Make sure you're taking care of yourself Viki. Your comrades care about you. Thank you for being an educated voice in these trying times. Du bist großartig
I think achieving the same goal but by different means would have been a better phrasing but I think that could be from not being a native English speaker.
Yeah, the bulk of what I can gather about trotsky is he had a distinctive possibility of making a martyr out of Nazi Germany to the rest of the west. the Soviet Union was in no state to go liberating/conquering other nations in the 1930s, but they probably could've taken Germany in the economic and political turmoil.
I know 2 trotskyists and one actually writes for a trotskyist newspaper and they caused the group i was in to split because they kept bullying people who disagreed with them mostly the anarchists
This was pretty based. As a Trot I'll acknowledge that if Stalin took a shit Trotsky would have claimed to have sat backwards on the toilet. For your ending people are Trotskyists now because his ideas have become more relevant over time. With the global reach of capitalism and massive alliances of imperialist nations who are all anti-communist the theory of permanent international revolution is more important now than it was in Trotskys day.
opposition to the stalinist method of overt bureaucracy is also really poggers, with an emphasis on the 4th international's popular front rather than the overt soviet control which the 3rd held
I find it strange to hear a self-proclaimed Trotskyist say that the permanent revolution back then wasn't as important, or at least wasn't as important as nowadays. It certainly was extremely important in China 1925-1927, from which Stalin's two-stages theory advocated 'collaboration with the Chinese nationalists' which a little while later caused a massive massacre among Chinese communists and revolutionaries. This heavy blow to the Chinese revolution undermined the support for the Left Opposition in the USSR itself, which enabled Stalin to deal the final blow to the Left Opposition and to drive Trotsky in banishment. It also laid the basis for the split between the Third International and the Chinese communists, which existed de facto already in the '30s, even before Mao became their leader. Had the Permanent Revolution strategy been followed, it is quite likely we would have witnessed the Chinese revolution in the '20s instead of in 1949. This in turn would have invigorated the Left Opposition in the USSR and the Third International.
@@gymcelsocialism Actually the Popular Front (collaboration with bourgeois forces against the fascists) is a Third International thing. The 4th International advocated the "United Front", which advocated unity in action between various working class forces, but without bourgeois elements.
"to have sat backwards on the toilet" This practice is known as "Slatering", an homage to the popular early 1990s American situational comedy "Saved By The Bell", in which a particular character would typically sit on a chair backwards, his legs straddling the seat back. The character's name was A.C. Slater.
11:18 Mao also criticized Stalin and every chair of the CPSU afterward. It's not unique to criticize Stalin, but it is unique to make constructive criticism.
constructive criticism like "The Soviet Union today is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the grand bourgeoisie, a fascist German dictatorship, and a Hitlerite dictatorship. They are a bunch of rascals worse than De Gaulle."
Trotsky did make constructive criticism and till his death he always supported the Soviet Union over its capitalist and fascist enemies. He just pointed out the failures of Stalinism.
Even as a Trotskyist, I don't think Trotsky would have necessarily been better at leading the USSR. The development of the bureaucracy was inevitable based on the material conditions in Russia at the time. Edit: Also yes the ussr was a DWS but I'd rather that than a capitalist one any day.
I personally believe that if Stalin didn't came to power, Bukharin would have been actually a more likely candidate to lead the party, than Trotsky. And Bukharin was basically a "Stalin-lite": he supported socialism in one country, collectivization and industrialization, but was against the political purges.
@@MrNoobomnenie Everyone is against purges until they are sit in the Politburo listening to people saying that they could do better all the time, when the conditions are what they are. /half s
It's funny, cause even though I'm an ML, I kiiiind of agree with the assessment that the USSR was a DWS. It was by no means a classless society, and there was indeed a technocratic/nepotistic party sub-class that formed by the end of the USSR period. I just don't think that means we shouldn't support the USSR in its effort to build socialism, especially against the Imperialist Powers.
Two things: 1. This general narrative of "who was in charge and what would change" falls into the narrative favoured by liberals of the "great men who make history", and while those people certainly influence it, Trotsky was clear in his writings on the more structural problems of the developing USSR that went beyond who was in charge. I really recommend people read at least a little of his most important works where he touches on the topic, as what you know about him is probably a mix of anticommunist, antisemitic and Stalinist propaganda. 2. The idea of one person in charge is a horrible distortion of what Bolshevism was supposed to be about, as Lenin was not "in charge", to give an example. He had influence but only a vote and no way to violently enforce his will upon other party members, like Stalin did afterwards.
@@carlos_herrera Litarally the same argument could be made about Mao, who was against much of the bullshit that happened in his name. This might suggest that beurocratism was a runaway train way before either leaders even noticed it. Luckily, we comrades know this history very well now and would hopefully learn from it without having to experience this all over again.
No. For one thing, Stalin was the editor-in-chief of the party newspaper. For another, he was a surprisingly humble man who held respect for his fellow workers.
Trotsky was also hugely opposed to Stalin’s bureaucratic government style and implementation of economic planning, which Trotsky viewed as imposing demands on the proletariat, rather than representing their needs. Trotsky was also a proponent of using “experts” in fields, especially in military, industry, and economics and even used former Tsarist nobility military officers and bureaucrats to build the Red Army and state systems, which Stalin greatly opposed and would have rather purged
@@NMahon Stalin didn't "hate" the bureaucracy because he was part of it, and that caste gave him support and basis for its position. Trotsky explained this phenomenon in its theory of bonapartism
Stalinists: hate Trotsky because he opposed Stalin to a petty degree and even tried to undermine the Soviet state Anarchists: wtf man you killed Makhnovia :(((
Trotskyism historically: Marxism-Leninism with some hot takes about the role of the peasantry Trotskyism in 2021: basically Marxism-Leninism but furiously trying to differentiate themselves from other forms of Marxism-Leninism with a materialist basis for the distinction
I would disagree with the statement "Trotskyists never achieved anything." There is more to socialism than just taking over the governments of various countries. Obviously, a political revolution is the goal. But there is so much work that needs to be done immediately, and trots are doing that work. Like Trotsky said, the point of the transitional program is not only to work toward revolution but to help workers in the day to day struggle for basic rights. Trotskyists were very important for example in the U.S. labor movement. The Minneapolis Teamsters strike was lead by trots. This doesn't mean trots are reformists. We want to see revolution just as much marxist-leninist do. But we trots are filling a niche that desperately needs filling.
@@camaradamanuel5025 He can call himself that all he wants, his policies don't reflect that beyond his support for a united Latin American economic alliance and allegedly having supported Colombian rebels.
Actually he did say how to do it better... While he was still in congress. Then Stalin booted him out. Then Stalin did what he suggested anyway, but a few years later.
@@tcyr8561 Well, and then Trotsky critisized Stalin for doing all those things anyway. A more funny thing is that Trotsky critisized other people from Stalin's circle for the same "unbolshevik" things - but when Stalin executed them, those suddenly became "the Old Guard" and "true Lenin's bolsheviks".
@@MalleusRegum I dont know what argument you even tried to make here. Critisizing your party comrades while still being friends with them is way worse than murdering said party comrades? Are you delusional?
There is a lot of disinformation on Trotskyism on a whole, so I applaud you for attempting to take it on, however I think there is a lot wrong here saying this as a Trotskyist. Both a misunderstanding of vanguardism as well as how permanent revolution functions as a rejection of the two stage theory. It is on the basis of Russia's combined and uneven development of modern capitalist systems in the major cities while also the very underdeveloped country side that cause Trotsky to conclude that socialist revolution is possible because of the linkage of the Russian state with the international capitalist class, the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of acting as a revolutionary class, and any attempt at a bourgeois revolution could not complete it leaving the peasants angry and this is what permits the workers to act as the leadership of the peasantry and to have a proletarian revolution that completes the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. You also repeat some myths that I have debunked with some of my videos like the comparison between Trotsky and Stalin's industrialization plans. Did Stalin "Steal" Trotsky's Economic Program? ruclips.net/video/pd8oHn7yNog/видео.html A Response To AlternativeHistoryHub's "What if Trotsky Came To Power Instead Of Stalin?" ruclips.net/video/mPR-0lkw8ps/видео.html The scripts for both videos with the full citations(I cite all of my claims as a history channel" can be found here if you would rather read then listen to a video indefenseoftoucans.gitlab.io/
I am a trotskyist and this Video was quite alright. Though trotzkism doesn't say that only members of the communist party can be elected. The first soviet government was a multi-party gov. Only parties (and their members) which had fought against the revolution were disallowed from participating in the elections.
The only thing missing now is his view of the tradition of the Communist Left in Russia with Gavriil Myasnikov, the Dutch-German with Anton Pannekoek, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, the Italian in Bordiga and the French of Marc Chiric, all these groups that emerged during or after the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 opened by the October Revolution.
When I first started properly learning about Marxism I was surprised that Trotsky wasn't very well liked by ML's because at school Animal Farm told me that he was actually a cute little piggy or something Eh liberal education is so fucked
The Transitional Program is worth a read, and it’s a mistake to hand-wave the eventual assassination or imprisonment of every remaining original Bolshevik Party leader. Sometimes “doing the same thing differently” can avoid genocide. Maybe give The Revolution Betrayed a read if you like the Transitional Program. Just saying - this glossed over a very nuanced and complex moment in history and politics and I urge everyone to just read books and decide for themselves what these men stood for.
Just a small correction. You didn’t have to be a member of the communist party to be elected. You could run as an independent and independents consistently won seats throughout the USSR’s existence. The communist party always held a majority though so independents would usually be between 10-20% of the seats depending on the year. P.S. I am a marxist-Leninist and I really like your videos. A lot of other youtubers just insult us but you actually give a fair hearing to our view even if you don’t agree with a lot of it. I think this should be the standard on the left.
1:48 “Trotsky was a strong supporter of Lenin” For a very long time, he was not. Trotsky was not a Bolshevik with Lenin until 1917- for more than a decade he was ideologically much closer to the opposed Menshevik party. The term Leninism, I believe *originated* with Trotsky and his circle way before the revolution- calling Lenin’s politics Leninism to attack it. (I may be confusing this with Rosa Luxemburg, if you have the deets feel free to correct me) His anti “socialism in one country” line went counter to what Lenin believed. Lenin hoped for other countries in Europe such as Germany to follow Russia in revolution, but he had to face reality when for a variety of reasons this simply didn’t happen.
Trotsky was only very briefly associated with the Mensheviks, like 1 or 2 years. He really struck out on his own and developed his own ideas. Where Trotsky developed the Permanent Revolution, in which the revolution would be made by an alliance of workers and peasant, but the workers would constitute ideologically the dominant part and would make a push for socialist take-over, the Mensheviks stayed with the classical Two-Stages theory. Lenin was literally in between those two: recognising the Russian capitalist class would not support a revolution like happened in France 1789, he broke from the two-stages theory and believed the revolution would be made by an alliance of workers and peasants, just like Trotsky believed, only Lenin remained very open to where the revolution would lead to. After the Februari Revolution of 1917, Lenin modified his ideas and developed his theory of the "Uninterrupted Revolution", which actually came very close to the Permanent Revolution of Trotsky.
"Trotsky long ago said that unification (between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks) is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik." -Vladimir Lenin, 1917. "The complete victory of the socialist revolution is unthinkable in one country, but demands the most active co-operation at least of several advanced countries." -Vladimir Lenin, 1918. "The first role occupied by the proletariat of Russia in the world labour movement is explained not by the industrial development of the country-just the opposite by the backwardness of Russia...the Russian proletariat is clearly aware that the necessary condition and fundamental premise of its victory is the united action of the workers of the whole world, or of several countries advanced in capitalist relations." -Vladimir Lenin, 1918. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/ssf/sf08.htm Sorry you don't like the truth. LOL.
I also heard that Trotsky was also very fanatical and annoyed other socialists with his fanaticism, even in his own party. I heard that most of the people in his party didn't like him much. Anyway, good video.
Apparently true yes. He was a fanatical communist, believed strongly in the ideas etc. I think it's important to remove the person from their ideas a lot of the time, theory of permanent revolution has merit some of Trotskys actions were.... Questionable
@@comradefreedom8275 then you'll be well aware of his actions against anarchists which were less than ideal, a compromise could have been reached there which was mutually beneficial. I'm a Trotskyist but I'd support left unity over sectarianism.
@@DITOGaming I understand. Yeah, I heard both Trotsky and Lenin committed acts against anarchists that weren't exactly kind. Though I'm hoping they don't reflect the Leninists and Trotskyists of today.
One correction I would make, when you said, "running a country is probably harder than it looks." that's not even the half of it. Try running a country that is also despised and loathed by essentially everyone on the other side of the iron curtain....That's a lot of hostile people, and some of them have nuclear weapons too, have fun. :D
@@CIMAmotor Yes, but I was referring more to the Russian Civil War and its immediate aftermath where capitalist countries tried to gangbang Soviet Russia.
@@ManiacMayhem7256 Well how about Universal Basic Housing? No other nation had ever done anything like that, and sure there were some serious flaws especially with Stalin's ideas for housing, but it was the first time in history a state organized workers to build housing for the public on a massive scale like that.
I think one of the reasons the 'Evil Communist Dictator' narrative is so pervasive, despite western leaders generally being equally as bad if not worse, is because talking about how evil Stalin was is a way to keep us from talking about whether or it's a government's duty to meet the basic needs of it's citizens. If a nation as poor and backwards as Russia could freely feed and house pretty much everyone what excuse does any other nation have for not doing so? We're meant to focus on the bad things Stalin did so that we don't recognize the good things we could be doing.
@@ManiacMayhem7256 If that we true we'd give the same level of scrutiny to Winston Churchill, but let's face it, capitalists wrote the narrative and they decided to frame it like Stalin was uniquely evil and use the invocation of his name as a *thought terminating cliche* to limit discussion of the policies we could learn from. But the truth is for all the horrid things he did, he did a lot of really based things too, for each bad policy there are good policies we could learn a lot from if we were looking to rework and improve upon what the Soviet Union got right. Establishing a state workforce that doesn't answer to the private sector and is capable of mass infrastructure and construction projects might be worth considering. It might be worth considering that money isn't real and that arbitrary concerns about currency values don't accurately reflect what can actually be done with the resources we have available. It might be worth considering that if the poorest most backwards country in europe could somehow manage to feed and house and educate everyone and provide everyone with health care, any richer and more developed country should be able to do the same. And if we can't do the same, to ask "What's stopping us" We're meant to focus on Stalin being evil so we never ask "What's stopping us from achieving what the Soviet Union achieved with so much less?" If we start asking that we start coming up with answers that scare the people that think they benefit from the current system.
Thank you so much for your work in this field. I came late to communism as I started off as a (USA) two time Reagan voter. To put things mildly, I had a way to go to get to where I am today. I just watched your videos on Marxism, Leninism, and now Trotskyism in sequence and for the first time I think I understand the difference. For a while I've been wondering why some Communist absolutely HATE "Trotskyists" when in fact none of them could tell me what MADE a Trotskyist. I think I get it now. Again, much appreciated and I'll be working my way through your videos. Your one on how the USSR worked was the first time anyone EVER explained that to me. Well done!
Half true with some over simplified parts, like Trotsky didnt oppose Stalins ends but the way he did it. This is wrong because Stalin imposed somethings Trotsky originally wanted like mass industrialization, but with cooperation of peasants which Stalin Ignored with dekulakization.
@@hatinmyselfiscool2879 Yes peasants were anyone who worked the land, the land owners (kulaks) hired workers to work the land but both were peasantry. And no I was saying the opposite of what they said.
Good explanation. One reason for Trotsky's militancy and "vanguardism" is the Russian Civil War--the attempt by the White Russian army and a huge invasion by Western armies (British, U.S., French, German, etc.) to overthrow the Russian Revolution. Trotsky practically created and ran the War single-handedly for 5 years. He was a good organizer and great propagandist. Most of all, he saw the overwhelming power of anti-socialist governments allied against him.
As a Trotskyist myself, this video is good, but Trotsky was more than simply a critique, he was founder and first commander of the Red Army. He led troops in situ, and apparently was competent in this regard.
He was not a commander, he was in charge of organization stuff. Nor was he a founder, as when the Army was actually founded, he was in Brest, negotiating with Germans. At that time he was a commissar of foreign affairs. The "first" guy was actually Nikolai Podvoisky.
I'm a fan of both Trotsky and Stalin to a degree. Both had good points. Both had their mistakes. In the end both were great Communists. And its a shame Leftists fight over it. Let's work and achieve Socialism in our lifetime today. Great video comrade..If I had money I'd donate..
In a perfect world. The party would have been split between a Stalinist and Trotskyist faction. The clashing of ideas would have prevented the state from taking to much power and would have lead to more options for leaders.
It wouldn't, we experienced the aftermath of the Stalinist faction winning control of the mainstream socialist current and purging the Trotskyists from the party, and look where that got the left and international revolution at. Modern China capitulated to the Capitalist system in all but their government structure and some sector of their state-owned economy remain (the only redeeming factor is that they still financially bailout and support remaining Socialist and anti-imperialist countries today and didn't get involved in Russia's fiasco), Cuba is in an almost permanent economic siege by the US (I say almost in the hope that revolution disolves the U.S. or the loss of U.S. power projection in the future forces it to revert to some form of isolationism with the ascension of a rival power like China or of multipolar powers making it anyone's game and the U.S.'s allies not wanting to serve as a U.S. military bases or implement their one-sided, neoliberal, capitalist structure anymore), the Soviet Union is gone, majority of the post-soviet countries have turned sharply to Reaction, Capitalism, and NATO and EU imperialism, Yugoslavia was balkanized by reaction and xenophobia, majority of the third world socialist nations like South Yemen, Ethiopia, Somali, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Afghanistan, and so on are all gone and subject to an impoverished, war-torn, financially and economically colonized, plutocratic version of themselves, or governed by theocratic reactionary forces like the case of Afghanistan. The remaining Stalinist parties have all capitulated to the bourgeois popular front and abandoned revolutionary principles for social democratic betrayal as mainstream "socialist" or "communist" parties or dead as a result of their failed or long-drawn, stagnant guerrilla wars as the case in places like the MLs in Colombia, or the Maoists in India, and the Philippines.
Well... Sadly there is one thing Tritskyism achieved, in my opinion. It managed to antagonise all Capitalist countries to the ideas of Communism as a whole. Like you said, Stalinims aims to build one particular country towards Communism, and then use its prosperity to inspire workers of other industrialised countries to reform their own countries when they see that socialism is achievable and works. And in the meantime, he was willing to not interfere into Capitalist countries and even collaborate with them. And the idea that Comminism is existential incompatible with Capitalism worldwide - which is the basis of animosity of the Cold War - comes from Trotskyi. Also some post-Stalin USSR leaders were also Trotskyists, so it's not like this ideology never had a chance at running a country...
Trotsky and Lenin regarded a revolutionary party as necessary for the worker's revolution in the advanced capitalist country too, not just the low-developed world, and as such the need for the party was not to substitute for lack of industrial working class people. Claiming that is a total misunderstanding of Leninism. Also, Trotsky broke with the third international after if had become a force of counterrevolution instead of a force for revolution. At last, I find it a bit hard to state that Trotskyism never succeeded in anything as Trotsky himself led the October Revolution in Petrograd and built and led the Red Army that saved the USSR from the White counterrevolution.
I have already commented like 5 times on this same video but it's the inaccuracies are significant. The depiction of Leninism is overly simplistic. Trotsky was clear in his works that the existence of other parties should be allowed for a healthy worker's democracy to exist. Also, it was not only Trotsky not liking the way the USSR's bureaucracy implemented its policies. You have to see the appalling (and recurrent) revolutionary failures of China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, among others, to see how the policy of the "Popular Front" gave the revolutionary proletarian up to the reactionaries. Like, I enjoy your vids Viki and have shared a couple of them to my friends but it seems like the one about Lenin and the one about Trotsky are failing on some important areas. I hope we could have some discussion on this because this is not doing the best job possible at informing young new socialists.
I know this post was a year ago but I don't recall Trotsky calling for other parties, instead, he wanted more internal democracy within the Bolshevik party, like the factions that existed before Stalin dismantled the Left Opposition in the 1920s and later the Right Opposition in the 1930s to "preserve party unity" under him and his loyalists' control under the pretense that the two factions were dividing the party and that their existence was somehow against democratic centralism.
@@davidmartinez688 Trotsky was not a party fetishist, and he was totally on board with the abolition of parties during the civil war. But after it, as he says in "Revolution Betrayed", there's no reason to keep the ban on parties, even more so due to the apparent fact expressed by Stalin himself that the proletariat was absolutely victorious and classes were all but abolished.
I would be curious to hear you explain Marxist-De Leonism, based on the theories and movement of Daniel De Leon in the United States, which was rather prominent in the early 1900s. His socialism was a Marxist Syndicalism of sorts.
Commander Trotsky was so cool, but why take things so personally? On "Lenin selected works: volume 3" Trotsky and Bukharin are criticized for thinking that 'Because there was no more Bourgeoisie, the state is now a Worker's State. So he thinks there should be no mediation in the relationship between the Workers state and the working class, and it is wrong. As if the state, being a Worker's one, the Working class would never contradict its Worker State, and would never have its interests violated' Anyway, Stalin was right 😎
Never achieved anything? Lenin and Trotsky hand in hand led the revolution leading to the FIRST socialist/workers state. Trotsky was the leader of the Red Army. You need to seriously "reassess" your interpretation of "achieved" !
He “achieved” getting the USSR into a disastrous war with Poland, alienating everyone around him with his arrogance, and getting an icepick driven into his skull. Stalin saved the Slavic people and got them nuclear weapons, laying the groundwork for the Soviets to go to the stars.
Trotsky or not, I think that would happen because of Lenin, not Trotsky. Well, let's go for Trotskyism's revolutions. Where are they? Serious question, I do not want to use wrong sources.
Yet another great video witch taught me much. Not that you have an inkling to do this but I would love a t-shirt/hoodie with the slogan “Hello Everybody” with your avatar right next to it. 😀
In US leftist politics Trotsky seemed to have represented a more humane communism as opposed to Stalinism. I'm not so sure this is true. Especially in its implementation.
The US would represent anyone not in power in states on their shitlist as better than those in power. That has nothing to do with the material conditions in said states, it's just a propaganda trick to divert sympathies into ineffective channels.
It’s very interesting to see that Marxism is applied differently when observed in practice outside of Europe. It makes total sense that Leninism would develop in Russia because of a lack of industry and therefore would require a vanguard party to speed up the process. I wonder what revolution would look like in societies that are past industrial, worker relations and are now moving towards automation. I almost feel like Marxism will have to be updated for this particular problem in the future.
I truly don't understand the "Permanent Revolution" vs. "Socialism in One Country" debate, as an ML. Stalin and the USSR did not have any control over whether other worker revolutions in Europe and beyond would be successful. Once it was apparent that they largely were not (Post-WWI), the USSR had NO CHOICE but to try and build Socialism by itself. What else was it to do? I genuinely don't understand this Trot argument against the USSR.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, for what I hope to do is show you how there was in fact a great degree of influence and control over other workers revolutions and there was a failure of policy on the part of the Communist Internationale. I'm going to paste some text and a link here and I hope you as a proper marxist engage with the text instead of dismissing in on preconceived notions: "‘Radek and Smilga obstinately defended the subordination of the Chinese Communist Party to the bourgeois Kuomintang, not only up to Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’etat but also afterwards. Preobrazhensky mumbled something inarticulate, as he always does when political questions are involved. A remarkable fact: all those in the ranks of the Opposition who defended the subordination of the Communist Party to the Kuomintang turned out to be capitulators. Not a single Oppositionist who remained true to his banner bears this mark, which is a mark of notorious shame. Three-quarters of a century after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto, a quarter of a century after the founding of the party of the Bolsheviks, these ill-starred “Marxists” considered it possible to defend the keeping of the Communists in the cage of the Kuomintang! In his answer to my charges, Radek already then, just as in his letter of repentence today, tried to frighten us with the “isolation” of the proletariat from the peasantry in the event of the Communist Party’s withdrawing from the bourgeois Kuomintang. Shortly before that, Radek called the Canton government a peasants’ and workers’ government and thereby helped Stalin to disguise the subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. With what are these shameful deeds, the consequences of this blindness, this stupidity, this betrayal of Marxism, to be covered? With what, indeed! With an indictment of the permanent revolution!" www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr09.htm
@@Dsonsee thanks for the link. I knew about this aspect of the Chinese Revolution, how the Soviets kept the nascent CPC in check from taking on the Kuomintang, but I’m not sure how this connects to Trotskyism and Socialism in One Country. This shows one instance of Soviet influence in a (ultimately successful) revolution, but doesn’t show how the USSR had control over whether full world revolution would happen, as envisioned by Trotsky. I’ve yet to read the link, though, so I’ll see what it says.
Viki, the person in the painting at 0:17 is Yakov Sverdlov, the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee. That painting was created in in the 30s at a period when Trotsky's image was completely removed from the public image. This is the second time you've making this mistake even though I explained it in a previous video. Good video nonetheless.
Trotsty's thumbnail looks as though it's a younger version of him with sideburns, a small beard and with an agape mouth, almost as though he's saying "That's what happens to me when I die?!" Don't know if anyone else sees it, and to those who can't unsee it after having it pointed out, sorry not sorry 😁 Nice and informative as always 😀
Trotsky certainly knew how to run an army. The IV International only became a neccesity after Stalin (dictatorically leading Komintern) had led the German working class - the strongest and most wellorganised in the world at the time - into the shameful defeat by the Nazis. The Austro-Marxist at least put up a heroic military defence in the workingclass areas of Wienna before being crushed. The stalinists i Germany gave up without a fight, claiming that "after Hitler - it is our turn".
4:50- amazing that even Leninism apparently had to acknowledge capitalism as the best means for development of industry, and that socialism would have to parasitize itself off of that success.
@Bobby Johnson and socialism is even worse, because it creates a parasitic government to do the same thing, and what's more, strips its subjects of choice in the matter. You have over a century of socialism's empirical failure to reference, mate. Grow up.
3:20 "form a Council, called a Soviet" You do realise that "Soviet" is literally just a Russian word for Council, don't you? So "Council called Soviet" literally means "Council called Council" if you abandon unnecessary language barriers. I mean... It is understandable that during the Cold War, American sources would use transliteration, rather than translations of some words to make Communist ideas more confusing, misterious and thus scary. But why do people, who seem to be genuinely interested in learning about the stuff keep up this tradition?
Part 1 Why write a long reply to 3-month old vid? Meh, I guess I'm bored. :P So full disclosure, I was a Trotskyist active in a European Trotskyist party for about 7-years, before moving away from accepting what I now see as a sectarian aproch to Marxism of swallowing whole a regid set of ideological conceptions and formulas and declaring all other strands of Marxism as 'revisionist' etc. I now consider myself a Marxist and accept a variety of different Marxist ideas from different Marxist tendencies, seeing some valuable contributions in Trotsky's ideas and others that are complete junk. Point is, my 7-years of Trotskyism means I am well versed in his ideas and actions so, without necessarily endorsing Trotsky at every time, I feel I can point out some factual problems with your video. I'll just comment on the The Two Stage Theory and Permanent Revolution and only if there is interest come back on other points. You were hopelessly muddled on this question. The theory of permanent revolution is about the class forces involved in the actual revolution itself and relates to countries where the bourgeoisie have not yet gained political power or where they bourgeoisie are in political power, the country lacks bourgeois-democracy. The two stage theory was a right-wing (within Marxism) conception of revolution in a feudal country based on a dogmatic crystallization of the lessons of the French revolution of 1789 and ignoring Marx's lesser known writings of the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In the French revolution (and before that the English revolution of 1649) the emerging bourgeoisie, as a radical, revolutionary class struggling agonist feudalism led the revolution dragging behind it the peasantry and the embryonic proletariat, the sans-culottes (ruffly translate as urban poor.) However by the time of the 1848 revolution the proletariat and began to consolidate itself as a class with it's own emerging class interests that were in direct opposition to the bourgeoisie. This meant that, while at the start of the revolution and even in the Communist Manifesto itself, Marx argued for the proletariat to support the bourgeoisie in their struggle for power against feudal absolutism, expecting a repeat of the French revolution, what happened was that, horrified by the movement of the proletariat moving into revolutionary action with their own anti-capitalist and crude, socialistic demands, the bourgeoisie betrayed the revolution and ran into the arms of the feudal, absolutist state to protect them for the workers. This process was clearly outlined in detail by Marx in his political writings on the aftermath of the 1848 revolution with Marx stating that in the next revolution against the feudal, absolutist state in Europe, the bourgeois would again be compelled by their class interests to try and detail it and form another rotten compromise so the working-class would have struggle to establish a bourgeois republic against the bourgeois themselves! As I said, it was the fact that these various articles by Marx were not well known combined with the enduring popularity of the, frankly outdated in places, Communist Manifesto that prevented these lessons being understood by the majority of the late 20th and early 20th century Marxist movement.
Part 2 Now to be clear this view of Marx was NOT the theory of permanent revolution. This position of Marx was for the complete political and organisational independence of the working-class to establish a bourgeois republic, not socialism or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx's, correct in my view given he was wiring in the mid 19th century, is the proletariat, given it's still small size numerically and weak social weight would be too weak to hold on to power after leading the revolution and end up giving way to the bourgeois who would consolidate their rule. This view of Marx was the starting point for Lenin's own theoretical conception of the coming revolution in Russia, the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and is essentially Marx's view's but slightly adapted to Russian conditions and the massive development of capitalism on a world stage since the middle of the 19th century. Studies of the development of Lenin's ideas agree that Lenin was able to become acquainted with Marx's views thanks to the republication in 1895 of Marx's writings on France during and just after the revolution of 1848 in the book Class Struggles in France that had a new introduction by Engels where he stressed it's radical content. As a side note, the new introduction so scared the increasingly conservative leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, who were already starting to move away from socialism towards what would later be called social-democracy, that is a commitment to welfare capitalism (when the market can afford it!) that they censored his introduction, such was a the pitiful state of 'official Marxism' at that stage. So what was Lenin's view and how exactly did it differ from Marx? Lenin recognized that the social weight of the peasantry dwarfed that of the other European countries and so understood the greater importance of a strong alliance between the two classes. Also, unlike Marx, with Lenin convinced that by the early 20th century, socialist revolution in the advanced European countries was just around the corner, this worker-peasant alliance revolutionary regime could hold on to power for a longer period of time, enacting a very radical bourgeois republic that would carry out what we would later call social-democratic polices decades before such governments came to power and did so in the aftermath of the second world war. This radical regime, he argued, could hold power until socialism was achieved in the economically advanced countries, where with their economic aid, technical support etc, Russia could then start moving towards socialism. If the revolution in Europe was delayed however, this regime would eventually be crushed by internal reaction as the worker-peasant alliance would eventually break down as peasantry, having gained control of their land in the revolution, being the basis for the alliance, would by the reactionary class interests, start supporting the creative of a large scale agricultural capitalist-class that with the backing of the peasantry would crush the workers. So what about Trotsky and the theory of permanent revolution? In his books 1905 and The Permanent Revolution he concedes the radical and revolutionary aspects of Lenin's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry compared to the stages theory of revolution, that in practice means trying to 'hold back' the working-class as as to not 'scare' the bourgeois from leading the revolution. This is nonsense as they are fully understand their class interests and can't be fooled and frankly once the working-class begins to become conscious of itself and its class interests during a revolution can't be held back anyway, those Marxists who try, like the Menchiviks during the Russian revolution who held to the two stage aproch are ignored and simply left behind. The problem as Trotsky saw it was that, firstly, while accepting the need for the worker-peasant alliance, Lenin underestimated the ability of the peasantry to act as a cohesive, united class during a revolution. Rather the peasantry always falls under the domination of the working-class or the capitalist-class so Lenin needed to prepare the working-class, via the vanguard, to actively lead the coming revolution. This a relatively minor point and could be worked out in practice during the revolutionary process, the others were more serious. Secondly, in the working-class coming to power when, although socially weak in Russia, the working-class had been strengthened globally along with the recent heavily concentration of new factories sharping class-consciousness further, rather than restrain itself to a radical capitalist republic, as Lenin expected, in finding itself in power, the capitalist state effectively smashed with nothing to hold the workers back, the working-class would move to attempting to implement socialist measures, even if in reality the economy was not developed enough for them.
Part 3 (final) This prediction of Trotsky was born out in the October revolution where, after the Soviets took power, workers, seeing their government in power and the police and army smashed, moved to rapidly take over factories, placing them under workers control and demanding the government nationalism them. This resulted in chaos and confusion for the first several months of the revolution as time and time again Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders, stuck in the theoretical conceptions of Lenin's theory, attempted to oppose the workers taking over industry. However with the Soviets ratifying these decisions and the only cohesive force on the ground they had at that state, the Red Guards workers militias who carried out the revolution refusing to carry out their orders of arresting the workers and handing ownership back to the former owners. To be clear I'm not an anarchist saying that Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders were not genuine revolutionaries, socialists, communists etc. Rather they were imprisoned by a false theoretical conception of the revolution that informed their actions. Lenin pointed out that these socialist measures the workers were carrying out would only result in a full scale capital strike by the Russian capitalists, horrified at seeing their property seized, resulting in the economy being paralyzed. Trotsky and the small left-communist faction of the party pointed out in reply that even if the party had the ability to hold back the workers, which it didn't, a strike of capital would happen regardless. The idea that the capitalist in Russia would be content and happy to invest, develop the productive forces with the understanding that, the moment socialist revolution break out in Europe, all their wealth and property would be taken from them, is nonsense. Over time, reality imposed itself on the Bolshevik leaders and with the outbreak of the civil war, with the entire Russian bourgeois supporting the white's, the idea of 'progressive capitalist development' seemed increasingly ridicules and so the socialist measures the workers were carrying out were ratified and incorporated into what was to became known as war communism. This is not to say Trotsky beloved that Russia could advance to socialism on it's own using state planning measures, like Lenin, he also believed that in the long run, internal reaction would crush the revolution without revolution in the economically advanced countries.
In Russia, simply practice had born out Trotsky's correct theoretical analysis and perspective over Lenin's, by the early 20's there was not even a debate. As a consequence, 1905, the book where Trotsky outlines his theory, was published for the first time in Russia (it previously being published in Germany) in 1922 with the full support of the party leadership to assist the party membership in understanding the development of the Russian revolution. The 'controversy' of Trotsy's permanent revolution vs Lenin's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was artificially reignited in the mid 20's as part of the power struggle of the Kamaov-Ziminiof-Stalin triumvirate against Trotsky where previous disagreements between Trotsky and Lenin that had been settled, some in Trotsky's favor like this one, others like questions of the vanguard party in Lenin's, were brought up as part of a political campaign to discredit Trotsky and lean on the increasingly disturbing cult of personality around Lenin that was forming. The consequences for the international revolution were disastrous! Had the party only imposed Lenin's theory on the 3rd intentional, that would not have been so bad. Again as Trotsky himself admitted it was a revolutionary theory and in spite of the chaos and confusion it caused in the early months the point is that it did allow the revolution to take place. However what was imposed on the intentional was not Lenin's theory by the stagiest theory, the one held by the Menchiviks and Lenin argued against for over a decade. This resulted in the defeat of the Chinese revolution of the late 20's where the Comintern instructed the Chinese Communist Party to subordinate itself to the nationalist Kuomintang who, being seen as the 'party of the bourgeois' was, under stagiest theory, meant to lead the revolution with the workers acting as cheerleaders to establish bourgeois republic with bourgeois-democratic rights. Instead the Kuomintang massacred the Chinese CP killing thousands and leading to the Kuomintang forming a brutal military dictatorship. This farce was repeated many times throughout the 20th century, with time and again revolutions being crushed every time a communist party adopted the stagiest method during a revolution.
The difference between Trotskyism and Stalinism is that Stalinism was and is counter-revolutionary while Trotskyism represented socialism and that is shown in what Trotsky laid out in the Revolution Betrayed became true. The Stalinists became the new capitalist oligarchy that now rules Russia.
That trotsky in the thumbnail must ve had his photo taken after he got the pickaxe
I'm thinking more mid-piclaxe Trotsky when he realises he was just a counter revolutionary
Wrong weapon.
To be fair he always looks like that.
Make sure you're taking care of yourself Viki. Your comrades care about you. Thank you for being an educated voice in these trying times. Du bist großartig
I just wanted to second this.
I third this... =oD
Ich vierte das
uufff nummer fünf
I cringed on this.
ahh yes Viki, the Anarcho-Tankie Internationalist of the 7th variant
The 4th internationale, posadism.
💥🐬👽🛰️🚀
Doing "the exact same thing but in a different way" is, in fact, doing something different.
So much for "bad news in a good way".
I think achieving the same goal but by different means would have been a better phrasing but I think that could be from not being a native English speaker.
Yeah, the bulk of what I can gather about trotsky is he had a distinctive possibility of making a martyr out of Nazi Germany to the rest of the west. the Soviet Union was in no state to go liberating/conquering other nations in the 1930s, but they probably could've taken Germany in the economic and political turmoil.
@@grayson0916 👌
You can shoot someone in the head or chest, either way it usually falls under the umbrella of shooting someone, often to death
Memes about trotsky:
-icepick
-newspaper
-split
also invading every country that you dislike but it's socialist
-letter to wife
Nothing about killing anarchists? Oh well
I know 2 trotskyists and one actually writes for a trotskyist newspaper and they caused the group i was in to split because they kept bullying people who disagreed with them mostly the anarchists
@@kevinhuang8916 invading like the white army
This was pretty based.
As a Trot I'll acknowledge that if Stalin took a shit Trotsky would have claimed to have sat backwards on the toilet.
For your ending people are Trotskyists now because his ideas have become more relevant over time. With the global reach of capitalism and massive alliances of imperialist nations who are all anti-communist the theory of permanent international revolution is more important now than it was in Trotskys day.
opposition to the stalinist method of overt bureaucracy is also really poggers, with an emphasis on the 4th international's popular front rather than the overt soviet control which the 3rd held
@@gymcelsocialism every Trotskyist party or org in my experience follows the 4th international method.
I find it strange to hear a self-proclaimed Trotskyist say that the permanent revolution back then wasn't as important, or at least wasn't as important as nowadays. It certainly was extremely important in China 1925-1927, from which Stalin's two-stages theory advocated 'collaboration with the Chinese nationalists' which a little while later caused a massive massacre among Chinese communists and revolutionaries. This heavy blow to the Chinese revolution undermined the support for the Left Opposition in the USSR itself, which enabled Stalin to deal the final blow to the Left Opposition and to drive Trotsky in banishment. It also laid the basis for the split between the Third International and the Chinese communists, which existed de facto already in the '30s, even before Mao became their leader. Had the Permanent Revolution strategy been followed, it is quite likely we would have witnessed the Chinese revolution in the '20s instead of in 1949. This in turn would have invigorated the Left Opposition in the USSR and the Third International.
@@gymcelsocialism Actually the Popular Front (collaboration with bourgeois forces against the fascists) is a Third International thing. The 4th International advocated the "United Front", which advocated unity in action between various working class forces, but without bourgeois elements.
"to have sat backwards on the toilet"
This practice is known as "Slatering", an homage to the popular early 1990s American situational comedy "Saved By The Bell", in which a particular character would typically sit on a chair backwards, his legs straddling the seat back. The character's name was A.C. Slater.
Half the comments are “something serious”
The other half are “hee hee icepick go brrr”
11:18 Mao also criticized Stalin and every chair of the CPSU afterward. It's not unique to criticize Stalin, but it is unique to make constructive criticism.
constructive criticism like
"The Soviet Union today is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the grand bourgeoisie, a fascist German dictatorship, and a Hitlerite dictatorship. They are a bunch of rascals worse than De Gaulle."
@@deletemymind565 sounds like old timey speak for "communists and nazis are literally the same"
@@Hardcore_Ant exactly. mao was really cringe
@@deletemymind565 I'm not claiming mao's perfect, but there's alot to learn from maoist criticisms of the soviet union.
Trotsky did make constructive criticism and till his death he always supported the Soviet Union over its capitalist and fascist enemies. He just pointed out the failures of Stalinism.
Even as a Trotskyist, I don't think Trotsky would have necessarily been better at leading the USSR. The development of the bureaucracy was inevitable based on the material conditions in Russia at the time.
Edit: Also yes the ussr was a DWS but I'd rather that than a capitalist one any day.
I personally believe that if Stalin didn't came to power, Bukharin would have been actually a more likely candidate to lead the party, than Trotsky. And Bukharin was basically a "Stalin-lite": he supported socialism in one country, collectivization and industrialization, but was against the political purges.
@@MrNoobomnenie
Everyone is against purges until they are sit in the Politburo listening to people saying that they could do better all the time, when the conditions are what they are. /half s
It's funny, cause even though I'm an ML, I kiiiind of agree with the assessment that the USSR was a DWS. It was by no means a classless society, and there was indeed a technocratic/nepotistic party sub-class that formed by the end of the USSR period. I just don't think that means we shouldn't support the USSR in its effort to build socialism, especially against the Imperialist Powers.
What's a DWS?
@@sameccleston8673 degenerated workers state, what trots call the USSR or other actually existing socialism.
Two things:
1. This general narrative of "who was in charge and what would change" falls into the narrative favoured by liberals of the "great men who make history", and while those people certainly influence it, Trotsky was clear in his writings on the more structural problems of the developing USSR that went beyond who was in charge. I really recommend people read at least a little of his most important works where he touches on the topic, as what you know about him is probably a mix of anticommunist, antisemitic and Stalinist propaganda.
2. The idea of one person in charge is a horrible distortion of what Bolshevism was supposed to be about, as Lenin was not "in charge", to give an example. He had influence but only a vote and no way to violently enforce his will upon other party members, like Stalin did afterwards.
Exactly Comrade
How about all the times Stalin supposedly tried to resign, his objections to the cult of personality, etc.
@@carlos_herrera Litarally the same argument could be made about Mao, who was against much of the bullshit that happened in his name. This might suggest that beurocratism was a runaway train way before either leaders even noticed it. Luckily, we comrades know this history very well now and would hopefully learn from it without having to experience this all over again.
What specific works of Trotsky point to this?
@@private2809 Try "Revolution Betrayed". But it's also scattered here and there in many works
“SHUT THE FUCK UP,
N E W S P A P E R S A L E S M A N”-Stalin probably
No. For one thing, Stalin was the editor-in-chief of the party newspaper. For another, he was a surprisingly humble man who held respect for his fellow workers.
Comrade Stalin would never disrespect a Newspaper salesman or something like that
trotskyists: * furiously typing 900 word comment *
marxist-leninists: hehe ice pick ⛏
Hehe ice pick
Hehe ice pick
**stalinists**
@@Paloma73013 you're right there bud!
@@christopherbolshevik6395 nxnxnxn yeah, leninist is not same thing.
I am named after him.
That's actually quite cool!
Based
Check out my cool new pick axe
@@gabrieljames7998 Check out this dude's original meme, guys, he did the funny let's laugh at it
I feel for you...
Trotsky was also hugely opposed to Stalin’s bureaucratic government style and implementation of economic planning, which Trotsky viewed as imposing demands on the proletariat, rather than representing their needs.
Trotsky was also a proponent of using “experts” in fields, especially in military, industry, and economics and even used former Tsarist nobility military officers and bureaucrats to build the Red Army and state systems, which Stalin greatly opposed and would have rather purged
Tbf Stalin also hated the bureaucracy, it had in many ways become bigger than him and he never solved that issue in his lifetime
@@NMahon Stalin didn't "hate" the bureaucracy because he was part of it, and that caste gave him support and basis for its position. Trotsky explained this phenomenon in its theory of bonapartism
No he wasn't, that's why he helped destroy soviet democracy in the worker councils of both Russia and the free territories of Ukraine
Stalinists: hate Trotsky because he opposed Stalin to a petty degree and even tried to undermine the Soviet state
Anarchists: wtf man you killed Makhnovia :(((
Dude, thank you for introducing me to this, I never knew about Makhnovia and I think I'm simultaneously in love with it and heartbroken it's gone.
I hate and depise Trotsky because of that.
8@@zhitchcresttail3387
The fall of Makhnovia was truly a disaster for humanity
ICEPICK
BOTTOM TEXT
I'm crying
@@vezja me too :(
What about newspapers...
lmao
⛏⛏
Trotskyism historically: Marxism-Leninism with some hot takes about the role of the peasantry
Trotskyism in 2021: basically Marxism-Leninism but furiously trying to differentiate themselves from other forms of Marxism-Leninism with a materialist basis for the distinction
That LGBT-BLM-ANTIFA and neo-liberal (neo-commie) flag poster really speaks volumes... Saving it for archival purposes.
I would disagree with the statement "Trotskyists never achieved anything." There is more to socialism than just taking over the governments of various countries. Obviously, a political revolution is the goal. But there is so much work that needs to be done immediately, and trots are doing that work. Like Trotsky said, the point of the transitional program is not only to work toward revolution but to help workers in the day to day struggle for basic rights. Trotskyists were very important for example in the U.S. labor movement. The Minneapolis Teamsters strike was lead by trots. This doesn't mean trots are reformists. We want to see revolution just as much marxist-leninist do. But we trots are filling a niche that desperately needs filling.
Hugo Chávez claimed to be a trotskyist🤣
@@camaradamanuel5025 He can call himself that all he wants, his policies don't reflect that beyond his support for a united Latin American economic alliance and allegedly having supported Colombian rebels.
@@camaradamanuel5025 And North Korea claims to be democratic. Your point?
If only you leftists worked together, maybe the left would be successful somewhere.
Trotsky: i would do it better.
Stalin: alright, what's your plan?
Trotsky: well, i would do it better.
Actually he did say how to do it better... While he was still in congress. Then Stalin booted him out. Then Stalin did what he suggested anyway, but a few years later.
@@tcyr8561 his "solutions" weren't much different from stalin's.
@@tcyr8561 Well, and then Trotsky critisized Stalin for doing all those things anyway.
A more funny thing is that Trotsky critisized other people from Stalin's circle for the same "unbolshevik" things - but when Stalin executed them, those suddenly became "the Old Guard" and "true Lenin's bolsheviks".
@@MalleusRegum I dont know what argument you even tried to make here. Critisizing your party comrades while still being friends with them is way worse than murdering said party comrades? Are you delusional?
@@smalbeaste They were not murdered. They were sentenced to death according to the Soviet law during public trials.
This topic was a nICE pick
Congrats on 33k subs only need to mulitply this number by 3 to get 100K ! Go viki
just in time to influence the 2024 US election with socialist ideas
:)
I've been wondering about this
Me too
Me three
thank youuuuu i've been needing an explanation of this
Holy shit I was trying to search up if you've made a video on trotskyism a few days ago. Sad to see you hadn't. Looks like you answered my prayers
There is a lot of disinformation on Trotskyism on a whole, so I applaud you for attempting to take it on, however I think there is a lot wrong here saying this as a Trotskyist. Both a misunderstanding of vanguardism as well as how permanent revolution functions as a rejection of the two stage theory. It is on the basis of Russia's combined and uneven development of modern capitalist systems in the major cities while also the very underdeveloped country side that cause Trotsky to conclude that socialist revolution is possible because of the linkage of the Russian state with the international capitalist class, the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of acting as a revolutionary class, and any attempt at a bourgeois revolution could not complete it leaving the peasants angry and this is what permits the workers to act as the leadership of the peasantry and to have a proletarian revolution that completes the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.
You also repeat some myths that I have debunked with some of my videos like the comparison between Trotsky and Stalin's industrialization plans.
Did Stalin "Steal" Trotsky's Economic Program?
ruclips.net/video/pd8oHn7yNog/видео.html
A Response To AlternativeHistoryHub's "What if Trotsky Came To Power Instead Of Stalin?"
ruclips.net/video/mPR-0lkw8ps/видео.html
The scripts for both videos with the full citations(I cite all of my claims as a history channel" can be found here if you would rather read then listen to a video
indefenseoftoucans.gitlab.io/
This is one comment that I think should be pinned. Thanks for your valuable work and research, comrade fellow bird
Did you actually link an Alternativehistory Hub video as an argument?
@@Dsonsee it really shouldn't
@@thechekist2044 No I didn't I did a long form response video I did to althistoryhub that touches on some of the same stuff Vikki brought up.
@@thechekist2044 You didn't read his comment, he was referring ppl to his own videos that touch and expand on similar ideas.
I am a trotskyist and this Video was quite alright. Though trotzkism doesn't say that only members of the communist party can be elected. The first soviet government was a multi-party gov. Only parties (and their members) which had fought against the revolution were disallowed from participating in the elections.
The only thing missing now is his view of the tradition of the Communist Left in Russia with Gavriil Myasnikov, the Dutch-German with Anton Pannekoek, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, the Italian in Bordiga and the French of Marc Chiric, all these groups that emerged during or after the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 opened by the October Revolution.
When I first started properly learning about Marxism I was surprised that Trotsky wasn't very well liked by ML's because at school Animal Farm told me that he was actually a cute little piggy or something
Eh liberal education is so fucked
the more you think about it the more liberal education is cRiNgE
Animal Farm is cringe
@@ManiacMayhem7256 1984 was an excellent one, yes
The school wants you to read Animal Farm so you don't become a socialist, but they fail to tell you that Orwell was literally a socialist.
@@ghostninja5035 And animal farm literally says the Bolshevik revolution was good. It's just that due to Stalin it went bad.
Great video, I personally enjoyed it. What's next?
⛏
Finally, someone explains it instead of just bashing it and moving on.
The Transitional Program is worth a read, and it’s a mistake to hand-wave the eventual assassination or imprisonment of every remaining original Bolshevik Party leader. Sometimes “doing the same thing differently” can avoid genocide. Maybe give The Revolution Betrayed a read if you like the Transitional Program. Just saying - this glossed over a very nuanced and complex moment in history and politics and I urge everyone to just read books and decide for themselves what these men stood for.
As you implied, Trotskyism is essentially Leninism without Stalinist censorship (used to justify state oppression as socialist).
Just a small correction. You didn’t have to be a member of the communist party to be elected.
You could run as an independent and independents consistently won seats throughout the USSR’s existence. The communist party always held a majority though so independents would usually be between 10-20% of the seats depending on the year.
P.S. I am a marxist-Leninist and I really like your videos. A lot of other youtubers just insult us but you actually give a fair hearing to our view even if you don’t agree with a lot of it.
I think this should be the standard on the left.
1:48 “Trotsky was a strong supporter of Lenin”
For a very long time, he was not. Trotsky was not a Bolshevik with Lenin until 1917- for more than a decade he was ideologically much closer to the opposed Menshevik party. The term Leninism, I believe *originated* with Trotsky and his circle way before the revolution- calling Lenin’s politics Leninism to attack it. (I may be confusing this with Rosa Luxemburg, if you have the deets feel free to correct me)
His anti “socialism in one country” line went counter to what Lenin believed. Lenin hoped for other countries in Europe such as Germany to follow Russia in revolution, but he had to face reality when for a variety of reasons this simply didn’t happen.
Trotsky was only very briefly associated with the Mensheviks, like 1 or 2 years. He really struck out on his own and developed his own ideas. Where Trotsky developed the Permanent Revolution, in which the revolution would be made by an alliance of workers and peasant, but the workers would constitute ideologically the dominant part and would make a push for socialist take-over, the Mensheviks stayed with the classical Two-Stages theory. Lenin was literally in between those two: recognising the Russian capitalist class would not support a revolution like happened in France 1789, he broke from the two-stages theory and believed the revolution would be made by an alliance of workers and peasants, just like Trotsky believed, only Lenin remained very open to where the revolution would lead to. After the Februari Revolution of 1917, Lenin modified his ideas and developed his theory of the "Uninterrupted Revolution", which actually came very close to the Permanent Revolution of Trotsky.
"Trotsky long ago said that unification (between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks) is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik."
-Vladimir Lenin, 1917.
"The complete victory of the socialist revolution is unthinkable in one country, but demands the most active co-operation at least of several advanced countries."
-Vladimir Lenin, 1918.
"The first role occupied by the proletariat of Russia in the world labour movement is explained not by the industrial development of the country-just the opposite by the backwardness of Russia...the Russian proletariat is clearly aware that the necessary condition and fundamental premise of its victory is the united action of the workers of the whole world, or of several countries advanced in capitalist relations."
-Vladimir Lenin, 1918.
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/ssf/sf08.htm
Sorry you don't like the truth. LOL.
I also heard that Trotsky was also very fanatical and annoyed other socialists with his fanaticism, even in his own party. I heard that most of the people in his party didn't like him much.
Anyway, good video.
Apparently true yes. He was a fanatical communist, believed strongly in the ideas etc.
I think it's important to remove the person from their ideas a lot of the time, theory of permanent revolution has merit some of Trotskys actions were.... Questionable
@@DITOGaming I'm not surprised. Well, I'm an anarchist.
@@comradefreedom8275 then you'll be well aware of his actions against anarchists which were less than ideal, a compromise could have been reached there which was mutually beneficial. I'm a Trotskyist but I'd support left unity over sectarianism.
@@DITOGaming I understand. Yeah, I heard both Trotsky and Lenin committed acts against anarchists that weren't exactly kind. Though I'm hoping they don't reflect the Leninists and Trotskyists of today.
@@comradefreedom8275 they don't as far as I've seen. We've all got the same goals just different ways of achieving them.
One correction I would make, when you said, "running a country is probably harder than it looks." that's not even the half of it. Try running a country that is also despised and loathed by essentially everyone on the other side of the iron curtain....That's a lot of hostile people, and some of them have nuclear weapons too, have fun. :D
The country was also despised by others on their side of the iron curtain too.
@@CIMAmotor Yes, but I was referring more to the Russian Civil War and its immediate aftermath where capitalist countries tried to gangbang Soviet Russia.
This is the first of your videos I have watched. I really enjoyed your delivery.
All my favorite Lenin quotes express his contempt for Trotsky lol
@@ManiacMayhem7256 Yeah but everyone knows about those and even self proclaimed Stalinists are usually more aware of his flaws than liberals.
@@ManiacMayhem7256 Well how about Universal Basic Housing? No other nation had ever done anything like that, and sure there were some serious flaws especially with Stalin's ideas for housing, but it was the first time in history a state organized workers to build housing for the public on a massive scale like that.
I think one of the reasons the 'Evil Communist Dictator' narrative is so pervasive, despite western leaders generally being equally as bad if not worse, is because talking about how evil Stalin was is a way to keep us from talking about whether or it's a government's duty to meet the basic needs of it's citizens.
If a nation as poor and backwards as Russia could freely feed and house pretty much everyone what excuse does any other nation have for not doing so? We're meant to focus on the bad things Stalin did so that we don't recognize the good things we could be doing.
@@ManiacMayhem7256 If that we true we'd give the same level of scrutiny to Winston Churchill, but let's face it, capitalists wrote the narrative and they decided to frame it like Stalin was uniquely evil and use the invocation of his name as a *thought terminating cliche* to limit discussion of the policies we could learn from.
But the truth is for all the horrid things he did, he did a lot of really based things too, for each bad policy there are good policies we could learn a lot from if we were looking to rework and improve upon what the Soviet Union got right.
Establishing a state workforce that doesn't answer to the private sector and is capable of mass infrastructure and construction projects might be worth considering. It might be worth considering that money isn't real and that arbitrary concerns about currency values don't accurately reflect what can actually be done with the resources we have available.
It might be worth considering that if the poorest most backwards country in europe could somehow manage to feed and house and educate everyone and provide everyone with health care, any richer and more developed country should be able to do the same. And if we can't do the same, to ask "What's stopping us"
We're meant to focus on Stalin being evil so we never ask "What's stopping us from achieving what the Soviet Union achieved with so much less?" If we start asking that we start coming up with answers that scare the people that think they benefit from the current system.
Thumbs up for the treatment of the history. It's about the right length for my span of attention...
gooood one comrade. i always forget why there is a split! haha
i think trotskyists and stalinists should just kiss and hug.
I’m a trot and I literally agree. We’re more similar than we’d like to admit I think.
No fauk stalinism and fauk stalinists
Thank you so much for your work in this field. I came late to communism as I started off as a (USA) two time Reagan voter. To put things mildly, I had a way to go to get to where I am today. I just watched your videos on Marxism, Leninism, and now Trotskyism in sequence and for the first time I think I understand the difference.
For a while I've been wondering why some Communist absolutely HATE "Trotskyists" when in fact none of them could tell me what MADE a Trotskyist. I think I get it now.
Again, much appreciated and I'll be working my way through your videos. Your one on how the USSR worked was the first time anyone EVER explained that to me. Well done!
What would you consider yourself now?
"I'm gonna do my own Internationale!"
The internet one
With blackjack and hookers!
@@danielzylberkan1587 in fact, forget about the Internationale!
EDIT: and the blackjack!
one for the algorithm. love you viki, just subbed on patreon and happy to contribute to great content like this!
Half true with some over simplified parts, like Trotsky didnt oppose Stalins ends but the way he did it. This is wrong because Stalin imposed somethings Trotsky originally wanted like mass industrialization, but with cooperation of peasants which Stalin Ignored with dekulakization.
also the 3rd international summation and the 4th international summaries are completely wrong, this is basically a Wikipedia analysis of Trotskyism
Rich farmers that own land are peasants? You gotta explain that to me. Also, that‘s literally what he said.
@@hatinmyselfiscool2879 Yes peasants were anyone who worked the land, the land owners (kulaks) hired workers to work the land but both were peasantry. And no I was saying the opposite of what they said.
@@slenin8088 i‘m pretty sure he mentioned multiple times in the video that stalin and trotsky‘s goals and programs were very similar.
@@hatinmyselfiscool2879 and thats what I'm saying is wrong lol
"My videos don't have ads because I don't like ads"
Absolutely world class ideals
Good explanation. One reason for Trotsky's militancy and "vanguardism" is the Russian Civil War--the attempt by the White Russian army and a huge invasion by Western armies (British, U.S., French, German, etc.) to overthrow the Russian Revolution. Trotsky practically created and ran the War single-handedly for 5 years. He was a good organizer and great propagandist. Most of all, he saw the overwhelming power of anti-socialist governments allied against him.
Another banger. Thank you viki 1999
As a Trotskyist myself, this video is good, but Trotsky was more than simply a critique, he was founder and first commander of the Red Army. He led troops in situ, and apparently was competent in this regard.
He was not a commander, he was in charge of organization stuff. Nor was he a founder, as when the Army was actually founded, he was in Brest, negotiating with Germans. At that time he was a commissar of foreign affairs.
The "first" guy was actually Nikolai Podvoisky.
Thanks for the video Viki, I always look forward to your content
Thanks for the video, I like the series as it helps to systematise my knowledge on the topic.
Btw, I know its irrelevant, but you look great!
Love the thumbnail...
I'm a fan of both Trotsky and Stalin to a degree. Both had good points. Both had their mistakes. In the end both were great Communists. And its a shame Leftists fight over it. Let's work and achieve Socialism in our lifetime today. Great video comrade..If I had money I'd donate..
Yes, I agree comrade, Stalin should have killed more people.
as a Trotskyist i love this Video chefs kiss goodjob you're channel is a godsent
In a perfect world. The party would have been split between a Stalinist and Trotskyist faction. The clashing of ideas would have prevented the state from taking to much power and would have lead to more options for leaders.
It wouldn't, we experienced the aftermath of the Stalinist faction winning control of the mainstream socialist current and purging the Trotskyists from the party, and look where that got the left and international revolution at. Modern China capitulated to the Capitalist system in all but their government structure and some sector of their state-owned economy remain (the only redeeming factor is that they still financially bailout and support remaining Socialist and anti-imperialist countries today and didn't get involved in Russia's fiasco), Cuba is in an almost permanent economic siege by the US (I say almost in the hope that revolution disolves the U.S. or the loss of U.S. power projection in the future forces it to revert to some form of isolationism with the ascension of a rival power like China or of multipolar powers making it anyone's game and the U.S.'s allies not wanting to serve as a U.S. military bases or implement their one-sided, neoliberal, capitalist structure anymore), the Soviet Union is gone, majority of the post-soviet countries have turned sharply to Reaction, Capitalism, and NATO and EU imperialism, Yugoslavia was balkanized by reaction and xenophobia, majority of the third world socialist nations like South Yemen, Ethiopia, Somali, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Afghanistan, and so on are all gone and subject to an impoverished, war-torn, financially and economically colonized, plutocratic version of themselves, or governed by theocratic reactionary forces like the case of Afghanistan. The remaining Stalinist parties have all capitulated to the bourgeois popular front and abandoned revolutionary principles for social democratic betrayal as mainstream "socialist" or "communist" parties or dead as a result of their failed or long-drawn, stagnant guerrilla wars as the case in places like the MLs in Colombia, or the Maoists in India, and the Philippines.
@@davidmartinez688 It's almost like Communism is not a feasable economic system at all lol
@@zake64 What a shock!
Thank you for the video, comrade 💕
Well... Sadly there is one thing Tritskyism achieved, in my opinion.
It managed to antagonise all Capitalist countries to the ideas of Communism as a whole.
Like you said, Stalinims aims to build one particular country towards Communism, and then use its prosperity to inspire workers of other industrialised countries to reform their own countries when they see that socialism is achievable and works. And in the meantime, he was willing to not interfere into Capitalist countries and even collaborate with them.
And the idea that Comminism is existential incompatible with Capitalism worldwide - which is the basis of animosity of the Cold War - comes from Trotskyi.
Also some post-Stalin USSR leaders were also Trotskyists, so it's not like this ideology never had a chance at running a country...
Respect to you for taking on what has been at times a controversial and divisive subject
Trotsky and Lenin regarded a revolutionary party as necessary for the worker's revolution in the advanced capitalist country too, not just the low-developed world, and as such the need for the party was not to substitute for lack of industrial working class people. Claiming that is a total misunderstanding of Leninism. Also, Trotsky broke with the third international after if had become a force of counterrevolution instead of a force for revolution. At last, I find it a bit hard to state that Trotskyism never succeeded in anything as Trotsky himself led the October Revolution in Petrograd and built and led the Red Army that saved the USSR from the White counterrevolution.
I have already commented like 5 times on this same video but it's the inaccuracies are significant. The depiction of Leninism is overly simplistic. Trotsky was clear in his works that the existence of other parties should be allowed for a healthy worker's democracy to exist. Also, it was not only Trotsky not liking the way the USSR's bureaucracy implemented its policies. You have to see the appalling (and recurrent) revolutionary failures of China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, among others, to see how the policy of the "Popular Front" gave the revolutionary proletarian up to the reactionaries.
Like, I enjoy your vids Viki and have shared a couple of them to my friends but it seems like the one about Lenin and the one about Trotsky are failing on some important areas. I hope we could have some discussion on this because this is not doing the best job possible at informing young new socialists.
🧊⛏️
I watch this 6 months later, and I fully agree. Except I haven't watched the one on Leninism yet, so I can't really comment on that one.
I know this post was a year ago but I don't recall Trotsky calling for other parties, instead, he wanted more internal democracy within the Bolshevik party, like the factions that existed before Stalin dismantled the Left Opposition in the 1920s and later the Right Opposition in the 1930s to "preserve party unity" under him and his loyalists' control under the pretense that the two factions were dividing the party and that their existence was somehow against democratic centralism.
@@davidmartinez688 Trotsky was not a party fetishist, and he was totally on board with the abolition of parties during the civil war. But after it, as he says in "Revolution Betrayed", there's no reason to keep the ban on parties, even more so due to the apparent fact expressed by Stalin himself that the proletariat was absolutely victorious and classes were all but abolished.
I would be curious to hear you explain Marxist-De Leonism, based on the theories and movement of Daniel De Leon in the United States, which was rather prominent in the early 1900s. His socialism was a Marxist Syndicalism of sorts.
Uhhh
dead ideology
Ohhh I was waiting for this, thanks for the video
Third bullet point "Soviets are based" and all tankies nod furiously in unison.
thank god this video came! been waiting on it
Commander Trotsky was so cool, but why take things so personally?
On "Lenin selected works: volume 3" Trotsky and Bukharin are criticized for thinking that 'Because there was no more Bourgeoisie, the state is now a Worker's State. So he thinks there should be no mediation in the relationship between the Workers state and the working class, and it is wrong. As if the state, being a Worker's one, the Working class would never contradict its Worker State, and would never have its interests violated'
Anyway, Stalin was right 😎
The best explanation! Thank you my bro 🖤
I would follow that handsome drawing anywhere!
For whatever reason RUclips keeps recomending me this video even though I've already watched it twice.
Trotsky walked so J. Posadas could run (out of the nuclear silo carrying five nukes on his back).
I'm not sure if I ever saw Viki until this video.
Even that initial painting of October, putting Stalin behind Lenin, in front of Trotsky, is a lie.
Excellent video. Hope lots of people find your channel.
Ohhhhhh shiiiiiiiit. ITS HERE!!!!!!!!!
Good video. Hello from finnish Trotskyist
Your voice sounds really pretty in this video!
"I have no idea what I'm talking about but here's my video explanation anyway" 😭 thanks comrade
So much respect for being impartial. The left needs more understanding and acceptance of differences in belief.
wow, so informational! thanks so much for all that you do.
i really liked when you said "wow so pog (could you tell I'm a zoomer?)"! Very funny XD
Never achieved anything? Lenin and Trotsky hand in hand led the revolution leading to the FIRST socialist/workers state. Trotsky was the leader of the Red Army. You need to seriously "reassess" your interpretation of "achieved" !
He “achieved” getting the USSR into a disastrous war with Poland, alienating everyone around him with his arrogance, and getting an icepick driven into his skull. Stalin saved the Slavic people and got them nuclear weapons, laying the groundwork for the Soviets to go to the stars.
Trotsky or not, I think that would happen because of Lenin, not Trotsky.
Well, let's go for Trotskyism's revolutions. Where are they? Serious question, I do not want to use wrong sources.
another video that slaps! keep it up viki
Talk about the trotskyist to neocon pipeline
Good information Thanks for posting it!
Good shit Viki
Yet another great video witch taught me much. Not that you have an inkling to do this but I would love a t-shirt/hoodie with the slogan “Hello Everybody” with your avatar right next to it. 😀
In US leftist politics Trotsky seemed to have represented a more humane communism as opposed to Stalinism. I'm not so sure this is true. Especially in its implementation.
The US would represent anyone not in power in states on their shitlist as better than those in power. That has nothing to do with the material conditions in said states, it's just a propaganda trick to divert sympathies into ineffective channels.
It’s very interesting to see that Marxism is applied differently when observed in practice outside of Europe. It makes total sense that Leninism would develop in Russia because of a lack of industry and therefore would require a vanguard party to speed up the process.
I wonder what revolution would look like in societies that are past industrial, worker relations and are now moving towards automation. I almost feel like Marxism will have to be updated for this particular problem in the future.
I truly don't understand the "Permanent Revolution" vs. "Socialism in One Country" debate, as an ML. Stalin and the USSR did not have any control over whether other worker revolutions in Europe and beyond would be successful. Once it was apparent that they largely were not (Post-WWI), the USSR had NO CHOICE but to try and build Socialism by itself. What else was it to do? I genuinely don't understand this Trot argument against the USSR.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, for what I hope to do is show you how there was in fact a great degree of influence and control over other workers revolutions and there was a failure of policy on the part of the Communist Internationale.
I'm going to paste some text and a link here and I hope you as a proper marxist engage with the text instead of dismissing in on preconceived notions:
"‘Radek and Smilga obstinately defended the subordination of the Chinese Communist Party to the bourgeois Kuomintang, not only up to Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’etat but also afterwards. Preobrazhensky mumbled something inarticulate, as he always does when political questions are involved. A remarkable fact: all those in the ranks of the Opposition who defended the subordination of the Communist Party to the Kuomintang turned out to be capitulators. Not a single Oppositionist who remained true to his banner bears this mark, which is a mark of notorious shame. Three-quarters of a century after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto, a quarter of a century after the founding of the party of the Bolsheviks, these ill-starred “Marxists” considered it possible to defend the keeping of the Communists in the cage of the Kuomintang! In his answer to my charges, Radek already then, just as in his letter of repentence today, tried to frighten us with the “isolation” of the proletariat from the peasantry in the event of the Communist Party’s withdrawing from the bourgeois Kuomintang. Shortly before that, Radek called the Canton government a peasants’ and workers’ government and thereby helped Stalin to disguise the subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. With what are these shameful deeds, the consequences of this blindness, this stupidity, this betrayal of Marxism, to be covered? With what, indeed! With an indictment of the permanent revolution!"
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr09.htm
@@Dsonsee thanks for the link. I knew about this aspect of the Chinese Revolution, how the Soviets kept the nascent CPC in check from taking on the Kuomintang, but I’m not sure how this connects to Trotskyism and Socialism in One Country. This shows one instance of Soviet influence in a (ultimately successful) revolution, but doesn’t show how the USSR had control over whether full world revolution would happen, as envisioned by Trotsky. I’ve yet to read the link, though, so I’ll see what it says.
Correct. This is why Trotsky was silly.
You said you don’t put ads on your video but I literally got an ad right after you said that.
Viki, the person in the painting at 0:17 is Yakov Sverdlov, the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee. That painting was created in in the 30s at a period when Trotsky's image was completely removed from the public image.
This is the second time you've making this mistake even though I explained it in a previous video. Good video nonetheless.
Thanks for keeping the picture
Jfc, I should've just made you a better edit of the Trotsky silhouette so you don't have to use that travesty. Actually I still might
Trotsty's thumbnail looks as though it's a younger version of him with sideburns, a small beard and with an agape mouth, almost as though he's saying "That's what happens to me when I die?!"
Don't know if anyone else sees it, and to those who can't unsee it after having it pointed out, sorry not sorry 😁 Nice and informative as always 😀
Trotsky certainly knew how to run an army.
The IV International only became a neccesity after Stalin (dictatorically leading Komintern) had led the German working class - the strongest and most wellorganised in the world at the time - into the shameful defeat by the Nazis.
The Austro-Marxist at least put up a heroic military defence in the workingclass areas of Wienna before being crushed.
The stalinists i Germany gave up without a fight, claiming that "after Hitler - it is our turn".
4:50- amazing that even Leninism apparently had to acknowledge capitalism as the best means for development of industry, and that socialism would have to parasitize itself off of that success.
@Bobby Johnson and socialism is even worse, because it creates a parasitic government to do the same thing, and what's more, strips its subjects of choice in the matter.
You have over a century of socialism's empirical failure to reference, mate.
Grow up.
3:20
"form a Council, called a Soviet"
You do realise that "Soviet" is literally just a Russian word for Council, don't you?
So "Council called Soviet" literally means "Council called Council" if you abandon unnecessary language barriers.
I mean... It is understandable that during the Cold War, American sources would use transliteration, rather than translations of some words to make Communist ideas more confusing, misterious and thus scary.
But why do people, who seem to be genuinely interested in learning about the stuff keep up this tradition?
I mean, they called themselves the Soviet Union, not the Union of Councils...
Part 1
Why write a long reply to 3-month old vid? Meh, I guess I'm bored. :P
So full disclosure, I was a Trotskyist active in a European Trotskyist party for about 7-years, before moving away from accepting what I now see as a sectarian aproch to Marxism of swallowing whole a regid set of ideological conceptions and formulas and declaring all other strands of Marxism as 'revisionist' etc. I now consider myself a Marxist and accept a variety of different Marxist ideas from different Marxist tendencies, seeing some valuable contributions in Trotsky's ideas and others that are complete junk. Point is, my 7-years of Trotskyism means I am well versed in his ideas and actions so, without necessarily endorsing Trotsky at every time, I feel I can point out some factual problems with your video.
I'll just comment on the The Two Stage Theory and Permanent Revolution and only if there is interest come back on other points.
You were hopelessly muddled on this question. The theory of permanent revolution is about the class forces involved in the actual revolution itself and relates to countries where the bourgeoisie have not yet gained political power or where they bourgeoisie are in political power, the country lacks bourgeois-democracy.
The two stage theory was a right-wing (within Marxism) conception of revolution in a feudal country based on a dogmatic crystallization of the lessons of the French revolution of 1789 and ignoring Marx's lesser known writings of the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In the French revolution (and before that the English revolution of 1649) the emerging bourgeoisie, as a radical, revolutionary class struggling agonist feudalism led the revolution dragging behind it the peasantry and the embryonic proletariat, the sans-culottes (ruffly translate as urban poor.) However by the time of the 1848 revolution the proletariat and began to consolidate itself as a class with it's own emerging class interests that were in direct opposition to the bourgeoisie.
This meant that, while at the start of the revolution and even in the Communist Manifesto itself, Marx argued for the proletariat to support the bourgeoisie in their struggle for power against feudal absolutism, expecting a repeat of the French revolution, what happened was that, horrified by the movement of the proletariat moving into revolutionary action with their own anti-capitalist and crude, socialistic demands, the bourgeoisie betrayed the revolution and ran into the arms of the feudal, absolutist state to protect them for the workers.
This process was clearly outlined in detail by Marx in his political writings on the aftermath of the 1848 revolution with Marx stating that in the next revolution against the feudal, absolutist state in Europe, the bourgeois would again be compelled by their class interests to try and detail it and form another rotten compromise so the working-class would have struggle to establish a bourgeois republic against the bourgeois themselves!
As I said, it was the fact that these various articles by Marx were not well known combined with the enduring popularity of the, frankly outdated in places, Communist Manifesto that prevented these lessons being understood by the majority of the late 20th and early 20th century Marxist movement.
Part 2
Now to be clear this view of Marx was NOT the theory of permanent revolution. This position of Marx was for the complete political and organisational independence of the working-class to establish a bourgeois republic, not socialism or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx's, correct in my view given he was wiring in the mid 19th century, is the proletariat, given it's still small size numerically and weak social weight would be too weak to hold on to power after leading the revolution and end up giving way to the bourgeois who would consolidate their rule.
This view of Marx was the starting point for Lenin's own theoretical conception of the coming revolution in Russia, the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and is essentially Marx's view's but slightly adapted to Russian conditions and the massive development of capitalism on a world stage since the middle of the 19th century. Studies of the development of Lenin's ideas agree that Lenin was able to become acquainted with Marx's views thanks to the republication in 1895 of Marx's writings on France during and just after the revolution of 1848 in the book Class Struggles in France that had a new introduction by Engels where he stressed it's radical content.
As a side note, the new introduction so scared the increasingly conservative leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, who were already starting to move away from socialism towards what would later be called social-democracy, that is a commitment to welfare capitalism (when the market can afford it!) that they censored his introduction, such was a the pitiful state of 'official Marxism' at that stage.
So what was Lenin's view and how exactly did it differ from Marx? Lenin recognized that the social weight of the peasantry dwarfed that of the other European countries and so understood the greater importance of a strong alliance between the two classes. Also, unlike Marx, with Lenin convinced that by the early 20th century, socialist revolution in the advanced European countries was just around the corner, this worker-peasant alliance revolutionary regime could hold on to power for a longer period of time, enacting a very radical bourgeois republic that would carry out what we would later call social-democratic polices decades before such governments came to power and did so in the aftermath of the second world war.
This radical regime, he argued, could hold power until socialism was achieved in the economically advanced countries, where with their economic aid, technical support etc, Russia could then start moving towards socialism. If the revolution in Europe was delayed however, this regime would eventually be crushed by internal reaction as the worker-peasant alliance would eventually break down as peasantry, having gained control of their land in the revolution, being the basis for the alliance, would by the reactionary class interests, start supporting the creative of a large scale agricultural capitalist-class that with the backing of the peasantry would crush the workers.
So what about Trotsky and the theory of permanent revolution? In his books 1905 and The Permanent Revolution he concedes the radical and revolutionary aspects of Lenin's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry compared to the stages theory of revolution, that in practice means trying to 'hold back' the working-class as as to not 'scare' the bourgeois from leading the revolution. This is nonsense as they are fully understand their class interests and can't be fooled and frankly once the working-class begins to become conscious of itself and its class interests during a revolution can't be held back anyway, those Marxists who try, like the Menchiviks during the Russian revolution who held to the two stage aproch are ignored and simply left behind.
The problem as Trotsky saw it was that, firstly, while accepting the need for the worker-peasant alliance, Lenin underestimated the ability of the peasantry to act as a cohesive, united class during a revolution. Rather the peasantry always falls under the domination of the working-class or the capitalist-class so Lenin needed to prepare the working-class, via the vanguard, to actively lead the coming revolution. This a relatively minor point and could be worked out in practice during the revolutionary process, the others were more serious.
Secondly, in the working-class coming to power when, although socially weak in Russia, the working-class had been strengthened globally along with the recent heavily concentration of new factories sharping class-consciousness further, rather than restrain itself to a radical capitalist republic, as Lenin expected, in finding itself in power, the capitalist state effectively smashed with nothing to hold the workers back, the working-class would move to attempting to implement socialist measures, even if in reality the economy was not developed enough for them.
Part 3 (final)
This prediction of Trotsky was born out in the October revolution where, after the Soviets took power, workers, seeing their government in power and the police and army smashed, moved to rapidly take over factories, placing them under workers control and demanding the government nationalism them.
This resulted in chaos and confusion for the first several months of the revolution as time and time again Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders, stuck in the theoretical conceptions of Lenin's theory, attempted to oppose the workers taking over industry. However with the Soviets ratifying these decisions and the only cohesive force on the ground they had at that state, the Red Guards workers militias who carried out the revolution refusing to carry out their orders of arresting the workers and handing ownership back to the former owners.
To be clear I'm not an anarchist saying that Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders were not genuine revolutionaries, socialists, communists etc. Rather they were imprisoned by a false theoretical conception of the revolution that informed their actions. Lenin pointed out that these socialist measures the workers were carrying out would only result in a full scale capital strike by the Russian capitalists, horrified at seeing their property seized, resulting in the economy being paralyzed. Trotsky and the small left-communist faction of the party pointed out in reply that even if the party had the ability to hold back the workers, which it didn't, a strike of capital would happen regardless. The idea that the capitalist in Russia would be content and happy to invest, develop the productive forces with the understanding that, the moment socialist revolution break out in Europe, all their wealth and property would be taken from them, is nonsense.
Over time, reality imposed itself on the Bolshevik leaders and with the outbreak of the civil war, with the entire Russian bourgeois supporting the white's, the idea of 'progressive capitalist development' seemed increasingly ridicules and so the socialist measures the workers were carrying out were ratified and incorporated into what was to became known as war communism.
This is not to say Trotsky beloved that Russia could advance to socialism on it's own using state planning measures, like Lenin, he also believed that in the long run, internal reaction would crush the revolution without revolution in the economically advanced countries.
In Russia, simply practice had born out Trotsky's correct theoretical analysis and perspective over Lenin's, by the early 20's there was not even a debate. As a consequence, 1905, the book where Trotsky outlines his theory, was published for the first time in Russia (it previously being published in Germany) in 1922 with the full support of the party leadership to assist the party membership in understanding the development of the Russian revolution.
The 'controversy' of Trotsy's permanent revolution vs Lenin's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was artificially reignited in the mid 20's as part of the power struggle of the Kamaov-Ziminiof-Stalin triumvirate against Trotsky where previous disagreements between Trotsky and Lenin that had been settled, some in Trotsky's favor like this one, others like questions of the vanguard party in Lenin's, were brought up as part of a political campaign to discredit Trotsky and lean on the increasingly disturbing cult of personality around Lenin that was forming.
The consequences for the international revolution were disastrous! Had the party only imposed Lenin's theory on the 3rd intentional, that would not have been so bad. Again as Trotsky himself admitted it was a revolutionary theory and in spite of the chaos and confusion it caused in the early months the point is that it did allow the revolution to take place. However what was imposed on the intentional was not Lenin's theory by the stagiest theory, the one held by the Menchiviks and Lenin argued against for over a decade.
This resulted in the defeat of the Chinese revolution of the late 20's where the Comintern instructed the Chinese Communist Party to subordinate itself to the nationalist Kuomintang who, being seen as the 'party of the bourgeois' was, under stagiest theory, meant to lead the revolution with the workers acting as cheerleaders to establish bourgeois republic with bourgeois-democratic rights. Instead the Kuomintang massacred the Chinese CP killing thousands and leading to the Kuomintang forming a brutal military dictatorship.
This farce was repeated many times throughout the 20th century, with time and again revolutions being crushed every time a communist party adopted the stagiest method during a revolution.
That cartoon Trotsky looks angry/grossed out, lol
Trotsky looks angry in all pictures, hahahaha
This is a really good video
The difference between Trotskyism and Stalinism is that Stalinism was and is counter-revolutionary while Trotskyism represented socialism and that is shown in what Trotsky laid out in the Revolution Betrayed became true. The Stalinists became the new capitalist oligarchy that now rules Russia.
Ah yes, the famous Stalinists Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
Based AF, Viki, you're awesome!
Where were you when Trotsky was kil
I was in party committee when phone ring
"Trotsky is icepick"
"URAAA!"
trotsky's face is genius