purpleworm [none/use name]

Thank you for the sources

I don’t understand why Stalin’s failure in Poland is such an own given the context of Trotsky fumbling the most perfunctory elements of resolving Soviet participation in the Great War, but I guess it doesn’t matter. I agree with you about Trotsky’s assassination, I think. I had the reasons for his exile – where at the time his agitation was much more damaging – in mind but the question was about executions, so I was being silly there. As much as I think Trotsky demonstrated depraved behavior in his approach to various issues while in exile, I don’t think most of it was really that consequential as far as the SU was concerned, so we do agree now that I’ve stopped confusing myself on what we’re talking about. The HUAC thing theoretically could have been bad except Trotsky’s help would have been beating a dead horse and he didn’t get to do it anyway.

Could you explain the paraphrasing I asked about a few comments ago? Where he told the Americans that the Soviet Union was still preferable to them?

I’m confused, is what I am talking about not him trying to doing destabilizing? I thought we agreed on that point, that it wasn’t just that he was such a leftist icon that he mogged Stalin, but that he was engaged in agitation and organization that was counterrevoltionary and thereby a direct and practical threat and thus his removal and eventual assassination.

I apologize for not being clear enough. The original idea was “there is no way that someone could fight for the revolution and be a counterrevolutionary” and my involvement of Trotsky was that he was indeed an important figure in the revolution and civil war, but in his subsequent wrecking and willingness to work with rightists, behaved as a counterrevolutionary once he was no longer on the ascent. It has nothing to do with his policy proposals or anything like that.

A lot of communist movements in the imperial periphery or semi-periphery are fueled more by nationalism than communism, and it’s just that the communist party has the best program for achieving a lot of what the nationalists want.

My syntax was probably muddled, though I do also feel like I made it clear that I wasn’t claiming Trotsky was a fascist or even a rightist, but that he acted in such a way as to enable rightists and was interested in self-promotion to the point of resorting to wrecking and collaborating with rightists. Congrats that he was big on industrialization and Stalin later adopted that policy, it’s an observation so sharp that only a mind as fine as Orwell could catch that Trotsky sometimes put forward a correct position and Stalin sometimes changed his position to that position.

Trotsky couldn’t handle not winning the popularity contest and violated the most basic principles of democratic centralism by organizing an opposition bloc to continuously try to undercut Stalin and replace him despite not having the backing needed for the position. I furthermore reject the dichotomy you offer of pragmatism and purity as being idealist nonsense, letting someone play rebel whenever the vote doesn’t go their way is counter to democracy. Even beyond that, there was the fact that this agitation, again, involved working with rightists as a major faction of the “opposition bloc.” I can’t tell if the thing about the White was meant to deflect that as though anyone would think that’s what I meant.

And you know as well as I do that Trotsky spent his whole exile career promoting ridiculous myths, most of all the Permanent Revolution “debate,” to say nothing of his absurd leftcom stance on the Spanish Civil War which, as far as I can tell, he literally only took to be contrary to Stalin. I can say the same with his furious opposition to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which led him to considering the Nazis and Soviets to being in one camp (in his “third camp” theory, they were the second). I’ll dig it up if I really need to, but an interesting point of flip-flopping that people usually don’t mention is that he at some point as a Bolshevik argued in favor of what amounts to Blanquism, saying that the dictatorship of the party was for the fostering of democracy (in a separate debate, Stalin opposed any endorsement of a “dictatorship of the party” and I believe that when he was outvoted on this matter, he attempted to resign but this was also rejected). Nonetheless, despite Lenin and indeed even Stalin writing about the problems with bureaucracy, Trotsky gets to be some champion of the notion because of what amounted to sour grapes. However, I will admit that normally his vacillations were not based on rightism, usually they were either being an ultra or muddying reality in a way that is difficult for me to map on to the ideological framing you’re discussing (e.g. lying about the Testament). To be clear, of the possible interpretations that I mentioned in the last comment, I personally believe that Trotsky didn’t believe in anything, he was just saying things at his own convenience. I worry about how one could vacillate from his experiences in Russia to his stance on Spain otherwise, unless I missed the part where he went through and explained why and how he changed his mind.

I believe that there is a reason Lenin said things like:

Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other.

But it’s okay, because Trotsky felt the need to report to us that Lenin once said of him that there was “never a better Bolshevik,” and don’t worry about proof of this being a real statement, much less a meaningful one.

I’m curious about the quote regarding the American government that you are referencing. The correspondences I read had no comment from him on America and were instead all about him being excited to denounce Stalinism while the CPUSA was being decapitated. Idk, it seems to reflect very different priorities, but perhaps your episode was an earlier one.

As someone broadly supportive of Stalin, I think that among Stalin’s contemporaries who he could name, he might consider the majority that way. Tito is an example that people here don’t bring up very often, but he was regarded as a sicko revisionist. I’ve got some friends who have a special interest in the subject, but I personally know basically nothing about it.

I don’t know about Zhu De, but for the Bolsheviks the idea generally wasn’t that they were crypto-fascists, but that they firmly and sometimes by means of conspiracy maintained a reactionary ideology that they tried to wreck the socialist project with, e.g. that class antagonism could be reconciled and class society thereby preserved indefinitely. Other times, it was not that they had such an ideology but that they insisted on enabling people who do. I don’t endorse every accusation made but, even in one of the most extensive cases, Trotsky, the accusation wasn’t that he was a fascist but that he collaborated with fascists for the sake of subversion (which I don’t believe is true in the case of supposedly working with the Axis, though he sure did work with Russian rightists and try to work with the HUAC), whether because he didn’t believe in anything or because he thought he was such a clever boy that he could get a net benefit out of working with fascists.

As for why, well, it makes perfect sense to me why someone who is just somewhat progressive for the time (or even just personally aggrieved) would support the Bolsheviks when the February Revolution failed to produce an end to Russian involvement in WWI. People have all sorts of reasons for supporting the communist revolution without being on the same page as characters like Lenin, as Lenin himself wrote repeatedly about in texts like “Left Wing” Communism and elsewhere, and that should in fact be expected to be a huge proportion of the support.

Trotsky generally is honestly a great proof of how what you’re saying, though you are right it “just seems insane,” is perfectly likely, because beneath the accusations that we agree are probably false was a history of decades of careerism, repugnant ideological contortions, and wrecker behavior. Depending on your view, Solzhenitsyn might be an even greater example, because he was a military officer in the Red Army but had the most abominable political values short of the people who he was fighting in the war.

It’s literally what you’re saying

That doesn’t mean “however they want,” it just means “I don’t know.” You not having access to the basis for what the best answers are does not mean we should endorse the idea that there’s no better or worse approach.

Fair enough

I agree, but there are wars where America is not a significant participant.

Even if we’re taking a slightly goofy approach like this, it might be better to direct hostility to people who are foreign-educated rather than merely knowing English, which in some countries is most people.

You’re just giving up on the idea of there being a correct answer, at complete odds with dialectical materialism

“Aggression” is doing a lot of work there because people always call the other side the aggressor, even when the other side is just acting in its own defense, in which case communists should probably support that side.

Mao argued basically the same thing, and that’s the whole point of “New Democracy” besides the issue of development of relations of production, since China still had heavy feudal elements. That was why Mao supported a temporary alliance with the “patriotic bourgeoisie” against colonial forces, but he was quite clear that you can’t let that circumstance become cemented.

It’s not just a matter of empathy, though you are right that they certainly lack it. It’s the fact that the very nature of their class position demands that they act cruelly or else get out-competed by someone who does, which is a widely unifying principle that is only set aside when a business that can’t compete with its larger equivalents decides to instead cut out a tiny share of the market to appeal specifically to left-liberals who want to have “moral consumption” as part of their lifestyle brand.

This isn’t any sort of real philology on my part, but the class interests of the bourgeoisie put them at odds with the vast majority of humanity, and that remains as long as they have that class position. The broad benefit of society is typically even a detriment to them, as it diminishes the totalizing power over their monopolization of what were once the commons, their ability to inflict social murder. There is only one tolerable kind of bourgeois individual, and that is the traitor to their class interests, and even then the existence of those rogue elements must be used to further the project of the destruction of their class rather than as some insipid anecdote that they “aren’t all bad” and therefore that class antagonism can be removed without removing classes.

And all of this is to serve capital, the organizing principal which dominates the actions of the bourgeoisie whether they like it or not, which itself is served by humans but is not human.

So taken literally, yes, obviously it’s hyperbole, but I don’t think you can identify an element of society for whom it is less hyperbolic than for the bourgeois.

I feel like it could be a joke about Klan robes (which is also meant to look like a ghost, so I guess it’s what you said).

I don’t even understand what you’re insinuating. The DPRK’s goal is to be sanctioned? They wouldn’t be doing things differently if they weren’t sanctioned? You know they violate the sanctions constantly, and often it’s just to do some small amount of normal trade, right?

I don’t like Juche, but the point of it in this context isn’t to avoid trading with countries, and indeed to considers it better to be able to trade with countries. The goal is to be able to survive not being able to trade in the case where that’s the unfortunate reality, something that was only solidified by the experience of the Arduous March. Strategically, it is obviously something they should be maintaining and one of the main reasons they survived.