this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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This is beside the point but also fuck Trotsky. Trotsky’s basic idea consisted of applying military methods in the economic field and of turning the entire population of Russia into a vast army of labour, destroying the trade unions and forcing the workforce into jobs they could not leave without the permission of high authorities. Any shirking of duty or unauthorized absence from work was to be punished on the same basis as desertion from the army. Fuck that guy.
But also fuck capitalism. It's horrific.
Marx also viewed capitalism as a necessary intermediary step towards achieving communism and saw it as an improvement to what existed before it. An amazing thing about the Russian Revolution and USSR is they went from feudalism to a modern communist state in less than a generation. In that context it was incredible what they were able to achieve in the time they did and we can recognize areas it worked independent of the rest.
There's been some pretty good discussion about whether capitalism or communism has resulted in more deaths overall, and the value in that isn't to arrive at some final tally to find who wins.
A lot of what Marx wrote about the two stage revolution was written in direct response to the failure of the Paris Commune. Marx also saw socialism as the inevitable successor to capitalism. But there are socialist traditions that predate his theories and there's nothing to say he was wrong on some things.
Yeah like his labor theory of value has basically been disproven but that doesn't have to negate his critique of modernity and his view of class conflict, notion of private property, exploitation, etc. Historical materialism is hugely influential even today. Marx didn't outline some rigid framework for a communist utopia either.
Hegel's idealism as well... Marx began as a Hegelian in Germany and increasingly became critical of Hegel's dialectic. His concept of dialectical materialism is a response to Hegel and turns it on it's head. The notion that material conditions aren't shaped by human ideas and values but instead that human ideas and values are a response to material conditions.