoolery tomfoolery

[smalbeaste]

Trot here, I would like to answer these takes.

Yes, just like Castro said, Trotskyism and the 4th internationale heavily degenerated especially after WWII and Trotskys death, but you don't give any context to why that happened.
Even before WWII the fourth internationale was a really weak organisation where basically anyone who didn't like Stalin could be a member, meaning all sorts of ideas were present. Trotsky himself opposed this development rigorously, writing ''The transitional programme'' (a brilliant book and a great introduction to Trotsky) to combat this.

Didn't work out so well, since Trotsky was assassinated two years after. When loosing it's ideological authority figure, the 4th internationale went complete apeshit. There is nothing to say to the so called ''marxists'' of the 4th internationale who split to become reformists, mandelites, enterists, completely leaving bolshevism and communism behind etc. But the fourth internationale was also built under very hard conditions. They way Stalinists laugh at this tragedy, and joke about Trotskys death, a very important marxist figure, just sends everyone a signal that you're the shittiest people on the planet.

As for Harry Haywoods claims, these are just frankly the same repeated lies as always. This shit needs to stop.

Claim number 1: ''Trotsky didn't believe in the revolutionary power of the peasantry''.
This is simply false and is nothing but a moralistic argument, not a dialectical material analysis of the peasantry as a class.
Trotskys position on the peasantry were EXACTLY like Lenins position and 100% proven correct. I would advise you to read any work by Trotsky in context and see if you can spot anywhere where he says that the peasantry couldn't play a revolutionary role. If that were the case, imagine Trotskys surprise during 1917! Just kidding of course...
The crux is that the peasantry can't play a revolutionary role BY ITSELF. Because of it's role in production, and the way the class is made up, it has never in history been a revolutionary class by itself. Peasants are isolated from eachother and their production isn't social and organized like the working class. Peasants can revolt, but not change the mode of production and in turn change society by themselves, which is why they're not a revolutionary class.
Also, the peasantry isn't exactly the class of the future, but is instead proletarized into the working class.
But why and how did the peasant masses play such an important and revolutionary role in 1917 then? Because it was led!
For the peasantry to play a revolutionary role it then has to be led by another class: the small working class of Russia, which leads me to the next false claim.

Claim number 2, or ''I don't understand what the permanent revolution is''.
The permanent revolution isn't about waiting for revolutions to spread in advanced countries indefinetely ''ignoring the material conditions'', that's a complete misconception at best, or a conciouss lie at worst. The permanent revolution is an idea first put forward by Marx after the 1848 revolutions, that Trotsky developed in 1904-05 as a rebuttal to the menshevik and later stalinist-adopted two-stage theory.
It states that the immediate task of an underdeveloped country like Russia at the time, is pretty much like a classic bourgeosie revolution: to end the tsarist monarchy, to give land to the peasantry, to develop industry and a stronger working class etc. This was every marxists position at the time as they hoped the 1905 revolution would carry out this task.
Trotsky realized however that the bourgeosie class in Russia COULDN'T fulfill a revolutionary role and progress society forward, like it had done in France or in England. They instead where a weak class in Russia, tied up to the monarchy and mostly outsourced by foreign businesses.
Therefore, the tasks of the classic bourgeoisie revolution had to be carried out by another class: again, the small working class of Russia, in a sense skipping over the bourgeoisie revolution and building directly toward socialism, making the revolution ''permanent''.
This was proven during the Russian revolution 1917, and the theory explained how the workers could sieze power in an underdeveloped country like Russia and build the first workers state in history (if you exclude the Paris commune). It's not the other way around.
It has since then been proven again and again, most notably during the Cuban revolution, where the weak bourgeosie, tied up to US imperialism, was unable to take Cuba forward after the overthrow of Batista. Castro (being a proponent of bourgeoisie democracy at first) quickly understood this, and instead relied on the working class to play the revolutionary role, skipping over the bourgeoisie role, creating a workers state and making the revolution ''permanent''. The rest is history.

For the rest of the claims: they're so ridiculous that I don't have the time or the energy to answer them. It's hard to tell if you're talking about ''Trotskyists'' or Trotsky himself. There is a gigantic historical difference.
I would recommend all ML's and new marxists here to actually read Trotskys works and think to yourselves: could it be so that everything I've heard about Trotsky are a bunch of lies?

Hope this clears some things up.

[peasantgasser]

this video couldve been avoided if reading trotsky was necessary to critique him.

[AJJ]

What about those Trotskyist that deny any other Trotskyist are actually Trotskyist for this very reason?

[leotard]

all this could've been prevented if he had just read a single word of trotsky

[Musterprolet]

Why is Trotzkyism so bad?

Trotskyism exists because especially intellectuals and academics with a petty-bourgeois class background are systematically inculcated with an anti-communist image of history. Moreover, there is often a tendency among these intellectuals to shy away from the hardships of the class struggle. Yet Trotsky offers a supposedly more "humane" alternative. This makes it easier to see oneself as a Marxist, as a revolutionary, because one can always refer to the "true", the "democratic" and "humanist" core of Marxism and distance oneself from those parts of revolutionary history that are most under fire from the class enemy. This is an expression of an opportunist attitude, because Trotskyism abandons the difficult but indispensable task of critically defending the history of the workers' movement in its entirety in favour of a view of history that, while easier to appeal to, is fundamentally at odds with the facts and ultimately also fails completely to credibly come to terms with the mistakes of our history. They systemically overlook the anti-communist machinations of Trotsky and his clique.In the process, even the research findings of more honest bourgeois historians who actually work with scientific methods, such as Arch Getty, Robert Thurston, Lars Lih, etc. are ignored, so you see the opportunism.

Trotskyists often evolve into hard-right anti-communists and apologists for the crimes of US imperialism, examples of which abound: Natalya Sedova, Max Shachtman and James Burnham became open reactionaries and became important representatives of the anti-communist current of neo-conservatism. Trotskyists advocated many anti-communist wars, such as against anti-colonial communist movements, because of their Marxist-Leninist positions etc.

Neither did Trotsky's critique of the "bureaucracy" yield a serious programme for socialist construction in the Soviet Union and ws based on references, nor could a better strategy for world revolution be derived from his polemic against socialism in one country. Trotsky himself, on the basis of these false theories, developed from a harmful ideological influence within the workers movement into a traitor who did little other than work against the Soviet Union and the world communist movement. Honest socialists and revolutionaries who want to fight for the overthrow of imperialism and a new attempt at socialism would be well advised to shelve Trotskyism for what it is - a fatal aberration.

[aidanpower]

The comments are most certainly divided

[Altropos]

Sometimes, I think that some Trotskyist points are more relevant today: especially permanent revolution. In this modern, connected world, I socialism is increasinly difficult to uphold in one country.

[Mounstrum]

Okey, this video as it seemed for me was very unfair towards TROTSKY, NOT TROTSKYIST. Im sure there is some actual trotskyist who actually try to keep on same level as Trotsky him self, but most of them just became “soviet union was state capitalism” kind of people, while Trotsky him self never used such formulations and thought that they weren’t describing soviet socialism correctly. He created a “deformed workers state” theory which is not perfectly describes soviet union too but is much better in comparison to “state capitalism” trotskyies. And as I remember, Trotsky himself said that no matter the fact that soviet union is(Trotsky opinion) “deformed workers state”, he always proclaimed that they should support soviet union in war against imperialists, and not to join the struggle on side of imperialists(position which Trotsky’s followers would claim to be wrong, again, not all Trotskyist will claim it wrong ). I don’t wish to defend Trotskyism or Trotskyist, as it seemed for me that this video criticised them correctly. But not all the Trotskyists are direct followers of Trotsky’s ideas, as some of the ideas of modern Trotskyist were despised by Trotsky himself. (Again, i am not Trotskyist my self neither I think that Trotsky’s critic of USSR was “correct” as he himself was biased too, but this video just seemed unfair towards representing Trotsky’s ideas. Not modern Trotskyist ideas, but Trotsky’s ideas which he wrote in his main works)

[sinjindelmore]

Thank your for this video! I’m a baby ML and I was a bit confused why many comrades didn’t like Trots. I understand now why that is. Also side note how was this only 4 minutes it felt like 10 with all the info in this video.

[blockmanhatecommentguy]

Trotsky believed that the socialist revolution should happen without the capitalist stage of development not that it is needed

[spoopyscarysocialist]

What did you guys think of the video essay/animation mixed format? If I were to switch to doing this style of video for my main channel, I could likely pump out more videos in a shorter amount of time. At the same time, however, the main channel's entire identity is built around being an animation channel. Let me know what you guys think!

Next video on the main channel will be Lenin's What Is To Be Done.

[afgor]

I'm all for criticism of Trotsky, there's plenty to criticize. he made incredibly stupid blunders in WW1, his writing style is too flowery and he was an ineffective politician

this video isn't criticism of Trotsky, it's a criticism of the imaginary version of Trotsky and Trotskyists that lives inside the mind of Stalinists. Trotskyists don't think if Trotsky had replaced Stalin everything would be fine, that's blatantly anti-Marxist nonsense. Trotskyists also don't endlessly criticize successful revolutions they criticize the beurocratic leadership which perverts the revolution

true to the Stalinist trope you also clearly haven't read the theory you pretend to. even if trots thought that had trotsky lead the USSR everything would have been fine (they don't) this is idealism, not left anti-communism

[CulturalMarxist]

I used to be drawn to 'Marxism-Leninism' and anarchism (obviously at different points!), but I now align more with Trotskyism. Here in Ireland, Trotskyists are at the front of essentiallly every workers' struggle and they're leading the way forward for revolutionary socialism. Pretty much every single Trotskyist I've met is a complete legend and I sincerely believe our numbers will only grow from here!

[DC-wgcr]

What ended the USSR was losing 27 million of their best comrades during WWII. That lost generation made them weak and less agile.

[surge]

I used to love Trotsky but I later found out the USSR the horrible things that happened under Stalin wasn't the main cause there were 3 much bigger problems like Lysenkoism and the economic unrest caused by the civil war and WWI and the devastation of WWII

[tombrown]

"The worst thing you can do for an idea is to defend it poorly" is this video in a nutshell.

The argument was so pathetic I'm more inclined to ignore MLs when they warble about trotsky.

[moshood]

Your definition of permanent revolution is really off. And you also ignore that Lenin’s position on the peasants changed and that some peasants were hostile to the revolution as it is a very heterogeneous class.