Trotsky's ghost train

13/10/2024

08/10/2024

Johann Fichte argued you can have a development of a economic system of capitalism in one country like Germany without a international development of capitalism from the rest of the world, which was an idealist argument among the German idealists to give credence and mystified theories of the Prussian state, and how the Prussian state is superior to all else. This was criticized by F.W.J. Schelling but still argued that the subject is found in the Prussian state bureaucracy and leadership that would set all things into motion, which was then criticized by G.W.F. Hegel against both Johann Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling and argued that there is no such thing as the isolated state or the abstract state due to the law of motion in epochs where the larger transformations outside of the state which the state operates in leads to the acts of people and the state to match that. Thus the Prussian state is not a subject of history that leads things or sets things in motion, rather it is the masses that are in the foundations of the system of social relations to begin with. This argument by G.W.F. Hegel would of course go on to influence Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

This is why there are memes online that say G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin versus Johann Fichte, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Joseph Stalin as a joke when it's not really a joke, it's an explanation of the debates of the German idealists and Hegel and how history in a sense repeated itself with the betrayals of Marxism and Leninism done by Joseph Stalin and the Stalinist movement.

06/10/2024

“A workers’ state, in recognizing the right of self-determination, thereby recognizes that revolutionary coercion is not an all-powerful historical factor. Soviet Russia does not by any means intend to make its military power take the place of the revolutionary efforts of the proletariats of other countries. The conquest of proletarian power must be an outcome of proletarian political experience.”

~ Leon Trotsky

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/red-white/ch09.htm

04/10/2024

What was Trotsky’s views on the Right Opposition and Bukharin?

Generally speaking, Trotsky took a very hard stance against Bukharin and the Right Opposition. It was pretty clear that he viewed Bukharin and the Right Opposition as a bigger threat to the existence of the USSR/Soviet Union than Stalin's "centrist" faction. When Bukharin reached out to Trotsky in the late 20s, Trotsky rebuffed him. In hindsight, it may have been a mistake not to join forces with the Right Opposition on the single issue of party democracy — anything else would have been unprincipled and a betrayal of Leninism.

This continued. Look at Trotsky's writings on the POUM in Spain. The POUM was a unification of the Right Opposition and Left Opposition in the period right before the Spanish Civil War was instigated by Fascists Franco. The POUM were not accepted into the International Left Opposition and played a highly problematic role in the Spanish Civil War, even though they led workers' militias against Francoist forces.

Put simply, the political program of the Right Opposition and Bukharin was/is absolutely anti-Leninist. If you look at what happened to the International Right Opposition and the leading lights after the 20s (e.g., Jay Lovestone) you get an idea of their political trajectory. Any reconciliation with the Right Opposition without a full reckoning of their miserable program was unprincipled and would lead to, at best, confusion. In Spain, it was incredibly costly as the formerly Trotskyist group around Andreu Nin was unable to fight for a Marxist/Leninist program, leaving the highly militant and mobilized Spanish working class without revolutionary leadership.

03/10/2024

Stalinists love pointing out Lenin's criticisms of Trotsky like Stalin wouldn't have gotten wrecked thrice over if he had had anything at all to say. Lenin didn't know his name as late as 1915 lmao

02/10/2024

~ Andy Blunden, 'Stalinism: Its Origins & Future,' 1993

29/09/2024

What has been created in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are deformed workers states, qualitatively equivalent to the degenerated workers state which emerged in Russia with the consolidation of the Stalin-led bureaucracy. The ruling bureaucracies of the deformed workers states are narrowly nationalist in outlook, attempting to balance precariously between imperialism and the working class. Based on the property forms of a workers state, they occasionally put up a limited and distorted defense of the social conquests achieved by the overthrow of capitalism in order to preserve their own privileged position.

But because their rule is based on the political expropriation of the working class, these petty-bourgeois bureaucratic castes are incapable of mobilizing the proletarian masses for an international revolutionary assault on the bastions of world capitalism, since it would simultaneously mean their own demise. The Stalinist rulers in Hanoi, Vientiane and Phnom Penh must be overthrown by a workers’ political revolution led by a Leninist-Trotskyist party in order to establish the organs of proletarian democracy and open the road to socialism.

28/09/2024

When the working class takes power in economically underdeveloped countries, it must carry out the unfinished tasks of the bourgeois revolution as well as the new tasks of the proletarian revolution. Under those difficult conditions of scarcity and economic backwardness, a bureaucracy can easily arise — an opportunist stratum of officials and administrators with ready access to prized material goods.

Like the labor bureaucracy in capitalist countries, the bureaucracy in a backward workers state has material interests of its own which are highly contradictory in nature, and this contradiction is reflected in its politics.

It is anti-capitalist and pro-socialist insofar as it rests on the working class and manages a planned economy that excludes profiteers. But at the same time, its privileges make it politically conservative; bureaucrats desire, above all, accommodation with the capitalist world so they can maintain the status quo and consolidate their privileges.

And their conservatism is expressed on all levels of national and international policy.

The contradictions of the bureaucratic caste in a workers state must be understood in order to grasp the meaning of the wide swings in policy that emanated first from Stalin’s regime, and later, in modified form, from Mao.

For Mao wanted only to end the imperialist threat against China; he had no intention of transforming U.S. capitalism. So he urged struggle against imperialism — the “primary” contradiction — but not against “secondary” capitalism. And to justify this opportunism, he perverted dialectics, twisting and turning it to serve his own contradictory political ends.

18/09/2024

“I maintain that our revolution, as we know it, would not exist at all but for two international prerequisites: firstly, the factor of finance capital, which, in its greed, has fertilized our economic development; and secondly, Marxism, the theoretical quintessence of the international labor movement, which has fertilized our proletarian struggle. This means that the revolution was being prepared, before 1917, at those crossroads where the great forces of the world encounter one another. Out of this clash of forces arose the Great War, and out of this the October Revolution. And now we are told to abstract ourselves from the international situation and to construct our socialism at home for ourselves. That is a metaphysical method of thought. There is no possibility of abstraction from the world economy.”

~ Leon Trotsky, "Speech to the 15th Congress of the Russian Communist Party," November 25, 1926

https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2023/09/16/speech-to-the-15th-congress-of-the-russian-communist-party-part-two-by-leon-trotsky-from-international-press-correspondence-vol-6-no-79-november-25-1926/

17/09/2024

“Revolutionary patriotism can be only of a class character. It begins at patriotism to the party organization, to the trade union, and rises to national patriotism when the proletariat has captured power. Wherever the workers have power patriotism is a revolutionary duty. But that patriotism must be an inseparable part of revolutionary internationalism, the invincible conviction that the main class aim, even less so than partial aims, cannot be realized by national means or within national boundaries, constitutes the heart of revolutionary internationalism. If, however, the final aim has been realized, within national boundaries by the efforts of a national proletariat then the backbone of internationalism has been broken. The theory of the possibility to realize socialism in one country destroys the inner connection of the patriotism of the victorious proletariat with the defeatism of the proletariat of the bourgeois countries. The proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries is still on the road to power. How and in what manner it will march toward it depends fully and entirely on the question as to whether it considers the building up of socialist society a national or an international task.”

~ Leon Trotsky

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/xx/source.htm

13/09/2024

“From our standpoint world economy is viewed as an organic unity on whose ground the world proletarian revolution evolves; and the Communist International takes its orientation from the entire world economic complex, analyzing it by means of the scientific methods of Marxism and utilizing all the experiences of past struggles. This does not, of course, exclude but rather pre-supposes that the development of each country has its own peculiar features, that specific situations have their peculiarities, and so on. But in order to correctly evaluate these peculiarities, it is necessary to approach them in their international context.”

~ Leon Trotsky, 'On the Policy of the KAPD', November 24, 1920

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1/ch13.htm

28/08/2024

“Stalinisme pada gilirannya bukanlah abstraksi dari "kediktatoran", tetapi reaksi birokrasi yang sangat besar terhadap kediktatoran proletar di sebuah negara yang terbelakang dan terisolasi. Revolusi Oktober menghapuskan hak-hak istimewa, mengobarkan perang melawan ketidaksetaraan sosial, menggantikan birokrasi dengan pemerintahan mandiri kaum pekerja, menghapuskan diplomasi rahasia, dan berjuang untuk membuat semua hubungan sosial sepenuhnya transparan. Stalinisme membangun kembali bentuk-bentuk hak istimewa yang paling menyinggung, mengilhami ketidaksetaraan dengan karakter yang provokatif, mencekik aktivitas massa di bawah absolutisme polisi, mengubah administrasi menjadi monopoli oligarki Kremlin, dan meregenerasi fetisisme kekuasaan dalam bentuk-bentuk yang tidak berani diimpikan oleh monarki absolut.”

~ Leon Trotsky, "Moral Mereka dan Moral Kami," 1938

27/08/2024

Perang imperialis adalah kelanjutan dan penajaman dari politik predatoris kaum borjuis. Perjuangan kaum proletar dalam melawan perang imperialis adalah kelanjutan dan penajaman perjuangan kelasnya. Permulaan perang mengubah situasi dan secara parsial mengubah metode perjuangan kelas, tetapi tidak mengubah tujuan dan arah fundamental perjuangan kelas. Borjuasi imperialis mendominasi dunia. Dalam karakter fundamentalnya, maka perang yang akan datang adalah perang imperialis. Oleh karena itu, isi fundamental dari politik proletariat internasional adalah perjuangan melawan imperialisme dan perang imperialis. Dalam perjuangan ini, prinsip dasarnya adalah: “musuh utama ada di negeri kita sendiri” atau “kekalahan pemerintah (imperialis) kita sendiri adalah terbaik dari yang terburuk (lesser evil)”.

Tetapi tidak semua negara di dunia adalah negara imperialis. Sebaliknya, mayoritas adalah korban imperialisme. Beberapa negara jajahan dan setengah-jajahan jelas akan berusaha memanfaatkan perang ini untuk membebaskan diri mereka dari k*k perbudakan. Perang mereka bukanlah perang imperialis, tetapi perang kemerdekaan. Adalah tugas proletariat internasional untuk membantu negara-negara tertindas dalam perang mereka melawan penindas mereka. Tugas yang sama berlaku dalam hal membantu Uni Soviet, atau negara buruh mana pun yang mungkin lahir sebelum atau selama perang. Kekalahan setiap pemerintahan imperialis dalam perjuangan melawan negara buruh atau negara jajahan adalah terbaik dari yang terburuk.

Namun, kaum buruh negara imperialis tidak akan dapat menolong negara anti-imperialis lewat pemerintahan mereka sendiri, tidak peduli apapun hubungan diplomatik dan militer di antara kedua negara tersebut.

Bila kedua pemerintahan ini membentuk aliansi sementara, yang pada dasarnya adalah aliansi yang tidak dapat diandalkan, maka kaum proletar negara imperialis tetap akan menjadi oposisi kelas terhadap pemerintahannya sendiri dan mendukung “sekutu” non-imperialis ini dengan metodenya sendiri, yakni melalui metode perjuangan kelas internasional (agitasi tidak hanya melawan sekutu mereka yang culas, tetapi juga agitasi untuk pendirian negara buruh di negara jajahan; boikot dan pemogokan dalam situasi tertentu; menolak boikot dan pemogokan dalam situasi lain, dst.)

Dalam mendukung negara jajahan atau Uni Soviet dalam sebuah perang, kaum proletar sama sekali tidak bersolidaritas dengan pemerintahan borjuis negara jajahan atau birokrasi Thermidorian Uni Soviet. Sebaliknya, kaum proletar mempertahankan kemandirian politik mereka secara penuh. Dengan memberikan bantuan dalam perang yang adil dan progresif, proletariat revolusioner meraih simpati dari buruh negara jajahan dan Uni Soviet, memperkuat otoritas dan pengaruh Internasional Keempat di sana, dan meningkatkan kemampuannya untuk membantu menumbangkan pemerintahan borjuis negara jajahan dan birokrasi reaksioner di Uni Soviet.

Pada awal perang, seksi-seksi Internasional Keempat pasti akan menemukan diri mereka terisolasi: setiap perang mengejutkan massa dan mendorong mereka ke sisi aparatus pemerintah. Kaum internasionalis harus berenang melawan arus. Namun, kehancuran dan kesengsaraan yang disebabkan oleh perang baru ini, yang pada bulan-bulan pertamanya akan jauh lebih mengerikan daripada perang 1914-18 yang berdarah-darah itu, akan menyadarkan massa dengan cepat. Ketidakpuasan massa dan pemberontakan mereka akan tumbuh pesat. Seksi-seksi Internasional Keempat akan menemukan diri mereka memimpin gelombang revolusi. Program tuntutan transisional akan menjadi sangat relevan. Problem penaklukan kekuasaan oleh kaum proletar akan menjadi nyata.

Sebelum mencekik atau menenggelamkan umat manusia ke dalam lautan darah, kapitalisme mengotori atmosfer dunia dengan kabut beracun kebencian nasional dan rasisme. Anti-Semitisme sekarang adalah salah satu kejang-kejang yang paling ganas dari kapitalisme yang tengah sekarat ini.

Mengekspos tanpa ampun akar rasisme dan semua bentuk kecongkakan nasional dan sauvinisme, terutama anti-Semitisme, harus menjadi bagian dari tugas sehari-hari semua seksi Internasional Keempat, sebagai bagian terpenting dari perjuangan melawan imperialisme dan perang. Slogan dasar kita masihlah: Buruh Sedunia, Bersatulah!

~ Leon Trotsky, "Program Transisional," 1938

05/08/2024

“Trotsky, the great man of ideas, was himself the disciple of a still greater one – Marx. Trotsky did not originate, or claim to originate, the most fundamental ideas which he expounded. He built on the foundations laid by the great masons of the 19th Century – Marx and Engels. In addition, he went through the great school of Lenin and learned from him. Trotsky’s genius consisted in his complete assimilation of the ideas bequeathed by Marx, Engels and Lenin. He mastered their method. He developed their ideas in modern conditions, and applied them in masterful fashion in the contemporary struggle of the proletariat.”

~ James Patrick Cannon, "To the Memory of the Old Man (Trotsky obituary)," August 28, 1940

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940/08/oldman.htm

21/06/2024

Khrushchev did not firstly invent "peaceful road to socialism". Stalin did it in the first.

09/04/2024

Kami segenap admin FP Trotsky's ghost train mengucapkan selamat Hari Raya Idul Fitri 1445 Hijriyah. Mohon maaf lahir dan batin. 🙏

Semoga kita semua tetap konsisten dan tetap saling bahu membahu memperjuangkan dan mewujudkan Sosialisme seutuh-utuhnya di Bumi Nusantara dan Seluruh Dunia!

Slava Revolutsiya! Workers of the world, unite!