Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
(Episode 200!) Exploring the Complex World of Trotskyism, Part 2: Factionalism and Entryism
Chris and Jason form Regrettable Century join for this discussion. Ready for a journey into the labyrinth of American Trotskyism? Buckle up and join us as we take a deep dive into the complex history and dynamics of this ideology. From its inception in 1928 to its splintering evolution, we dissect the intricate facets of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, and the role of the Socialist Workers' Party in the wider Marxist-Leninist movement. We also discuss the pivotal yet controversial impact of major figures such as Churchill and Stalin during World War II on this ideological path.
Next, we navigate through the turbulence of Trotskyism's various splits and ideologies, touching on the rise of entryism and its attempted application within the Socialist Party in the 1930s and the Green Party in the 2000s. We scrutinize the four key doctrinal pillars of Trotskyism - doctrines that have often been the butt of jokes. What is more, we delve into the influence of the International Socialist League, the Socialist Party of America, and of course, Leon Trotsky himself on the development of American Trotskyism.
Finally, we look at the decline of Trotskyism in the United States. How has corporate publishing and the lack of worker's parties contributed to this downturn? Is there truth to the theory that much of the fractures within Trotskyism are a result of the low stakes of Marxist movements in the US and a resultant overinflated sense of importance? We challenge these notions and more. So, sit back and join us as we explore the fascinating and convoluted world of Trotskyism.
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All right, welcome to Varnvlog and Regrettable Century. And maybe the measures taken although they're not represented today except in the overlapping character of Jason, he can be Schroediger's podcast today. It depends on if he's representing Regrettable or measures is going to vary from moment to moment, and we're continuing our discussion on Trotskyism, which I think now is going to be almost as long as our no Royal Road series. I am also doing some guest panels to supplement this.
Speaker 1:For those of you who are wondering on British Trotskyism etc. Maybe if I can find a specialist in Latin American Trotskyism, somebody told me that there's one country right now my friend Camillo told me there was one country now where the Trotskyist fates are not going in the same direction and that is Argentina's. Trotskyist are actually getting stronger, which would make them the odd person out. And then there's commentary on the last video that we probably should look at post Soviet Trotskyism in Eastern Europe, Because it is bigger than you think and has to do with getting around official anti-communism and Stalin's not loved in one of those places we had some contact with post Soviet Trotskyism whenever we were in the ISO.
Speaker 2:I knew several of them online and I think that we even had a few of them come to our conferences, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to mention his name, but one person. He's back in Russia now. He was in the Russian Socialist Movement, or ERST, which is kind of a Trotskyist conglomeration of different groups that all met together. But I have no idea what they do now.
Speaker 1:It's hard for me to say. It's hard for me to know too, because who counts as a Trotskyist organization and who's got real numbers for them is harder and harder to tell. Plus, we get to the United States. As we mentioned the last time, all but five parties you can claim have some Trotskyist origin. It's easier to list the ones that don't than the ones that do. It's like the RCPUS, the CPUSA, the American Labour Party, the American Progressive Labour Party and whatever the Delonious Party was whose name I can't remember. That only ended a decade ago.
Speaker 2:Socialist Labour Party. Yeah, Socialist Labour Party.
Speaker 3:I think they still formally exist, but not really.
Speaker 2:No, no, they did. We looked this up. I looked it up on an episode that we did. They dissolved in 2015 or something.
Speaker 1:Oh really. They were, however, one of the longest standing Socialist parties in the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because I think they founded 1876 or 1875, even.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're older than the SPA.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because whenever the railroad strike happened, they were a party already, even at that time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're ancient. So to get into the legacy of the demise of Trotskyism, there's a lot of prepositions about it. I'm going to have to figure out how to reword that before I put this up. We're talking about factionalism and entryism. But to get into that and we're limiting ourselves to the United States Right, which I think is wise, let's talk about the origins of Trotskyism in the United States, and last time we actually weirdly didn't particularly do that.
Speaker 2:We started at the end last time, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I have been reading.
Speaker 2:Trying to work our way backwards. Yeah, as per Stefan's suggestion.
Speaker 1:I believe. Yeah, I have been reading the. So now we're going to dialectically flip the quarters and go forward from the beginning. Yeah, Maybe between watching the two episodes, because a lot of people liked the last episode but they got lost in the weeds and that was sort of the point.
Speaker 2:If you're going to watch or listen to us, you're going to have some weeds that you're going to have to navigate on your own. I'm sorry. There's so much leading we can do, we're lost ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when it comes to Trotskyism, the history is mostly weeds. Yes, so it's hard to do, but I think we have to start with the origins of American Trotskyism. I started where LeBlanc, palmer and Bias started in their three-part collection on the history of US Trotskyism, and that is in 1928. Can we agree on that? I think so.
Speaker 3:Is that when Canon goes to Russia and then comes back with the Testament or whatever the paperwork that Canon become to convince Trotskyist, because I think, whatever that year is, that's when it should be. I don't know what that year is, I think it's 28.
Speaker 1:I think it's 28, because it's, uh, because he's in the. Let's see, he's in the Communist Labor Party when it breaks off from the Socialist Party, then joins the Communist Party of America, which, um, and he has some relations to the. To like the Marxist-Cynicalist under Browder.
Speaker 3:I just looked it up, it is 28. Yeah, so it's 28. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, his history is interesting. And one thing that I think people tend to not understand about US Marxism is, for the first 40 years of his existence, the line between cynicalism and other forms of socialism doesn't really exist in the US the way it does in Europe. Yeah, yeah, and I think that's kind of important. It's also, I think, interesting because it means the proposed economic policy of fascism isn't really separated either. So what do I mean by that? Fascist economic policy, as stated by Mussolini, is National-Cynicalist, right, yeah, like that's what it is. Yeah, um, and I think it's important that we don't that all this is a little bit more run together in the US, because nobody was afraid of that when Eugene Debs or William C Foster either one of them, were running like state, you know, like Marxist. Well, debs wasn't one of Marxist's listeners because it didn't exist yet, but Foster was like Marxist-Leninist-Cynicalism. So it's an interesting problem.
Speaker 1:And at first Canon is tied into that with Earl Browder and all those people. Then he goes to the Soviet Union and what happens in the Soviet Union? That gets him, you know, interested in the left opposition and thus gets him immediately expelled from the Communist Party. Because he gets expelled also with two people who are going to keep showing up Um Max Schatman and Martin Avern. So Schatman's also there from the beginning.
Speaker 3:Um, I actually I only barely know this story. I just I think while he was a delegate, some Russian who was a member or was sympathetic to the left opposition just handed in stuff to read and then he read it and he didn't say anything and then he took it back to the States with them and it was like, uh, I don't know, it was whatever the uh, not the Testament, the Manifesto or whatever just the reason why the left opposition existed. They had some kind of document, right. I have never really delved into that story very much. I just kind of I just accepted it and moved on.
Speaker 2:I think he, uh he read something by Trotsky Uh, Trotsky's critique of like the situation in the Soviet Union at the time and then became like then sided with the left opposition. However, I remember what that document was, or whatever.
Speaker 1:Right, it's, it's. It's an interesting problem because, um, like many Trotskyist groups and other countries, the, the American Trotskyist left, actually tries to form a long time, tries to, for a long time, stay loyal to the common turn, even though it was exposed, expelled from it, which is which is something that's hard for people to think. When people think that, oh, you know, they were just splitters, I'm like no, they tried to stay in.
Speaker 3:Like, yeah, they, they, they tried, um, they were like they called themselves an external faction for like for years, like almost, uh, almost a decade, I think. For a decade they they were. They were the Communist League of America and they were like an external faction trying to get back into the Communist Party.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this starts the tendency of Trotskyist parties which, if you actually read the fine print, don't actually think of themselves as parties. Um, so the international socialist organization was part of the international socialist tendency. The international, uh, the IMT is a tendency.
Speaker 2:The Catholicist League did not call ourselves a party. We said we were a pre-party formation.
Speaker 3:You know, and a while ago, I never really could make any sense of the difference, like when I would try to you know, I was convinced because it was the line or whatever. But whenever I would tell somebody new, every single time they would push back with the same question, which is just like what is the real difference exactly? And I never had a good answer.
Speaker 1:The the the line to me does make some sense that, like there is no workers party in America, so one of the things that these organizations initially tried to argue for is the creation of a workers party or a socialist party which they could join. I think the contradiction is still, however, in the fact that almost all these groups maintained for their tendency organization the rules of the Bolshevik party constitution of 1921. Right, so while they wanted to enter as a faction, they also didn't really believe factions could exist, and the only are, at least not within their factions. You can have sub factions or whatever, which, of course, I think lays the road for what's going to happen, starting in the in the late twenties into the 30s, where we start this splitting tendency, which just accelerates into the 50s, 60s and 70s. The interesting thing, though, as people tend to think, this is somehow unique to Trotskyist, but in the United States this tendency is predominant across the board after the high point of the CPU SA in the 1940s.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Especially in the new left after the. I mean it's also present, like even during the high point of the of the CPU SA, like in addition to the Trotskyist splinters there's also like a right opposition and also like there's never not a split. There's a split out of the SP and there's a split I think there's a split out of the SLP as well. Like every group is just constantly splitting, but somehow a lot more by the 60s.
Speaker 1:I think part of it is that and this is going to be an interesting critique During third periodism these groups are all kind of small, oh yeah yeah, and the Trotskyist groups are also tiny, but the Trotskyist groups, in some ways they. It's interesting because of the situation with the Teamsters, which is, you know, the Trotskyist led and founded Labor Union, and it has some independence as opposed to the TUL. Tul, which is a coalition of unions that subsume themselves into the CIO as soon as third periodism ends and grow pretty prolifically during third periodism, kind of parallel to the Teamsters, right, but like they lose their independent identity more thoroughly than the Trotskyist ones do and thus they get purged harder in the 1950s too. But it's this. This is still very contentious.
Speaker 1:I mean because when I, when I mentioned, like the first three people to get kicked out, who are basically the people who found the Communist League, we already in those three names have tendencies that are going to develop later, because you have Martin Aburn and then who, I believe, gets suspended, with Shackman and Burnham, and you have Shackman there in the beginning too. So we already have a root for divide in the initial three people who are, you know, kicked out together, but they and they don't stay together very long. I mean, that's one of the things that I was surprised at. Like you start seeing Trotskyist group splinter as early as 1938. So you only have 10 years, basically, where everybody's all together. And what happens in 1938?
Speaker 2:The Hitler stalling packs right. Yep, Ballot chop, ribbon chop.
Speaker 1:Was that 38? That's 38. And 36 is also the end of the common turn. No, that's that.
Speaker 2:All top is 39.
Speaker 3:I thought it was a turn lasted longer. Yeah, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:But yeah.
Speaker 3:Shackman and Aburn were also separate before you know, during the 30s they were in a separate group from the. They weren't. They weren't the Communist League of America. They formed the Socialist Workers Party whenever Shackman and Aburn's group Wait, shackman's group, I don't, I don't, yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't really remember Common turn dissolved in 43.
Speaker 1:So it's actually later than I thought, yeah.
Speaker 2:During the war, I guess, as like a good faith effort to show the allies that look, we promise we're not going to try to overthrow your countries from within anymore.
Speaker 1:Right. When's the last common turn meeting, though I do not know about that.
Speaker 3:Like the common turn Congress. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now.
Speaker 2:I'm already on the common turn page on Wikipedia.
Speaker 1:Because I feel like when it, when it was dissolved in 43, it was basically also just sort of a formality at that point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true, because their seventh World Congress, which was their last World Congress, was 35. Yeah, Okay, so so so, for all and sense of purposes, you were right, yeah. So so what do we think causes the initial, I mean?
Speaker 1:there's the stated reason. The stated reason is interpretations of what's going on in the USSR and they all will bureaucratic collectivism and deformed worker state. I was reading Draper citing where they get these? From Trotsky, although they admit that Draper admits that deformed worker state is what Trotsky died supporting. But there's actual writing for both those positions from Trotsky himself. I'm still not sure exactly. Can you guys who are former trots explain to me what the actual differences between deformed worker state and bureaucratic collectivism?
Speaker 3:So the simple well, whatever the difference is this A deformed worker state just has to be clean. It just has to be cleansed. It's like it's like a you're sick and you take an antibiotic and that's it. So you have like a hopefully not much of a political revolution, but the social revolution just doesn't have to take place. You just change the leadership and it makes it better. And the bureaucratic collectivism thesis, really that that case is that from top to bottom the revolution has to be all over again. That like a social revolution and a political revolution, and really I don't think that there's too much of a distinction in reality, but formally that's the way they present it anyways.
Speaker 2:Right. The bureaucratic collectivism says that there's a strata in control of the Soviet Union that has made itself into something resembling a new class that needs to be overthrown, and the way that differs from state capitalism is what is? I think the bureaucratic collectivists don't imply that the state has substituted itself into the role of capitalists, that there's still collectivism going on, rather than you know, the state acting as capitalists extracting surplus value through you know something like the same sort of method of accumulation that happens under capitalism.
Speaker 1:One of the things we need to be pretty clear on. On that, though, state capitalism is not originally associated.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:With the left opposition of the Bolshevik party is associated with left communists, who were never in the common term, and with antithesis.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they were criticizing the Soviet Union, like by 1919, as a state capitalist formation.
Speaker 2:And that's what Otto Stroster calls the Soviet Union, the state capitalist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and interestingly, like I was reading, stuff like that comes from the right, it comes from social democrats, it comes from anarchists it comes from left oppositionists. Trotsky's initial two formations are unique to them, although interestingly, sound a lot like both the justification for the Cultural Revolution in the 1930s under Stalin and which is the removal bureaucratic elements, yeah, and the Great Porcelotarian Revolution in China. Both have similar like critiques of what is going on.
Speaker 2:And that's also Stroster's critique as well. It's the same thing. Yeah, it's that bureaucratic caste that's acting as the capitalist class does under capitalism. What are the original theories of state capitalism? I know there's the CLR James and Raya Donetskaya one. And what's the other one? You said there were two, oh, there's a bunch. I know that, but the original two Like the.
Speaker 1:OGC one's the anarchist one, which implies that there's since there's markets at all.
Speaker 2:No, I meant within Marxism.
Speaker 1:Oh, there's the, there's the, there's kind of the Council Communist one, which is that Lenin is a bourgeois thinker.
Speaker 2:I mean I've seen the Council Communists theories of that, but I was thinking specifically in the Trotskyist movement. So there's, I know that there's the Tony Cliff one, but that doesn't happen until the 50s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that one. I always think you have the Marxist, humanist one, which initially is Trotskyist but eventually just completely leaves, right, I think you should be here to talk about this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, stupid, I've never heard of this person somehow. It's someone named Ante Siliga, who's a Croatian. He was an early left oppositionist and he left in the 30s because he because he was a proponent of a theory of state capitalism.
Speaker 2:Apparently. Oh interesting, I had never heard of him either.
Speaker 3:The very first time I like I heard of it was a I mean the first before this conversation. The very first, the earliest iteration of it that I took seriously at all comes from the Johnson Forest tendency, which is C L R James and Ryan Danevsky. Yeah, and it's, that's in the 50s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's in the 50s as well. Yeah Well, the the Tony Cliff one is after the the Johnson Forest one, and it is infinitely less sophisticated, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the Tony Cliff one, I think, is really weak. It's very weak.
Speaker 2:I never agreed with it, even when I was in the ISO. I just kind of kept my mouth shut about it.
Speaker 1:So the Shackmanites, do they become state capitalists?
Speaker 3:No, not, not, not ever. They always have.
Speaker 2:You're always bureaucratic collectivism.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Um, and the reason why these two theories would require so much distinction is also lost on me. I don't know why, like all three of us couldn't be in a group in the 40s or whatever and think three different things about how the Soviet Union needs to be reformed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, it definitely worth splitting over, especially when you've got like a group of 20 people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's. It's. It's an interesting problem. Okay, because we've already stated two tendencies, ironically, from the beginning, without realizing that we did it. One Trotsky's party, some of you themselves as parties, yes, um, in most cases now, that's not true. When you get to the, to the socialist workers party, right, that's when they just decide we're going to embrace the party. But in general, most Trotsky's thinkers see themselves as as running a tendency to reenter into either the common turn or a labor party, and in the United States that labor party is also something they have to invent.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So um the campaign for the mass party of labor so that we can like be entryists into the mass party of labor.
Speaker 1:Right, which I used to mock the IMT for, like okay, you literally want us to invent a party so you can enter. So you can enter it. Yep, um, uh. But apparently it's a long standing tendency in Trotskyism. Going back to their original position on the common turn we're going into, the French turn right.
Speaker 2:It's what I always thought it was.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so it's, it's 36. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, so I. It's funny that we used to kind of mock the IMT for the. For that one we were in the ISO, but in the ISO all we were doing is tailing Democrat social movements, democrat led social movements, so it's like like we have any fucking room to criticize at all.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the irony of all this right Like yeah, like, uh, like today, the PSL, the WMP will criticize, Um, uh, both the, the CP USA and the and the DSA. But what do they do they? They enter front groups with democratically aligned, yeah Um activist orgs and whatnot, like decarceration movements, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's popular frontism, right yeah, that's okay, because it's a. Stalin said it was okay.
Speaker 1:The thing is in popular frontism is actually interesting because we we should, actually, we're going to have to eventually spell that distinction out.
Speaker 2:It's been popular frontism and, uh, united frontism.
Speaker 3:I think Varna is in.
Speaker 2:Frozen yes.
Speaker 1:We've all been frozen, can you hear?
Speaker 2:me now yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're back.
Speaker 1:Between popular frontism and united frontism. Yeah, and the two forms of united frontism. This is a couple forms of united frontism.
Speaker 3:So a couple forms of popular frontism.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, the thing is also popular frontism in America can't look like it does in Europe, because America's not a parliamentary system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it also requires like popular frontism requires an independent organization that cooperates with and actually takes the lead in struggles of whatever. Anti-fascism is what it originally meant to be. Yeah, but how do you do that with the Democratic Party in the United States when your fucking sect has like 147 people in it? You don't.
Speaker 3:You just can't.
Speaker 1:You can't, which is why the heroic period and you. This is why the irony exists between Europe and the US. Third periodism is a disaster for European socialists and communists.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and in the US, however, because the various communist parties do not tolerate jingoistic socialism, one of the few good things that come out of the conditions of entering the common turn.
Speaker 1:It means that when they're also holding third periodism since there's no social democratic party of any size for us to like beef with and call social fascists it means that communists organize independently, and that's really when the strength of this grows.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I was about to imply that ends in 36 is third periodism, and that's when you have a pivot towards the popular front. Now Trotskyists are already out by this time. They've already done their stuff with the Teamsters. They're already at that point. But I think one of the reasons there might have been enough room, there might have been enough people in the Trotskyist movement in America to split and grow at all, was that a whole lot of contradictions emerged as soon as the popular front was tried to be instituted in the United States, and it helped the Communist Party in the 40s, but not at first. And then, as I pointed out, the people this is my favorite thing to point out is all the deals they make in the 30s and 40s are the very things that are used to crush them in the 50s, even up to and including the National Labor Relations Act.
Speaker 1:But the Trotskyists are kind of outside of that. When is the SWP formed again, let me that's 1940. Yeah, so it's later. Yeah. So it's right before the formal end of the common turn to you. So the SWP? The SWP is like, what makes it? Why does it come into being?
Speaker 3:Because the Communist League of America decided to stop trying to go back to the Communist Party and also the Workers' Party of, I think, the Workers' Party of America, or maybe it's just the Workers' Party, I'm not really sure what this. Whatever, it is James Burnham and Max Schachtman's group, which was also led big strikes and was the other independent semi. Whatever, it was the other influential left-wing group that was on the Communist Party. They merged, so they had to come up with a name that fit both of their trajectories, and so they weren't the Workers' Party too, they were the Socialist Workers' Party.
Speaker 2:Weren't they instructed to merge by Trotsky. They might have been actually, if I remember correctly. It's been a while since I've read this history. Like Trotsky got assassinated at years.
Speaker 1:Can you repeat yourself?
Speaker 2:And that was the year that Trotsky got assassinated, right 1940?.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, trotsky, assassinated in 1940. The interesting thing about also that this is before For example, chin Duzhu, who is a major figure in the early Communist Party of China, who opposes the proletarian NACIS thesis, becomes more and more involved in the left opposition. And there are left opposition movements in Vietnam and in a lot of Asia, which is something that's kind of forgotten now. But the war basically wipes all of them out. So in 38, you have this feeling that like, oh, there is a real international current for the left opposition in the Communist world everywhere by the end of the 40s. Trotsky is really strong in the United States and really strong is in quotation marks France, where they're significant, and some parts of Latin America. They're kind of a minority tendency in Mexico. They're beginning to have a major influence in Argentina.
Speaker 3:But Bolivia too. They were there for a little while anyways. Yeah, also, apparently I was wrong. I just looked this up. The Socialist Workers Party split in 1940 because it was formed in 1937.
Speaker 2:Oh, and it split from what.
Speaker 3:So the Socialist I mean. The rest of what I said is still true the Communist League and the Workers' Party merged and made the Socialist Workers' Party and then in 1940, a lot of Workers' Party types left again and they formed a new Workers' Party which is separate from the Socialist Workers' Party. But they don't ever have much of that. Burnham was already gone by.
Speaker 1:This time too. Burnham leaves in like 39.
Speaker 3:I think so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he leaves, likei know he leaves before Trotsky's death, because his leaving letter is to Trotsky himself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and he left over the fact, according to him, that the Soviet Union deserved no more support and the Socialist Workers' Party, you know, could not come around to that position.
Speaker 2:No, they just find more and more reasons to support the Soviet Union and all of the weird little third-world nationalist projects that come up throughout the rest of the 20th century.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is the irony of the accusation that Trotsky is where like direly opposed to the USSR, because it's just not true.
Speaker 2:It's not, for the most part not.
Speaker 1:You have someone like Isaac Dorcher who in Europe is basically advocating for, like you know, stalling 80% bad, 20% good. We need to, you know, figure out what's part of the Marxist-Leninist movement we can make peace with and reemerge with, and it just never happens. But the other reason it never happens is like you start seeing these bigger divides between defensist and non-defensist forms of Trotskyism, and it seems to get really heightened by the Vietnam War. But that's way ahead. So let's first talk about like. So we have the creation of the Socialist Workers' Party. How effective was the Communist League Like? What did they actually achieve before they became the Socialist Workers' Party?
Speaker 3:They were the Communist League during the Minneapolis General Strike which they led in one, so like that's kind of important. I think that's the one credit they have to their name, but it's kind of a big credit though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, minneapolis General Strike or the Teamster Rebellion? Right yeah, that was straight up. Organized workers doing battle with the police and scabs open battle in the streets and then running the city like a commune. Yeah and that's pretty fucking cool.
Speaker 3:That's why they formed the Socialist Workers' Party, because they have that and they're like well, we can do that. And the Workers' Party also had a similar credit to its name. I just don't know. Toledo, yeah you're right. They led a similar strike in Toledo. So it was coming together of two independent socialist groups that led workers to victory, and the assumption, of course, would be that you merge those, and then the Communist Party is going to be replaced. The Communist Party also did that, though, in San Francisco.
Speaker 2:So, like you know, the Communist Party also did all the good work, civil rights work in the country before the 1950s.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, that's why it's so hard to like in the United States. This is a harder thing to really deal with because the Communist Party USA and the Communist Party of America were part of the common turn and they definitely answered to the common turn, but they were so far removed from events in Europe and Asia that they kind of, as long as they maintained the lines they were supposed to maintain, pretty much organizing on their own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they weren't getting killed by fascists as a result of the direction of the common turn.
Speaker 3:Right, so there's no yeah they adopted positions that were like, similar to positions that were held elsewhere, but the stakes were very low.
Speaker 2:They didn't matter. Yeah Right, Very low stakes because nothing was going to happen.
Speaker 1:It's like, oh, we're going to call social democrats social fascists. There are no social democrats in America.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there was the very small group that left the Socialist Party called the Social Democratic Federation Right, but then they went back into the Socialist Party. Yeah, I don't even know how long they existed, like a couple years maybe.
Speaker 1:You could say like the end of communist electoral I mean communist socialist electoralism with people like Victor Berger, is damaged by this. But even that Berger's wife was a member of the CPO, of the CPO of the USA. So it's like it's not clear to me that it had any effect and there's been a lot of research indicating that. You know, yes, william C Foster and stuff took lines that were dictated to them, but it didn't have a lot of effect on day-to-day organizing policy in the same way that it did in Europe. And there was, you know, communists in the United States were facing violence, but it was violence from other peristate factors. It was like it's like fighting with the Klan and shit. It's not Right.
Speaker 2:And if you were a. Trotskyist, it was violence directed at you by the communists Right. There was some real violence, you know, all throughout like from the time of the left opposition all the way up until the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember hearing stories of old Trots who joined the ISO of like being getting the shit beat out of them by showing up to picket lines to support the workers, by workers who were in the Communist Party even in like the 70s and 80s.
Speaker 1:But the Communist Party did something that got them that kind of put them at a disadvantage. One of the reasons I was always like fascinated by this is, like why is it that Trotskyism did so much better than American academia, than Marxist-Leninism, and considered, particularly considered that Marxist-Leninism had a stronger base after the 1940s, like much, like it was huge. Like you know, the only thing larger than the Communist Party in 1947 is the Socialist Party in like 18.
Speaker 1:Right, like like you've got to go pretty far back and yet by the end of the new left, the Communist Party which is, I think, people forget, only a generation.
Speaker 2:If even the whole generation, it's not even a whole generation.
Speaker 1:The Communist Party had dropped from like 60,000 to like 5,000. So we have to ask ourselves a couple of questions Like so what was going on there? One of the things I discovered is one of the interesting results of the popular front of the abandonment of third periodism is Marxist-Leninist. Like academics and stuff were under explicit orders to just not engage with Trotskyist at all. Yeah, like there might be street fights but the actual theoretical leaders were not, they weren't supposed to debate each other, which is a position I often sometimes take towards people I don't like but I think actually ended up helping Trotskyist because they could articulate their criticisms in academia and nobody could respond.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we go unchallenged, and they had that the Trump card of being able to say, look, we don't like to what's going on in the Soviet Union either, whereas MLs could not do that. So you always have, especially in the third camp, trotskyists who just would. We would always say like oh yeah, the Soviet Union, that's not socialist, that's not what we mean by socialist, that is state capitalism, you know. So I mean like there's always that disavowal of official communism that exists within Trotskyism that makes it eat more palatable to, like, you know, academia.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is Maoism. I think partly emerges from this too, because while it's anti-revisionist and still pro-Stalin, it also has a critique of the Soviet Union. There are people even within official Maoism, not just within the left opposition, who gets kicked out with, like Chinduzu, but like there are soft critiques of Stalin from Mao himself and Lushaltzi.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 70% good, 30% bad. That's what Mao said. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And like they also talk about like Stalin, like they don't defend the purges, yeah. No not Stalin's purges Right. They defend other purges, but not.
Speaker 2:Well, that depends on who you're talking about. I guess maybe in the, you know, in the Chinese Communist Party. But like American Maoists, like Friso, they do later.
Speaker 1:You're jumping up to. You're jumping up to when.
Speaker 2:Am I skipping a lot of steps?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're jumping up to like the 90s when you deal with degenerated Maoists who Because one of the interesting things that happens and I don't think people realize this but the CPUSA, by the time it's 5,000 people. It is no longer associated with the civil rights movement because you have some really big defectors, like instead of you know, you have the generation of, like Paul Robison and W E B Du Bois and whatever, and they take some interesting opinions. Like I was surprised how long the common term maintained a defense of the Japanese Empire. They don't drop it until like 1941. Really, yeah.
Speaker 1:Even while supporting Chen Kaizhek to fight against the Right, even after the anti-common term pack. It's not uncomplicated, but they don't. They're not down like it's irredeemable until 1941.
Speaker 2:Paul Stalin is incredibly. You know, shady, I mean pragmatic, right, he's trying to keep the Japanese off his ass because he's thinking about Hitler. But the entire time he's like thoroughly infiltrated their country with spies and he's funding Chen Kaizhek to fight against the Japanese Right.
Speaker 1:And yeah, but in America it means like the leadership. For example, if you go back and read E B Du Bois's position on Japan, it's actually we don't talk about it anymore.
Speaker 2:W E B Du Bois has got some weird ideas before he was a communist about Germany as well, about like Kaizhek socialism.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, he would be the only person like it, Basically praising.
Speaker 1:Bismarck some social firms. Clr James is also. It was a big Spiggler fan before he became a yeah, before he became a Marxist, so like that's not even unheard of. What is interesting about all this to me and it's something that hurts the Trotskyist, and it comes up in America now because one of the things, one of the reasons why critiquing the United States Communist movement and its Martins Limanus form is so perilous Is because they do great work on race and the Trotskyist have good lines on it, but they don't really do anything.
Speaker 3:We're just not big enough to have an effect on anything right except for the one, except for the one time that we in Minneapolis. But that concentration is not possible elsewhere right.
Speaker 1:So that. So how many? So one thing I've never really understood, like the, by the time you have the foundation of the of the fourth international. Which God, when is that? It's like the late 40s, right? No, I.
Speaker 3:Think that's also 38. I'm gonna look. Yeah, I think the first one's 38.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it is, yeah, um. So again, that's after, that's after. There's no more Commentary in Congress, but before the commons are as officially dissolved. So the four in the height of the fourth international and Trotsky's alive.
Speaker 1:There are left oppositionists from all kinds of parts of the world by the time you get to the 50s. Like I said, it survived in France, it survived the United States, it survived in Latin America. It it's, there's some of it in other parts of oh, and Britain, it's all over Britain, but it's not, it's not really a Like. There's no Chinese left opposition Right, and that's the one thing the Maoists like do not broke like they like even to this day. Like Chen Duzhi is like Almost removed from the history of Chinese Communist Party, even though he's one of the founders. So it's, it's, it's, it's a mess. And in the United States it seems like it's a big movement, but it's not a mass movement and there is a mass communist movement Like the common, like yes, it's only 60,000, but again, you're not gonna have anything that size till the SDS and the SDS doesn't have an official ideology like so yeah, the Communist Party was the last like significant force on the left, well, I mean of any kind.
Speaker 2:Yeah even the the size of the Communist Party, the 60,000 members, is Not indicative of its reach either.
Speaker 1:Right because it.
Speaker 2:It was incredibly influential in the labor movement.
Speaker 1:You know and had well and the.
Speaker 2:CIO. Yeah, and had Incredibly large number of front groups and fellow travelers that weren't party members but were still aligned with the Communist Party.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think I think by the by the time the Second World War breaks out, there it was, there were one million former Communist Party members, which is to say people who, whatever, could not like hold up their end of Some or another obligation, but they weren't like former left wingers, they were just former members of the party. So they were still like active in some other way, which that actually makes the Communist Party and its Extent and its reach quite enormous.
Speaker 1:Right again. The only thing is is as big as is dabs up to night 1919. Yeah, because, if you like even though I think I think you only dealing with a hundred thousand or so former members of the Socialist Party they can control, like what? Something like 12, the 14% of the overall vote, which is crazy, like, like, so. So the 20th century is A period, particularly after the war, a period of socialist decline.
Speaker 1:And what makes us so funny, trotsky is want to do entry ism, but they have to build a labor party, but they get hit with With Kaft Hartley, but in the 50s, which makes that effectively a possible. The traditional route, traditional route for people know, is Like, basically the AFL CIO starts, just instead of lobbying, someone would coal ash, coal ass into a party itself. And the and and Kaft Hartley is designed I mean, I don't think they ever stated this anywhere, but it seems pretty clearly designed to make sure that never happens. Also, furthermore, the popular front, with with the Democratic Party, means that the, the Communist Party, while it does have its own party, can't encourage the formation of a mass labor party.
Speaker 2:Right. In fact they Specifically oppose it. When one was true, I guess the Socialist Party and I don't remember who else approached the Communist Party To oh yeah yeah. The form a labor party in the 30s.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was the, the formation of the farmer labor party, and the communists stayed outside of it. Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:Even though they could have supported it. One of those another world historic mistakes caused by fetishizing the fucking Soviet model they could have supported it, even as popular front is. But just you know you mean social fascism you can't support social fascism, which is that's enough to give anybody's paying attention to this sort of shit at the time whiplash right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. So that's the. That's the two things that cause the. The other thing they heard the communists. They were they, they were a pair from it, but they lose a ton of members. So we do need to talk about this. A lot of the enemies in that million that you mentioned in former Communist Party come at one time. Yeah, that is the Montauk ribbon-top pack. Yes, that that actually like I Think 10,000, 10,000 Communist Party members leave at once and that benefits the Trotskyist by greatly. Like they get a whole Lot of people who are like oh well, these left oppositionists have a point if you're making deals with Nazis.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's also when they, when the SWP grows, and also when they get most of their black and and their Jewish members, because those Are all former members of the Communist Party that left for the same reason. They had a pretty good reason to also.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean like part of the Molotov ribbon-top pack that people don't really talk about. I mean because it you can. I've always hear ML saying like look, this is just Stalin trying to buy time. Right was returning Communists who fled Germany for sanctuary in the Soviet Union to the Gestapo to be killed and tortured.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, also, they like they divided Poland in half and they like, yeah, you know, they came to the middle and they they shook hands. There's all these photos of, like the Wehrmacht and the Red Army like having cigarettes together and stuff and like that's more than buying time.
Speaker 2:You know photos of the of the streets of Berlin with interspersed Soviet and swastika flags.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they also make arms deal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's one of they. It should be a lot harder to defend than it is the arms deals go all the way back to, like, the Weimar period.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, they just continued them.
Speaker 2:They actually continue them all the way up until there are trains entering the Germany from the Soviet Union with raw materials and whatever else, on the day that Operation Barbarossa kicks off.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that one of my unpopular things, when people are like the Soviet Union won, won the war and a mckess, absolutely true, they're also maybe a part of why it happened in the first place.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's like I mean a big part of all of this is the Mikhail Tukhachevsky's deep operations, what's the term doctrine, for warfare Is kind of the Blitzkrieg and so like the red army taught the Germans how to use it and then they got rid of all the people in the red army that were like familiar enough with it to defend against it.
Speaker 2:It's it's more like. It's more like the uh, the, the Reichswehr and the red army developed combined arms warfare tactics together. Um, because I mean there's there's a lot of impetus of the of the Reichswehr developing Blitzkrieg on their own. But okay, yeah, but it's it's more like that doctrines that were being developed in tandem were lost by the soviets with the Purging of the officer corps, but not in germany.
Speaker 3:Right right.
Speaker 1:And that's why they almost lost the second world war, like right away um, I mean, the other thing is like Stalin was not prepared for Stalin grad. Everything I've ever read I mean, yeah, whether or not you think Stalin is a good, is a good war leader after the war actually begins, and this has become highly debated, even much, much non-Marx slainist, and I am of two minds about it. There's times where he seems to have some really brilliant generals and we talked about before, and there's times where, like, why the hell did you do that?
Speaker 2:well, I mean, if you the the world war, two historians don't think Stalin is a brilliant general. They think Stalin has the presence of mind enough to defer to his generals after catastrophes Strike the Soviet Union, whereas Hitler never does right. So, like Stalin, lets the professionals take over at some point. Hitler never does that, he just gets more and more involved.
Speaker 3:Compared to Hitler. Yes, stalin was, was a good general or a good war sign leader.
Speaker 1:Yeah, also compared to Churchill. Well. Churchill was a fucking moron, he's like you know, like all the Churchill worship just baffles me, like you know, anything about the war. If you think Churchill was doing anything good all he does.
Speaker 2:He like stumbles from like Catastrophe to catastrophe, like there are a few bright spots, dunkirk being one of them. But like everything else that happens positive, that happens because the British do something is because of German ineptitude or lack of resources, not because of like British military brilliance. Right like fucking a la lameine. That has way more to do with the Germans not having enough fucking supplies and materials to be able to persecute that fucking campaign, prosecute that campaign not, we're talking about this.
Speaker 1:We're talking about European feeders. Let's go back to the America and talk about Trotsky's.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm really good at derailing us into talking about World War II for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if you, if you weren't a former trot, I would actually be suspicious of your politics for that reason. Um, usually people who are really into war too are like well, Dude, I'm middle-aged.
Speaker 2:I'm middle-aged now you know. I mean that's that's one of the things you have to do is get really into World War II. No, I was always in really into World War II. In fact, it's what led me to become a historian but then I switched what I was focusing on.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say you might have been more into World War II. When we were like kids you were like yeah 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one of the things that trotsky has to get accused of is being fifth colonists and fascist sympathizers, and one of the one of the. One of the complications of this is, like their stances on the popular front during the war. Yeah, what are the official stances in regards to the war held up by the s by the time you get to the swp?
Speaker 2:Suicidal ones is what they are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean the way that it's taught, talked about now is, uh, to never cooperate with any formation other than a workers formation, and uh, well, I don't think that anyone can actually do that, or has that really done that?
Speaker 2:So, more practically, they oppose the no-strike pledge that the unions make during the war, in fact, lead strikes during the war. Uh, they send Trotskyists, russian speakers On the Len least missions to evangelize to the Soviet Union about rising up, overthrowing Stalin, and and uh, you know, yeah, that's no, very well. Yeah.
Speaker 1:See this and this I will say. The reason why I think we need to talk about this is this is one of the times where I'm like trotsky is reacting so dumb that some of the accusations made by Marxist Linenest Uh stick, even though what? What they're accusing them of doing? Is that really false? Like they aren't really shelling for the fascist, no, but they are Like not cooperating to the extreme. Now I will say that no strike pledge ends up fucking everybody eventually, you know the most right pledges bullshit, Absolutely.
Speaker 1:but but like the idea that you're going to, like, lead a revolution against Stalin in the middle of fighting Germany. Uh, that's, yeah, that. That's where some of that stuff sticks.
Speaker 3:That's the original. Yeah, it's the the sin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the sin that they're guilty of is being delusional and being Touristic and being idealistic.
Speaker 1:Right, um, I mean, effectively, what they're doing is out third perioding, the third periodist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why? Trotskyists are fucking good at that like.
Speaker 1:Like they're. Like, you know, we need to enter a labor party, uh, but also, we can only work with workers formations and uh, we're gonna find workers, some nations formations, so strictly that we can work with nobody, um, so I mean, I guess they're not quite as bad as, like, say, dutch council communists who won't worry to work with unions, but it's it's, uh, it's it's along the lines right, and also Marxists that don't work with.
Speaker 2:Unions are not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're like unions are, Are, are, are areas of bureaucrat, of bourgeois control, and I'm like well, so good, good fucking good fucking like finding something in capitalist society.
Speaker 2:That's not, I was gonna say so is the world?
Speaker 3:Yeah, right Um.
Speaker 1:Um, it's like, yeah, duh, that's why we need to be in them to like, rustle that away. It's not, it's like let's, let's not work with nation states because, uh, ultimately need to abolish them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course, but like I mean, that's what anarchists think well, but but at this point it's just like there's during this time period. I get why trotskyism is not popular and and the in the versions that become more popular in hindsight, or like Draperism or whatever, and it's and it's because it makes more sense Once the debates are over. And the thing that's even weirder about this so we're talking about this period, that they're doing this, but they're still actually also defending the soviet union, so that it's confusing as fuck. If you are a person who is, uh, coming into this milieu, I I can't imagine trying to try and explain this to people Actually, like yeah, so we.
Speaker 1:That's why Tony cliff just doesn't yeah, we're gonna try to overthrow Stalin in the middle of a war, but we're gonna defend the soviet union against its western Competitors, even though what we're doing could cause the soviet union to collapse and live a nazi invasion.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean I, the idea was that only like a couple dozen people actually were like deeply committed Stalinists, and so you just get rid of them. And then the whole rest of the Soviet Union was actually, you know, more or less sympathetic to the real communism that they espoused.
Speaker 1:And you know there's no way to check that assumption, so they just didn't see, my assumption has always been, from what I've read about like, about so on, as from like Sheila Fitzpatrick, for example, is that like it's more or less true that so on, as I'm didn't run that deep actually in the Soviet Union, but like it also wasn't that opposed.
Speaker 2:Like there were moments of like mass mobilization of, like the populace in support of Stalinist measures. There's like, like, if you look at, the purges are one, which is how a lot of fucking the MLs argue that you know the more Stalinist MLs I mean argue that the purges were actually, you know, democratic. Yeah, because Paul Cox shot one yeah yeah, there's a certain amount of logic to that. Doesn't mean it's not completely barbarous and it wasn't stoked from above, sort of like the cultural revolution.
Speaker 1:Also Gina, though, is actually more specific. It wasn't like, yeah, they were going for the purges, but the purging of the old Bolsheviks was a little bit more targeted.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's absolutely correct. Yeah, but eventually Stalin has to stop the purges because they've taken on a momentum of their own and there's too many fucking people being denounced and too many people being shot and it gets way out of control. And it's obvious that what's going on is people's paranoia and personal grudges are ending up with people in gulags.
Speaker 3:The collectivization drive is also a very yes, that's another one. Yeah, it's like because a whole lot of former peasants who had been, you know, they were in the Red Army for a couple of years and they got their basic education, then their political education and then they went back home and so, like we're talking about, like I don't know, all over the entire Soviet Union there were former Red Army soldiers who were committed communists and they were the ones that talked about collectivization and it was popular it was. It was. The fact it was popular is second to whether or not it was a good idea, but still yeah, or whether or not it was carried out with anything, anything resembling like a human touch, right.
Speaker 1:So my stance, so one of the one of my popular stances with with Trotsky is and I've had this for years a one I have no evidence of Trotsky when it done the same thing and what comes to collectivization and the problems that that led to and I mean it was- initially his idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and B it's some of this is a problem of accelerated development, allah and Ploekhanov and Ploekhanov's warning. Now, when I talk about Ploekhanov I want to say that like I don't think they actually had to do it the way that they did it, I don't think they had to develop. You know, I kind of think the, the piggybacking, the piggybacking off of off of a former capitalist society, giving the peasants communes, the technology applied by the various Zurich letters, that that Marx wrote, which I think those letters get more and more fascinating to me because they weren't sent and that's why Lenin and and Ploekhanov didn't know about them. But there are people who claim now that Ploekhanov actually did get his hands on them and suppressed them.
Speaker 1:So I'm like yeah, I don't know, One of the things I will say is that is that Ploekhanov's fear is correct, but what he does, which is basically like, let's build up bourgeois capitalism to build up socialism, would have also been a disaster. Like so it's because you know what a best it would have put them in a similar situation to the social, to the second international social and crafts in Germany.
Speaker 2:And at worst, what like? I think that's what fascism started out fast, right, Right, exactly. It's the corporate harmonization of classes and mitigation of the worst excesses of the exploitation of the working class so that you could have a developmental capitalist project. Right. Initially, that's what the fascists wanted to do.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and then and then the. And their promise was and we will turn this over to the workers as long as they cooperate with the capitalist, they will have the predominant share, and which is also why I point out the like co ops not inherently social or not inherently socialist in any Marxian sense at all.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's the, the corp, the whole idea of left corporatism is, which is what the the fascists start off advocating before they're actually the fascists back, when they're like weird syndicalists that are leaning nationalist. But yeah, that's at the core of the National syndicalism and fascist ideology.
Speaker 1:economically, and that's also where. That's also where the proletarian nation stuff developing in both China and in Italy is so fascinating. But again, trotsky's don't have a whole lot to say to this. They don't have a whole lot to say during the war and you got more and more defectors. So you have Burnham and 39. I think he's like the first of the OG big defectors from Trotsky ism, who does not become like a regular old communist, like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And when did Shackman the?
Speaker 1:50s, 50s, it's in the 50s. Okay, yeah, well, no, I think Shackman, shackman, because Draper is out of the. The Draper is out of the SWP by 47. So it's earlier. Now I'm gonna look it up.
Speaker 3:I'm looking right now.
Speaker 1:Because I'm literally reading an article from 1947 when Draper is arguing with, with the, with the, with the SWP theorist.
Speaker 2:So he breaks with Trotsky and 38. Who Burnham Shackman?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but see when is he record Trotsky ism.
Speaker 2:Looks like 1940 is when, or no, not? Trotsky ism so in 40, he develops his third camp ideas.
Speaker 3:It's kind of it's kind of tough because he doesn't formally break with Trotsky ism at all, does he?
Speaker 1:know he I think it is a 58 and he goes into the SPA. Yes, that's exactly, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he in 58, the ISL, the International Socialist League, right Dissolves and he goes into the Socialist Party. So it's it. Yeah, I was right, it was 58.
Speaker 1:And so Shackman just spends the rest of his life ending things, because he also dissolves the Socialist Party with Harrington. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And he also blocks communists from joining the Socialist Party, like anyone who would ever had CP membership could not have SP membership.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but he's where the Democratic Centralist Band comes from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, which is still actually it's still in place and both to see. I don't know if it's still in place formally in the CP USA. It was when I was in it, but they were malice and Trotsky is groups in the CP USA, so like it was, just like, well, we're not Democratic Centralist and weirdly I. What are the interesting things about the CP USA when I was in it is it didn't call itself this, but the radicals faction was a mixture of malice, trotsky is and Luxemburg is, so we were basically Marciites, but we didn't know that Whenever.
Speaker 2:I was in the CP.
Speaker 1:USA. I remember arguing, not arguing. I was in the FP USA, not the CP.
Speaker 2:USA. Right, okay, yeah, when I was in the CP USA I remember arguing with or discussing with an older comrade Lenin when I mean older, I mean he was in like World War Two about you know how Trotsky is like, you know there's no point in being against Trotsky in the post Soviet world and how the CP USA should like embrace, like Trotsky is joining the party. And I was kind of a soft Trotsky defender. I later became a Trotskyist, but I was already a soft Trotsky defender when I was, when I was officially in ML.
Speaker 1:The problem that a lot of the problems that we have, people have a Marxist Leninism, ironically is created by the anti revisionism controversies, and I think that's why when we do the history of Trotskyism, we're like we're not going to talk about the 40s, we're just not going to fucking talk about the 40s. Shut up, don't mention the 40s, even though, like, there's just inflexive members with the Molotov ribbon truck package 38, 39. Yeah, they don't keep a lot of those people either.
Speaker 2:Well, not after, especially not after after the war. Like there's, you know all of, of course, everything that happens after the war with the Red Scare, but like, yeah, well, also the theft Hartley act, yeah, that's hardly as well, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So we have all that stuff coming up. But what's interesting is like kind of the heroic period for Trotskyism after Trotsky's death is the late 50s up until the up until the 70s. Yeah, but that heroic periods also overlap with like hyper fragmentation, because while there's like three or four splits in the US group during the 30s and 40s we've already mentioned some of them and some people like Shaq. Shaq was one of these people like I can't even figure out who's in what, because he develops that's. I was like he's a bureaucratic collectivist but he also develops their campus, which is why they end up aligned with the Cliffites in Britain, even though they don't share the same theory of what the Soviet Union was.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in some ways that's, you have to kind of respect that, because, like it turns out that it doesn't really matter and he at least didn't act like it mattered.
Speaker 2:A lot, of, a lot of old Shaq Mennites in the US joined the international socialists. That became the international social organization Right. In fact we knew a couple of them when we were in the. Us. So yeah, old Shaq Mennites, that were still Shaq Mennites.
Speaker 3:I can even think of one person who, even today, is still a Shaq Mennite.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, now solidarity that was 86, I think yeah.
Speaker 1:That's way later. I'm just trying to remember because they're also out of this.
Speaker 3:But yeah, okay, they have. Their roots can be traced back to this period right now.
Speaker 2:So they leave the SWP, though, right?
Speaker 1:Well, we can talk about that whenever we get to that, yeah, so one of the things that holds chrusskism together, though, is we have these key figures. Now we've been talking about outlier figures like Shaq Menn, abern Draper, which is left Shaq Mennism, but let's talk about the man, the myth, james Cannon, because one of the things that I think we have to deal with is James Cannon's personality probably held some of those faction divides off, because they really get bad after he dies.
Speaker 3:I mean like if you were going to have like an origin, like a single figure, play that much of a role, you could do a lot worse than Cannon. Cannon was a wobbly in the IWW, then he was in the Socialist Party during Debs, then he was a member of the leader of the Communist Party. He was a delegate to the common turn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he was a delegate of the common turn, a friend of William Z Foster.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like Cannon was what Cannon represents, chrusskism at its best.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then he actually met with Chrotsky as well, yeah.
Speaker 1:Now he's still alive during the 50s and 60s. He doesn't die in the 1924, but he becomes less and less of a of a like glue figure as this goes on. Why do you think that happens?
Speaker 3:He's retired, he's like sort of told even to like not try to influence the party so much and I guess he accepts the discipline. So he, like he lives in I think he lives in LA or somewhere near LA and he just he just lives out his retirement.
Speaker 1:What was the?
Speaker 3:reason he was retired in 1953.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what was the reason that he was, like, forced to retire? Just, I think it's because he was old.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Born in 1890.
Speaker 3:So yeah, but his, he's replaced by Farrell Dobbs, who is still a pretty good leader. Yeah, it's not until the guy after Farrell Dobbs it's a. Whatever his name is, is it Jack Barnes?
Speaker 2:Jack Barnes. Jack Barnes and Mary Alice Waters.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yes, it's Jack Barnes and instead of Peter Kameho. And that's really what happens to Chrotsky is like yeah, there's just no turning back from that decision.
Speaker 1:So Peter Kameho is an interesting figure later on. I mean, he's a key founder of the Green Party. He was also one of these big like let's reach out to the left wing Maoist and like get them back in and form, like like Marcy yeah, marcy's one of the first. So let's talk about the splitters. So we have, so we have Cannon holding the whole period together and he's he's an inspirational figure, but he's an inspirational figure in Charger's things during the period that we don't want to talk about, right, yeah, so like he's basically holding them together as a, as a as a personality during the 40s, but it's also that's that's the time I mean one of the things I used to ask people like Cannon's great, but when you ask about his leadership for Trotskyism, it's like or the SWP, it's like he himself is fine, but that's not a fine period for Trotsky, for Trotskyist in the United States. It's just not a good period for them and I think I think if you hadn't had a leader like Cannon, they would have ceased to exist.
Speaker 3:Yeah, probably would have ceased to exist. Yeah. You know you'd have a bunch of shackmans and burnems Like they probably, they probably would have ceased to exist by the late 40s. You know whenever what's his name Henry Wallace, whenever he runs for president on a progressive party ticket.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:That's also around the same time that Sam Marcy founds what eventually becomes the, the workers world parties. All right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh damn, I didn't know that Cannon actually went to prison for opposing the Second World War.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and as shackman took his place for a while Cannon was in prison.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Interesting, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:Although I always like opposing the Second World War Not as smart as the first one. I was. It was always one of these things with, like John Dewey, of people who don't know. I have a deep distrust of John Dewey and one of the reasons is like he opposed World War Two but not World War One.
Speaker 2:He opposed the wrong damn war. That's stupid. He had it backwards. Yeah, Look like there's. There's something admirable about the Trotskyist opposition to the Second World War, because it is a principled anti-imperialist stance Like I get that.
Speaker 1:It's also fucking political suicide in a way that in a way it's a principled anti-imperialist stance in a and yet it's one of the ones that I'm just like that doesn't make any sense. Like it was political suicide to oppose World War I. But opposing World War I made sense to you, like not just in a principled manner, it made tactical sense, like even though it was politically unpopular, although I mean, deb still did pretty well to run from prison.
Speaker 2:But I mean, I think it was more politically unpopular, definitely more politically unpopular, especially in left circles, to oppose World War II Absolutely, and on top of the fact that, like Most of the people who oppose, World War II were right wingers. Right If you don't support the Soviet Union's defense of itself against the Nazis. That is an unequivocally right wing stance. You know Right. There's no one else who takes that stance, except for right wingers and in the Trumpist.
Speaker 3:Well, I think also Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party have a very like weak need kind of mealy mouth, sort of opposition to war, and they don't really have a clarified position, but effectively they oppose the war too, they just mostly just by shutting up about it though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what did the Love Steinites do?
Speaker 3:I think that they break up, they like shatter into. They basically cease to exist by the Second World War. But I think for a little while they are the communists, whatever they call it, international communist opposition or something. I'm gonna look that up too, but I think by then they don't exist anymore.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so the war kind of like forces Trotsky to hold a weird position that they don't talk about anymore, and the Love Steinites I mean this yeah, by 1940, by the 40s, by the middle of the war, they don't really exist anymore.
Speaker 1:So this is an area that's really ugly. You have Sam Marcy. He's not the first splitter. The first splitters are the Shacknites, right, but then you have Sam Marcy, who splits for the opposite reason. So the SWP is not defenseless enough and they're taking I don't remember what the official SWP stands towards the Hungarian situation.
Speaker 3:I think that there were four of them, I think that they're in favor of it because they see the possibility of a revolution like a fully fledged revolution, and Marcy does not.
Speaker 1:Right, so Marcy.
Speaker 3:Also in China. Like it's Mao. That's like a big part for Marcy. Marcy is like an early Maoist, kind of like a very soft but like stringent supporter of Mao and the SWP is not.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's only gonna get accelerated by the fact that the S&P's defense is still in sign on Soviet split, right, so Marcy leaves. So now we've had two major at least two major splits in the American Trotskyism. We have the Marcy-I-Split, which today it's like those parties are so removed from Trotskyism that you wouldn't. They don't even like. Members in those parties don't know that they were originally Trotskyists and considered themselves as such even in the 60s and 70s, 80s even. You have the third campus of various varieties and they're gonna merge with other international tendencies. You got other tendencies that happen. Then you have the split off of the Orthodox Trots. Now we associate now Trotskyist Orthodoxy. I think it's mostly associated with the IMT. The IMT is not, you know, us-born.
Speaker 3:No, yeah, it's also like it's not even until like 2005 or something before it even comes to the US.
Speaker 1:So who was the Orthodox Trotskyist who split off from the SWP in the early 60s? So we have the Marcy-I-Split. We talked about these splits before. Now, one of the things that we're talking about is, like, what defines Trotskyism, and we actually haven't talked about this, because one of the interesting things about what defines Trotskyism is, after Trotsky's death, most of them don't actually give you much, much grounds of actual immediate politics, so let's go like we've talked about. What defines Trotskyism is for Permanent Revolution, as opposed to Two-Staged Revolution. Yeah, political Revolution in the Soviet Union, that's pretty much. It actually Social Revolution in advanced capitalist countries, which, again, I've actually never been able to reconcile that with the fact that they're not supposed to have a Two-Staged Revolution, but that seems like a Two-Staged Revolution to me. Support for proletarian internationalism, although, theoretically, every communist does that. I guess. What that actually means, though, is the maintaining a common turn.
Speaker 3:Yeah Right, they're also pretty skeptical of any peasant-based movement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for a while. Well, extremely Like. Basically, they just call anything involving peasants reactionary, which means they also have to ignore Lenin's own writings on the dictatorship of the worker and peasant, because that doesn't come from Stalin.
Speaker 2:And Permanent Revolution Right.
Speaker 3:They have. So the SWP has a line, that's the workers and farmers government, because they're aligned for the US until the 60s. I think is for farmers to play the role in the American Revolution that peasants played in the Russian Revolution. But outside the US all peasant movements are yeah, they're very, very skeptical of.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the key Part of why sorry, go ahead, go ahead, I was gonna say, isn't that part of why Marcy leaves? That was not his only disagreement with the SWP, because he was a big supporter of Mao, and then the Hungarian Revolution was his last straw.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:So he had split with them already on Mao. And then there was another split in the 50s over Cuba, and I don't remember who it was.
Speaker 1:Well, I thought the SWP is no, they don't take their pro-Cuba line till later. Right, that's what they have.
Speaker 2:They have like a Cuban defensist kind of line always. But there is a split, as like from someone who sees I don't remember the guy's name but he says that like, actually Cuba isn't a degenerated worker state, cuba is a worker state, and he basically splits with them off that minor distinction.
Speaker 1:Is that that's?
Speaker 2:not the point. Is it Joseph Hansen? Yeah, yeah, that might be it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the Sparts and also the Freedom Socialist Party both come out of the SWP, but in the 60s yeah, they're out of 60s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Joseph Hansen leaves, but let me get back to like why we need to talk about was the Sparts like, what are the things that's so funny about this is, the things that are supposed to be endemic and definitional to Trotskyism are not, in general, what drives these splits?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And I'm not sure that.
Speaker 3:I don't think that Hansen leaves, actually. Oh really, yeah, he's just he just becomes a faction.
Speaker 1:So one permanent revolution is confusing. It is confusing even to me, Like. So what are the ideas of the permanent revolution? One is you have to have a capitalist revolution first, you have to have a bourgeois revolution. There's no like quick transition stuff. The bourgeoisie is considered passive as soon as the revolution happens. So one of the things that you see in Marxist Leninism that Trotskyist will never take up is defending a national or non-comparador bourgeoisie, Because they see the bourgeoisie as passive immediately after their own revolution. They don't have a function anymore.
Speaker 3:Oh well, and officially, the permanent revolution means that even the bourgeois revolution, the bourgeoisie barely plays a role.
Speaker 2:Right, like the workers party, can lead the bourgeois revolution and then skip over the stages of development.
Speaker 3:Just keep going yeah, yeah, that's awfully convenient for them.
Speaker 1:Well, and it makes sense in.
Speaker 3:Russia in 1917. And not at all otherwise.
Speaker 1:And not at all any other place at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and to be fair like Trotsky when he was alive. He didn't ever talk about it in any other context except for Russia, and also only in the United States, and also only in 1917.
Speaker 1:Right, you have the Kiro, the proletariat, which, okay, same thing. But that's also their distrust of the peasantry, right, yeah, and this is why they can't join with Love-Stoneites or Brachonites or the other forms of right opposition, because the right opposition is like, well, the peasantry is proletarianized and we have to include them in the revolution.
Speaker 1:Right yeah, then you have international revolution. This is the big thing. I just always point out to people that nobody, including Bakharin, actually really truly believed in socialism in one country. Yeah, nobody actually believed that. That was just a. We have to do this now until the other powers develop and then we can join up with them. No one ever thought that Russia could be a socialist country in the capitalist world in perpetuity. Nobody. Stalin never said that like. Yeah, that's actually like a Russian national Bolshevik thing or something.
Speaker 2:Well, honestly. Well, yes, and in fact that's when the like even Yosef Gerbils, and like the Strasser brothers, they soften their line towards the Soviet Union once socialism in one country is adopted. And I'm doing air quotes for those people listening because they're like, well, maybe we can actually work with the Soviets, as long as they are not trying to expand internationally. And it's a total mischaracterization of what's going on there. It's just a fucking holding action that even Lenin saw the necessity of and spoke about it at length.
Speaker 1:But, like Lenin, also talked about the need to develop state capital.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so did Bukharin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, there's also what's his name? Francis Parker Yaki. That's one of the things that he talks about. It's like oh good, this is like the Jewish elements, the cosmopolitan elements of Marxism being purged in the Soviet Union. So now the Soviet Union is national Bolshevist and we can support them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yaki, in the fascist international. I mean that comes back up and if you dealt with like alt-rightist and the 20 teens are radical traditionalists and the aughts, they all kind of believe that and they all have a weird reading of Stalin that actually kind of takes Trotsky's characterization of Stalin as like absolutely true and that's why they like him, like so yeah, and that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:And Francis Parker Yaki is around the time period that we're talking about now, in the 50s and 60s Right.
Speaker 1:And basically there's two weirdo forms of American reaction Yakiism. Weirdly, I think it's more influential now than when it actually came out?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely yeah, you can get his book on fucking Amazon.
Speaker 1:It's very strange to me so. So an international revolution is supposed to be part of it and one of the. So what we've been talking about, about what actually splits Trotsky's, are none of the things that define them Right, and that's kind of that, to me, is very, very interesting, because what splits them is Standpoints to how we're gonna pivot, to what the Soviet Union is doing, whether or not how far we're gonna take opposition to the Soviet Union, and how are we gonna justify that, aka deformed workers, state capitalism, et cetera. Now, later on Trotsky Like once, what can then Like?
Speaker 1:There's like this proliferation actually in the after the fall of the Soviet Union and right before it, of like Trotsky's theories about all this that are probably more worked out than anyone actually held at the time. But so we've centered that. We've also pointed out their tendency to be a tendency but to maintain the faction ban, but to wanna enter a workers party as a faction, until in America they formed their own party in 1940. 1940?, anyway, when did the SMP come in being in? We said earlier 38. 38, so until they formed their own party. And then there splits immediately and like One of them is the foundation of like Trotsky has become neo-conservatives.
Speaker 2:Yes, like three of them do that's true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and so do Maoists, maoists, whatever.
Speaker 3:So do communists like Benjamin Gitlow, who was famous for, like the free speech case, the communist one.
Speaker 1:He becomes an anti-communist. Yeah, one of the things that also kind of happens. That I wanna point out, though, is like Trotsky actually really erases the other left oppositionist historiography-wise. Yeah, like we don't talk about Retic or President Priyobrzehinsky, or, later on, zinoviev, or Antonov-Ovtsenko or any of these people.
Speaker 2:Well, we used to talk about Zinoviev in the ISO. I remember there was like right before I left. There was a talk at the socialism conference about how Stalinism is really just Zinovievism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean yeah, everybody hates Zinoviev and look, zinoviev kind of deserves it. He's one of the few people in the purges that I don't have any like. I don't know that he should have been killed, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for him.
Speaker 2:Well, so I guess there's that in one of the Stalin biographies I remember which one it is it's when Zinoviev's being executed, and I guess it's Kaminyev and Zinoviev together that are executed, and Zinoviev's like crying and pleading for his life and then, like you know, kaminyev is like just have some fucking self-respect and just do I like a man, jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:I think he says that we're part of the reason this is happening. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what he says. There's like we created this situation. We're part of the reason this is happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right.
Speaker 3:I didn't realize that the Socialist Equality Party formed in 64 as a split out of the SWP. Yeah, I didn't either.
Speaker 2:What faction was that? Who led that? That's North. That's David North.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay okay, I thought that they formed later in the 80s or something, but no, they get weird in the 80s.
Speaker 2:They do yeah.
Speaker 1:But they form earlier, I mean. So one of the interesting things is different in the United States and I'm gonna pair us to Britain now Because Trotskyists think that there needs to be a workers party at which they can enter into faction, but they maintain the Bolshevik faction ban within themselves. This leads to all the splitting, but there's nothing for them to enter into in the United States.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like that's not the case in other parts of the world. Like Trotskyists can enter into other parties labor parties, the socialist party, et cetera they can't in the US.
Speaker 3:Well, for a little while they joined the socialist party.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, that's their. The entryism is in the socialist party, yeah.
Speaker 3:But after that there's not. That's in the.
Speaker 2:In the 30s.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because it's after they come out. They formed the Socialist Workers Party, right, I think yeah, so they're only in the Socialist Party for like two years.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:But at any rate, yeah, after that there is no, there's nothing for them to join All the way up until well. So, Wallace, in the Progressive Party, which they, which they, support that campaign, but it doesn't go anywhere. So it's really not until the Green Party is formed that there is even a thing for them to enter Right. And also no group ever actually enters into the Green Party. I was gonna say individual.
Speaker 1:Trotsky, I mean Trotskyists. A former Trotskyist co-founded it. I mean one of the things about Kameho is Kameho ends up taking a. He ends up like under different pretexts, because he's not opposed to the, to the Hungarian Revolution or the Prague Spring, but he ends up taking basically Marcy's party, basically Marcy's position later, like in the 70s, Like we need to reach out to these Maoists and re-incorporate together, get over our ultra leftism, et cetera.
Speaker 2:There is a little bit of entryism going on in the Green Party and the for the ISO in the early 2000s, though.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I guess that's true, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that we have to like point out. So the American split-offs of the canon. We talked about this before, but we have the SEP. When did the Spart split? That's in the 60s too. Yeah, and that's over stances about Castro, right.
Speaker 3:I think so yeah.
Speaker 1:And the Spartacists league themselves splits. Now we went out with all this on the first episode, but these splits are happening and the Trotskyites that can enter a party, aka the British Trotskyites, seem to be the people who swoop in and keep American Trotskyism alive after the 80s. Because while there are American Trotskyist parties, the dominant ones, even the ones that are founded in the US, have ties to the British ones. They're not the US like, quote, indigenous Trotskyist parties.
Speaker 3:Like the.
Speaker 1:SEP just slowly declares the SEPs.
Speaker 3:The ISO. Yeah, Also like the ISO forms in 77, but they are the American section basically of the British SWP.
Speaker 1:Right and so by the 70s American Trotskyism's, dominated by a relationship to British Trotskyism, Mostly the ISO, but also the Grand Tites the Grand Tites are, the Woodites is what they probably actually are Solidarity et cetera. And so that that to me is interesting because we talked about why are there Trotsky's parties after 1992, but the American Trotsky's parties, except for the most militant, small and weird ones, the, the SEP, the Sparts, the Sparts splits, such as the International Bolshevik Tennessee, etc.
Speaker 2:They're all British.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the LaRoucheites, the Harringtonites, the Kamehawists in the Green Park.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to throw LaRouche in there, because a lot of people don't know that LaRouche was a Spart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sparts get weird. Yes, they do so. One of the things that's interesting is we entitled this factionalism to entryism. We got through the factionalism part. We talked about why there's an entryist tendency in Trotskyism. Because they do think the workers need their own party and they need to merge with it, similar to like Neo-Kowskis now, actually, or the second international even, like it's not. That's not a new position, that's not unique to Trotsky Right. I mean honestly, it's the historical position until the third international and the Bacar and Previzinski program changes it. Yeah, under Lenin. It's also funny that the left and right opposition actually write the program of the Communist Party in 19. But anyway, they weren't the rough and right opposition yet, but still.
Speaker 2:It's almost as if they never should have split into a left and right opposition.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I think it's really weird that the Bolshevik party is everyone's model and back when it was everyone's model, everyone was in it, and then they all split off to form their own Bolshevik party and they don't form it together ever.
Speaker 1:But we know why the Civil War faction bands and the Civil War, like the Civil War rules, are never revoked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the fetishization of a model. The fucking necessity has been turned into virtue. There we go.
Speaker 3:It turns into an article of faith.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is the irony the entire fucking time with Trotskyus, they maintain the rules that allow Stalin to exist in their own organizations Period, and thus end up creating their own situation over and over and over again. The situation of their birth is recapitulated over and over and over again because they insist, as an article of absolute faith, on maintaining that element of the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 2:One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Speaker 1:All right, this leads to the Fourth International, this is the Fifth International, this leads to the Orthodox Trotskyus parties, et cetera. But I guess I'm going to ask you something the American Trotskyus parties, technically? I was actually thinking about this. We think about the Intraest Trotskyus tendencies. Most of them are British. The American ones aren't Intraest by and large, although they do some of the same things. But the ISO is not technically Intraest, but it was.
Speaker 2:Not as a matter of principle. The Intraism of the ISO is sort of just tailism. Right, it was tailist. Yeah, they tail the Green Party around trying to pick off the most radical members. That sort of thing.
Speaker 1:And they would later tell the Democratic Party and.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, not on purpose but in practice, Right? Yeah Well, maybe on purpose. I don't know. I don't know what they were thinking up there.
Speaker 1:The IMT is harder, solidarity and salt are. I guess there are different kinds of Orthodox Trotskyus but they also end up Intraest. But they come from again Britain. The American Trotskyus parties are not Intraest but their key figures. Increasingly, by the time you get to December you have Hal Draper renouncing the party in sec form until socialist regroup as a whole, right, right that's the anatomy of a micro-sec essay and his founding of the Marxist Center and his relationship to Marxist publications. You have the SWP maintaining Pathfinder Press and defending Third Worldist revolutions that were Marxist-Leninist led, which again makes it kind of funny how. But as we talked about, while their defenses, their stances in World War II didn't make any sense. So they are around. The Pathfinder tendency is still a tendency, but they seem to start being completely unimportant by the 1990s.
Speaker 3:Really, even by the 80s Right.
Speaker 1:The SEP. It kind of just survives until it can thrive on the internet. For being the most radical, the Sparts take their weird campus orientation, which I mean. This is another thing that all the Trots do in New Left and the Maoists and the MLs honestly, as they all focus on students.
Speaker 2:But the Sparts double down on their sectarianism and only show up in public when they're opposing other Trots kids groups Right, they stand outside, convince people not to. I remember before I joined the year before I joined, they showed up at the conference and they got into an altercation with a bunch of ISO people and they ended up breaking this fucking woman's arm by shoving her into an elevator. It's crazy shit. And even then the League for a Revolutionary Party, which are another Sparts split they showed up.
Speaker 3:Actually the League for the Revolutionary Party is very weird because they have the same theory, the same theoretical basis as the ISO, except for the honestly I forget which but one side maintain the state capitalism. Oh yeah, ok. So the Tony Cliff people, the ISO, they maintain that state capitalism was a step sideways for the development of capitalism, and the people who become the League for the Revolutionary Party maintain that it's an advance, it's a step forward, and so on that basis, they found their own organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:So there's a reason why we mock Trotskiest, and I think even those of us who were one. I always found it very interesting the reason why I brought up the four things that Trotskiest believed. Aside from me not being able to tell what permanent revolution really is, I more or less agree with the key doctrines of Trotskiism in their stated form. They're so irrelevant to what Trotskiest actually do though that it's hard to like. The moment you meet Trotskiest and you're like OK, what are you guys splitting over? What makes us Trotskiest? Ok, we believe in transitional program. That's not listed in there, but that should have been. We believe in permanent revolution, whatever the fuck that is. We believe in proletarian international. Down with that. We believe in other stuff. And you're just like OK, what is this actually Like? What's this actually all about? All right, there's stuff about keeping leaders accountable and stuff, but that's actually not endemic to Trotskiism, that's endemic to Trotskiest's groups, and so I kind of get why it dies.
Speaker 2:But I think I don't get why it didn't die sooner Right yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean it seems like it should have died in the 90s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, honestly, as we said, if it wasn't for James Cannon, it seems like it should have died in America in the 40s. In the 40s Right.
Speaker 2:I guess like I get the brief burst of popularity around the global justice movement and then again with the opposition to the Iraq War.
Speaker 1:I also get the explosion of popularity in the 60s. Well, I get that. Yeah for sure. The reason why I want to bring that up, though, is because both Amalism and Trotskiism both explode during this time period. We talked about how they don't have a lot of economics. Like the one thing we've not mentioned, like economics does not play into much of this at all. Right, marxist, you don't talk about economics? Weird, that's also country from Alist. So what do you think drives that? Well, one of the things I think drives it is that the socialist parties under Khrushchev outside of the Soviet Union and this is maintained after Khrushchev's gone are incredibly cautious. They're incredibly conceitulatory, like look at the Communist Party of France in the 60s, look at the Communist Party of Chile during Allende, look at the, look at the and what was.
Speaker 1:Euro-communism, yeah, euro-communism. Look at the social patriotic period and Browderism and American communism.
Speaker 2:Which, for some reason, is something people are emulating now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's weird.
Speaker 2:Like how the fuck do you find that period of American communism inspirational? What's?
Speaker 3:really interesting is that like-.
Speaker 1:That's when it starts to die. It's called Browderism.
Speaker 3:So then the people who oppose it. They stand on the other half of Browder's legacy, which is the popular front, and they're like, yeah, we're for that, we're not for Browderism. It's like you're both for Browderism.
Speaker 1:Just different kinds. Well, my favorite stuff is the people who like love, the various 19-year-old MLs who are not part of any organization who love both third periodism but also love like Dungism, and I'm like no, so I don't know.
Speaker 2:You sounded like a social fascist over there. That's the problem with the internet, the internet, yep yeah.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:Because at least before you had to like meet in person. Yeah you could make a group, but that's because there were people in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, it's just adoption of your favorite posting style.
Speaker 1:So the factionalism in American Trotskyism is there from the beginning. We have splits from the beginning. It's not unique to American Trotskyism. It doesn't particularly bad in American Trotskyism. It does seem worse than in other countries. The French Trotskyists do not split like this.
Speaker 3:It's because there's nothing to enter. Yeah, so there's nothing to be tied to, which means you can theoretically snipe at each other about what you will enter eventually.
Speaker 2:It's because of how low the stakes are. Right, that's the ultimate reason how low the stakes are. And, like you said, there's nothing to enter In French Trotskyism. By being part of this or that movement, you can actually affect things that happen in parliament. There's nothing like that in the United States. We get to fine tune the minutiae of our theoretical stances and then hate each other for it.
Speaker 1:And that's also true in Britain. Yeah, so British Trotskyism comes to American Trotskyism. Interesting as British and not French, that's probably just language and probably yeah, yeah and kind of saves the day.
Speaker 3:Like. I know that the IMT was founded by a member of that group when he moved to the US Right and he was like well, there's no group here, so I'm not going to join an American group, I'm just going to found an American section of my old group from the UK.
Speaker 2:And then there's a split in the United States over whether or not the CWI and the IMT split in the United States over whether or not the IMT should be involved in entryism into the Labor Party. So you have a split in the United States where there's no Labor Party. Yeah, so based on some fucking English people should be doing something, but the other thing that we mentioned.
Speaker 1:So this is where you have a shift, though in Trotskyism in America back into entryism. But into what? Ok? So first you have the cameoist, who, arguably, are leaving Trotskyism as a tradition. By this point, start the Green Party Part of the coalition that starts the Green Party Right. That doesn't really go anywhere. It inspires a bunch of people, like if you ever dealt with Louis Project before he died of cancer, that was his big deal was he was cameoist and he was also a big left unity person. And before Neo-Kalskyism came to America from Britain, cameoism was probably the first big left unity push. That wasn't by Marxist-Leninist or by Marciites who, by the time they did that, were Marxist-Leninists anyway. So this is interesting time periods.
Speaker 1:In the 90s, you see this revival of Trotskyism led by people who came in in the new left and we skipped the new left actually, which is when Trotskyism moves from unions and Soviet dissidents and people in the American Communist Movement onto campuses. Onto campuses, but that's not unique to Trotskyism. That is all the socialist movements, all of them do that. All the Maoists, the MLs do it. Once the end of the CP, usa's ties to the civil rights movement end, that's immediately where they go to. They're not successful with that. They're probably the least successful group during the time period of entering the colleges, and partly because a lot of the groups that entered colleges were Marxist-Leninist splits from them. So the RCP, the Black Panthers, I believe maybe they were always independent MLs. It's a harder thing.
Speaker 2:I think the Black Panthers are always independent MLs.
Speaker 1:Right, and they weren't all MLs either, but they were mostly MLs.
Speaker 3:It's complicated too, though, because solidarity and the international socialists and the ISO all start off as teamsters and stuff. They don't really make their full reorientation of the campuses until the late 70s and the early 80s, but their campus orientation starts in the new left. It becomes dominant in the 80s because it's the only one left.
Speaker 1:Right, and so the entryism in the 60s and 70s was also a problem. But what that tended to mean in the 60s and 70s is that you left the Trotskyist movements. Yeah, like you were like, ok, I was a Trotskyist and now I'm going to be a mature person and go try to start a socialist party, or enter the socialist party, like we were supposed to do in the first place, or enter the Democrats or whatever. Like that becomes the entryist move and you have to leave the Trotskyist parties to do that, or the Trotskyist tendencies depending. After the British come in in the 90s is when that happens.
Speaker 1:During the many anti-war movements they are all way more giving to entryism. And that makes sense because they had a relationship historically to the British Labour Party until the new Labour really starts to dominate under Blair, right, like so. And yes, the UK has this SWP which is Tonic List Party and they're separate, but most of the other Trotskyist groups have ties to the Labour Party. Yeah, now what's interesting about the SWP and the ISO is the international socialist tendency is not entryist, but they, like you guys said, act so much like it. Anyway, their united frontism and I'm being specific about them becomes no different than popular frontism, right, effectively.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember saying that when I was in the ISO.
Speaker 1:Now.
Speaker 3:And also there's the 96th Labour Party, which is briefly formed and it exists for a little while, and the ISO, and they're involved in that. But even what is when is NATO's election or 2000. Campaign 2000. Yeah, so even that was only lasted like a couple of years.
Speaker 2:I wasn't in the ISO, then I think I voted for the. That was my first election. I voted for the Socialist Party candidate, which is I don't even remember his name at this point.
Speaker 1:No, I don't know, I like Socialist, not McNally Mech, I don't remember.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something fucking Scottish, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But anyway, like. But then in 2004, they backed NATO again, even after like NATO was like in support of the war in Afghanistan and like didn't run on the Green Party ticket. I think he was running on. He won on the independent party ticket or something.
Speaker 1:And he ran, and he was also endorsed by parts of the Reform Party too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it was really weird and didn't really make any sense.
Speaker 1:The Reform Party had gotten weird after the Trump Buchanan election.
Speaker 2:Right, they were like anti-immigrant and stuff.
Speaker 1:Right yeah, and so there's a left wing of the Reform Party that went and backed NATO and coalition with other, with like the Greens and some other people. That's when I was sort of like getting fed up with everything Like moving. I was moving Marxist, but I was not like I had met international answer, which had both ISO and Marciite like WWE people in it and I think it was actually technically led by the WWE, later the PSL, because they split over international answer stuff.
Speaker 2:Right, I remember we used to work with international answer like, but we like only in the coalition for anti-war stuff. We didn't actually yeah.
Speaker 1:We weren't part of international answer and then so ISO is huge in the 90s and aughts. The other thing that ties this together is the British Trotsky's publishing organizations are also quite big, and so there's a cottage industry and they don't just publish. I mean, like one of the interesting things about Trotsky's presses is they almost all publish things that they're technically opposed to. Yeah, Unless you're like in a very small sectarian press like the Norfolk Press or the or the IBTs Press or the Sparks Press or whatever. But the bigger ones are always kind of opportunistically publishing everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like Naomi Klein and Right but.
Speaker 1:Verso has a like the New Left Review, has a Trotskyist like origin which leads to Verso, which thinks is corporatized. And effectively that's what happens with Haymarket Books too is originally it's a party press. It gets more and more corporate. I think that's part of why the ISO actually got shut down, like dissolved, because it scandals way predate when it actually yeah, oh yeah. But Haymarket Books gets bigger and bigger. So you have this intellectual representation and this kind of quasi-intreist orientation. But again, in the United States, where are you going to enter Like, particularly as the third party movements start to really get limited by reforms in state law and being shut out of national debates. So it kind of does make sense to me that you move from factionalism which doesn't go anywhere to entryism back to factionalism and then decline.
Speaker 1:And what's replacing Trotskyism, I mean we're going to have to go into. I think the next episode will be United Front it was a popular front and really clarifying that up. But what's replacing Trotskyism, interestingly, is either a Marxist linearism that is so disconnected from anything that it supplements wild ideological shifts that have nothing to do with even the history of Marxism back into itself, yeah, and that's either both in liberal and anti-liberal forms, maoism, which moves from oppositional to China to conciliatory to China, which also then loses its particularly sectarian character, and democratic socialism, which is, as we've already kind of illustrated in our sectarian history, trotskyism lied anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So what are our lessons on this first round? I feel like this was actually this was clarifying in some ways, but also kind of hard to do because there's so many splits and I'm not trying to go into each individual one of them.
Speaker 3:Well, because that wouldn't be worth doing anyways.
Speaker 1:We already tried that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we talked about the main ones. It's hard to draw any lesson other than just that there needs to be a workers' party and that's it. So I think that, underlying, there needs to not be tendencies, infactions based on personality. Whether that personality exists now or it's a 100-year-old personality doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:I think it's those. There's a workers' party. I don't know that it matters if there's tendencies, infactions based on personality. There's tendencies, infactions based on personality, in any political movement.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, oh, I just mean that they shouldn't form their own parties.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, you need the workers' party first. Don't split, yeah, don't split. So I think that underlying every single one of these splits is this idea that's not explicitly stated in the Trotskyist like any Trotskyist program or anything but is there from the outset. Is that really? All that's missing is the correct leadership, Right? So everyone thinks that they're the correct leadership and they split up. It's just a sign of just the low level of stakes in the United States specifically leads to just idealism, Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that idealism leads to this overinflated sense of your own importance.
Speaker 1:A little history. I'm going to go out and say that that element of this is particularly bad in the US but it's not you need to, it's not exclusive to the US.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is. Yeah, you're right about that, but I mean really as far as the lowest stakes of any Marxist movement in the whole world has always been in the United States Right Ever since after the 1930s.
Speaker 1:One of the things that we have to like ask ourselves I don't know. I actually might say that the lower stakes may be Britain now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now.
Speaker 1:But until recently for sure. One of the things that I think we have to ask ourselves, though, is, like how much of this is not because of the ideological nature of Trotskyism, how much of this is not because of their opposition to Stalin? It's one of the things that I you know, I was thinking about this even in regards to like why does Trotskyism continue after the secret speech, Like? There's so many times where I'm like because a lot of the Trotskyists like Deutre, as I mentioned, and a lot of the European Trotskyists actually are like well, now we can sort of see ourselves coming back into line, but it's because Khrushchev and the ML parties weren't the correct leadership.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was going to say I think that by the time that Stalin is gone, you know, by the time of de-stalinization, there's no theoretical justification for Trotskyism. But there are personalities who draw enough people around them to keep it going less and less all the time, but still All right. But that's it. That's the reason. It's just because some people make a case for themselves and that's it.
Speaker 1:So my my thing is going to probably piss a lot of people off. I also don't think there's a justification for Marxism and I'm still existing after 1992 because the deviations in China are so severe. I mean, maybe, if you want, if people were picking up Ho Chi Minh thought maybe I could like although again, that doesn't come into being until actually into the 90s.
Speaker 2:But it's about justification for any kind of Marxist Marxism with an adjective to exist after 1991.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think that's true, yeah, you know, it's just not it it the sectarian, the sectarian nature of this just seems untenable and the actual states that are based off of it are gone. The leadership has pivoted, but all these organizations have their own institutional apparatus and one of the things we can clearly say is, by focusing on leadership, they actually don't do anything to make their organizations more accountable to membership in a way that would stop the kind of thing that they were worried about happening in the Bolshevik happening again, which you wouldn't even have to reject the Bolshevik legacy to do. You would just have to go back to the pre-1919 Bolsheviks.
Speaker 2:Or the pre-1921 Bolsheviks at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like you can, you can justify it if you like. You don't even have to go pre-revolution, you just have to go. Okay, we're not going to fetishize the faction ban because that came up in the context of a civil war.
Speaker 2:Since we're not fighting a civil war.
Speaker 1:Right and we're not going to make conditions that we're just going to pretend are going to be true in every context. Now, this has been, this is a problem across the socialist board is like. I talk about this as like we need orientations and eventually we need the orientation to generate a program. But we don't need, like a bunch of hard lines that we fetishize aside for some very basic ones, like yeah, like no classes, that's a good one, good life, social goods are good, but they're not socialism. But you know, like, like the theoretical minimum, and we should make a case for theoretical maximum too, but the theoretical minimum actually should be fairly minimal and for Trotskyist, interestingly as, as I said, the theoretical minimum is actually all in the context of the Bolsheviks but exported to places where they're not read into, particularly once Trotsky dies, in the situations that they're not actually all that relevant for.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like if Trotsky had not been. I mean, there is the some of this. I think maybe Trotsky himself like but Trotsky had not been ice picked, maybe Trotskyism would not have been as annoying in the United States, but it's interesting because, I say that but I'm also left with the fact that, like James P, cannon and Dodds are both good leaders and yet they lead Trotskyism in terrible times.
Speaker 1:So Dodd and James Cannon, like they're, they're the classic good leaders, but they're also like Trotskyism doesn't do shit when they're actually in charge. So I don't know what to make out of that either.
Speaker 2:Except for like in the okay in the 40s and 50s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Right, yeah, so I think we need. So we kind of dealt with the problem with the US, but I think we're going to need to go bigger to even understand the US, because this is still not. This still doesn't explain everything that's happened to me.
Speaker 2:I'll do that next time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So one thing I'm going to say is we should we should talk about the US's relation to the international Trotskyist movement through the United Front versus popular front issues on the next episode of this, Because I think we kind of got pinned down what happened with factionalism and entry ism and why the entryism also kind of doesn't come from the US Trotskyist movement. It's kind of like the US Trotskyist movement finds it in the British Trotskyist movement.
Speaker 2:But so we got to enter something.
Speaker 1:We can't just not enter, yeah, like what are we going to?
Speaker 2:and?
Speaker 1:we can't. We can't build our own party and we can't reconcile with them and with the MLs, even though there's no reason why we can't not after. I mean, you know, you can't reconcile with like Hoagist.
Speaker 1:The other weird thing that happens is and there's a book on this by Belden which just argues that like all these movements start like looking like each other even though they're nominally quite different. So, for example, we can find malice movements to support almost everything in a Trotskyist with support and oppose almost everything Trotskyism oppose, particularly once the CP USA is no longer like dominant. There's no like USSR affiliated party of any strength in the Americas Like you just find. You find that any of these groups have people taking positions that, while they are theoretically quite different, end up in practice looking identical to other groups and yet they can't bridge that Like it's the most frustrating thing in the world actually, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well yeah. I get why people go back to the second international more and more, even though I also think that might be a minefield too.
Speaker 1:It makes sense why they do, why they were grasped back to the second international, because this is just frustrating, like yeah and fruitless, and fruitless, and like when we talk about it in the international context, I don't think it's going to get any weirder because we have to talk about I mean any better, because we have to deal with like international Trotskyism's response, like the Vietnam War, which is all over the place.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you know, Mandel, Deutcher and Cliff, none of whom are Americans, are not relevant to us here. Like their positions on that are like diametrically opposed and that just gets replicated. Like you get pro and anti. Was there any Trotskyists who were pro Iraq war? I don't know.
Speaker 3:Other than like, not by no one.
Speaker 1:Are anybody who's a neo-conservative, but they wouldn't be Trotskyists anymore.
Speaker 2:Because, for Hitchens was a neo-conservative by the time he opposed right, he was pro Iraq war.
Speaker 1:I don't think I know anybody who is pro Iraq war, but although there was, the kinds of things that, like Spartacists would do, would be like critical support for Al Qaeda. Which critical support?
Speaker 3:for.
Speaker 1:ISIS. And then the fact that, like the Trotskyist vocabulary, even compared to most Marxist vocabulary by the time you get to the nineties, is so specialized that no one even understands what you mean.
Speaker 2:Especially in the fucking ISO. We had stuff that even the rest of the Trotskyist movements didn't have, like what? Like talking about the permanent arms economy and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:Deflected permanent revolution.
Speaker 2:Deflected permanent revolution.
Speaker 3:There we go. Yeah, that's different than permanent revolution. I don't know how, but it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, also, I don't know how the Trotsky, how the ISO's version of the transitional program isn't impossible. It is why it is. It's just like well, that's the one thing Marx himself said not to do. We got the man himself on record Don't support reforms that you don't think will work and don't also not support reforms so impossible is an accelerationism, or like the things that we one of the few things politically that we have direct guidance from Marx on that is in principle, not just in like necessity, like which national revolutions that we care about or not. That one's a mess, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, we diluted ourselves into thinking of it. All of the reforms, the, the maximalist positions on all reforms that we took were going to work.
Speaker 1:Now that's funny because a lot of ISO's we just tell me they didn't think it would ever work but it would radicalize the population. I'm like no, that would just make them not trust you.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely that's. There are a lot of people that said that, but the official line was what I just said.
Speaker 1:Oh, so so. So the official line was so ridiculous that people actually read into it and possible ism so that they can maintain it.
Speaker 2:I did. Yeah, I did. That's what I read into it. Oh my God, I was like oh yeah, so like, obviously, like under capitalism, it would be completely impossible to have a oh shit, I'm not going to say this, never mind, I'm going to get canceled. Some refer that wouldn't work, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's. That's all it is. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you know, at least you can say about weird ass like communizers and and Bizarro left Trotsky's tasks, or even bizarre oh Malism's, they're at least more interesting. Yeah, they're crazier in some ways, but like, but what I find is like some of the Trotsky's positions, by the time you get to the nineties, are effectively they sound reasonable but in practice they're absolutely not like. So like I'm a united frontist, but by the time the way the Trotsky's were interpreting that, it's like what do you mean? Yeah, how do you even do that?
Speaker 3:Like by the nineties, everything, everything changed, except for the, the, the way that we continued to respond to the world. It's just that the world changed, but we didn't know All right.
Speaker 1:Well, on that note, Trotsky ism ends up gross and we will now stop.
