They say, "they" in this case being communists, the Soviet Union misapplied, if not skewed beyond recognition, communist theories.
I think there's some validity to this argument.
Leon Trotsky was extremely critical of Stalin's Soviet Union - join the club. He asserted the power in Soviet communism concentrated only in the bureaucracy and not where it belonged: With the proletariat. Trotskyism attempted to bring communism to its Marxist roots.
In the Transistional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Task of the Fourth International (1938), he laid out how the process by which the people (the masses) had to be educated in the coming socialist revolution.
Basically, the same tenets we hear about nationalization and all that jazz. Make that, communist jazz.
I don't quite get your point...
ReplyDeleteTrotsky was not in power when he wrote his wonderful criticisms of Stalin's perversions of Lenin's perversions of Marx's least valuable ideas, i.e., his political program as opposed to his brilliant historical analysis of the development of capitalism.
Are you saying that Trotsky would have been any different if he had been in Stalin's place? He might have killed fewer people, true, and that's no small thing, but he was steeped in murder and terror, and totally committed to them as instruments of socialist development.
No attempt was made to guess what Trotsky would have been like in power. I just mentioned where he felt the differences were.
ReplyDeleteMy suspicion is proletariat or bureaucracy, it would have all added up to the same thing because as you said, they chose the wrong part of Marxist's ideas.
Marx did have valuable things to say about capitalism.