Lasting Damage posted:

dgcf already did a great job describing the who and the what, but it might also be helpful for you do describe some of these ideas they have that you like, to make sure other posters understand what you mean by Trotskyism.

Flournival Dixon posted:

I'd be interested to hear what specifics of it sound appealing, to me it feels like it appeals to countermaterialistic anarchist style moralizing but I'm far from like the average normal person when it comes to thinking about politics and how things should work as opposed to how they actually do according to my understanding of history and material reality.

People in this thread might poke fun at you for elaborating but nobody's going to be that mean unless you're a real dipshit about it and refuse to read capital for months and months and months on end all the while insisting that you've found the specific anti-coat equation that disproves the whole thing.

Mukulu posted:

The only other two ideas that I think are from Trotsky is getting working/poor people involved in revolution and that he was very anti-bourgeois revolution. Any all and info is greatly appreciated.

tristeham posted:

it is trivially true i guess but in practice Trotsky and his followers always opposed any revolution or insurgency that didn't strictly follow their ideology: they were and still are extremely opposed to maoism (that leaned a lot on the peasant class at first and repeatedly prevented any formation of a solified bourgeois leadership).

Ferrinus posted:

particularly funny given that mao, himself, asserted that he was committed to, and doing, "permanent revolution"

Ferrinus posted:

particularly funny given that mao, himself, asserted that he was committed to, and doing, "permanent revolution"

genericnick posted:

Not like this!!!

tristeham posted:

it is trivially true i guess but in practice Trotsky and his followers always opposed any revolution or insurgency that didn't strictly follow their ideology: they were and still are extremely opposed to maoism (that leaned a lot on the peasant class at first and repeatedly prevented any formation of a solified bourgeois leadership).

The Proletariat and the Peasantry, V.I. Lenin posted:

[...]

The peasantry wants land and freedom. There can be no two opinions on this score. All class-conscious workers support the revolutionary peasantry with all their might. All class-conscious workers want and are fighting for the peasantry to receive all the land and full freedom. “All the land” means not putting up with any partial concessions and hand-outs; it means reckoning, not on a compromise between the peasantry and the landlords, but on abolition of landed estates. And the party of the class-conscious proletariat, the Social-Democrats, have most vigorously proclaimed this view: at its Third Congress held last May, the R.S.D.L.P. adopted a resolution directly declaring for support of the peasants’ revolutionary demands, including confiscation of all privately-owned estates. This resolution clearly shows that the party of the class-conscious workers supports the peasants’ demand for all the land. And in this respect the content of the resolution adopted at the conference of the other half of our Party fully coincides with that of the resolution passed by the Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.

“Full freedom” means election of officials and other office-holders who administer public and state affairs. “Full freedom” means the complete abolition of a state administration that is not wholly and exclusively responsible to the people, that is not elected by, accountable to, and subject to recall by, the people. “Full freedom” means that it is not the people who should be subordinated to officials, but the officials who should be subordinated to the people.

Of course, not all peasants fighting for land and freedom are fully aware of what their struggle implies, and go. so far as to demand a republic. But for all that, the democratic trend of the peasants’ demands is beyond all doubt. Hence the peasantry can be certain that the proletariat will support these demands. The peasants must know that the red banner which has been raised in the towns is the banner of struggle for the immediate and vital demands, not only of the industrial and agricultural workers, but also of the millions and tens of millions of small tillers of the soil.

stumblebum posted:

that's basically the difference between proletarian dictatorship and marxist communism right?

dead gay comedy forums posted:

The problem started, however, when sharper commentators mentioned that what the Soviet state did and was doing was very much in line with what Trotsky himself defended. Marxists at the Fourth International did point at him personally that they had difficulty to see why him at the helm of defeating Kronstadt was righteous but Stalin doing the same wasn't.

mila kunis posted:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1921/04/kronstadt.htm Radek

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1921/military/ch61.htm Trotsky

Kronstadt was chosen as the point nearest to Europe and to Petrograd. Since, in the present international situation of our Republic, the Baltic fleet can play no active role, it has inevitably been denuded of manpower as well. An enormous number of the revolutionary sailors who played a very big role in the October revolution of 1917 were transferred to other fields of work during the past period.

More here : https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/01/kronstadt.htm

I would consider modern day (or cold war era) trotskyists invoking kronstadt as ironic, given Trotsky's own writings on the subject - but it's not really if you consider "trotskyism" as a catchall banner for anti-communist communists, whose purpose is to guide people sympathetic to communism down a path where they end up opposing it and supporting the aims of the imperial core. These days it's more fashionable for those types to identify as anarchist because its cooler and doesn't evoke the unwashed smell of the guy trying to sell you papers on campus, but the fundamental people and tendency are the same

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

In antiquity, temples were the storehouses of money, but not stacked as coins. The precious metals were made into statues, some simple and mass produced, some as ornate showpieces. This is how value was stored as a hoard. The Parthenon was like this. The great statue of Athena was designed to be broken down again.

When war broke out, coins were needed to satisfy the new labor demands, such as to pay rowers for the fleet. They melted the gold statues and minted coin. Without the hoard, there would be no way to satisfy this need without reducing the commodities in circulation or increasing the velocity of money through financial engineering.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:

I am beholden to the burger god.

stumblebum posted:

i'm suggesting that trotsky and his ilk would technically be correct that the peasantry are incapable of non-subjugated cooperation with proletarian rule (where peasant =/= rural proletariat) if one assumes that the proletarian dictatorship would be established without communist ideology. organizing proletarian rule via communism, on the other hand, allows for a contextualization that can lead the peasantry to purposefully develop material conditions towards their own class extinction on the bases that a.) their proletarianization is a material inevitability under globalizing industrial economics, b.) it is better to be proletarianized in a society where the proletariat are dominant instead of subjugated, and c.) accepts proletarianization (with its disruptions and hardships) as necessary towards developing classless society (which would involve the extinction of the peasantry anyways)

or rather, i'm asking if i'm conceptualizing this difference correctly, since i consider myself essentially illiterate in marxism

mila kunis posted:

concentrated, industrialized agriculture *is* more productive than having millions of scattered independent freeholds. that's why agriculture in the USA is more productive and has better yields than where independent un-concentrated small peasant run farms that still exist, for example in India. under capitalism concentration takes the form of agribusiness, so like from the POV of a farm laborer it's really not that much of a difference whether the firm you're working for is a private capitalist mega-ag corp or a nationalized state owned one (other than that you might get better salaries/working conditions from the latter).

the problem is that, for obvious reasons, people who own land tend to be resistant to be reduced to mere labour on that land. under unchecked capitalism this sort of happens naturally; big business outcompetes small farmers, and buys them out. small farmers can only be maintained by state subsidy in the long term (iowa corn guys with political connections, etc). in india they're currently trying to concentrate agriculture by the means of *removing* existing subsidies so the small farmers literally can't survive/compete, and have to sell off.

in the USSR after the 1917 revolution, land reform had given peasants vast amounts of land for themselves. but again, unconcentrated agriculture sucks rear end, and to concentrate it they'd have to dispossess a bunch of people. naturally people tend to be resistant to having their land taken away and the botched collectivization process ended up loving their agriculture for years (it did get better post ww2).

i think the soviets could have pulled collectivization off by supporting the kulaks - let them get bigger and bigger, richer and richer, buy out the poor peasants and turn them into farmhands and landless labour/industrial precariat, and then nationalize the big agribusiness concerns that would emerge like they did in the capitalist economies. in that kind of process, i think ironically they'd probably have had the support of the peasantry and farm labor when it came to the nationalization part

Halser posted:

With that said, should I just jump into Vol II immediately?

mila kunis posted:

the fundamental issue the soviets faced, and that shaped the thoughts of trotsky and others, is that industrial proletarian work is easily made to be collectivist but peasant farming wasn't. a small subsistence farmer can be the master of his own plot of land, he and his household can work it without too much reliance on others outside of needing to trade for material inputs like seeds and equipment occasionally. you can't do that with a factory, it requires collective effort at scale and its an easy sell to workers to tell them that the profits and output of their work is going to be collectively owned, because the alternative is "one guy" (capitalist) gets to keep all the profits.

it was a much harder sell to the millions of rural peasants who got their own piece of land to work with in the wake of the 1917. this led to people like trotsky being deeply suspiscious of and against the rural peasantry and view them as a reactionary force.

^ i think the last bit here is similar to "proletarianization is a material inevitability under globalizing industrial economics" that you're thinking of, and is similar to what people like bukharin proposed. instead the soviets took (ironically) trotsky's solution and collectivization ended up being a big disaster.

i really would be interested in understanding how chinese land reforms were different and they managed to thread that particular needle and get collective farming to work (outside of the interregnum of the GLF).

DeimosRising posted:

there's still a LOT of decentralized, small scale farming in China. When I was working in the Dongbei doing archaeological survey (of spaces of several hundred square kilometers) virtually all the agriculture was being done semi - communally. A given field would be separated into rows (not literal rows of a single planting but "vertical" stripes of territory) that were worked by a given family, and then the produce was pooled and the proceeds distributed (I don't know by exactly what mechanism). Most of this was essentially unmechanized - a lot more donkeys than tractors, and a lot of hand picking. My very loose understanding is that this sort of serves as a precursor to industrializing the production - first you get the small holders to pool together in to kind of coops, then eventually you get them tractors and poo poo whether through the market or assignation, and then that makes a lot of those small holders unnecessary and they move off to get jobs in the city (are they paid some pension or buy out, I'm not sure) and slowly the regional farming consolidates into something like a Western agri-business. I'd like to know at what point these are nationalized or whether a lot of them are being run via the system of letting capitalists run the business and just keeping a tight lid on their choices and political activity.

Halser posted:

I think it would be good for me to read a bit about brazillian history, put the theory into a more relevant context.

Zadok Allen posted:

Anyone have good recommendations for books on Marxism and AI?