It is growing more and more common to hear people repeating core elements of conspiracy theories. Many of these conspiracy theories grow from the fringes of right-wing extremist groups, then begin to creep into the mainstream through websites like Elon Musk’s Twitter (now renamed “X”), or through podcast personalities like Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, or through “influencers” on social media. They have grown even more prevalent since Donald Trump’s rise to power, as he himself promoted many of them from the Oval Office in Washington.
The new book, The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, by Carlos Martinez and published by Praxis Press, is a valuable and important defense of socialism in the People’s Republic of China today. As the U.S. ramps up propaganda and aggression against China, this book addresses an important need, for everyone who wants a better world, to understand and defend China.
Max Shachtman was one of the original founders of the Trotskyite movement in the United States. He was a pragmatist, an opportunist even among opportunists, who led the first major split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1940. At that time, he broke with the orthodox Trotskyite position that the USSR should be understood as a “degenerated workers state” and that it instead had come to be ruled by a new “bureaucratic collectivist” class.
As we wrap up our series on Trotskyism, let’s turn to the sad and shameful record of Trotskyism in the United States. This article will look at the Socialist Workers Party.
By now it should come as no surprise that Trotskyism, with its ultra-left emphasis on “pure proletarian revolution” originating in Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution,” that Trotskyism’s errors extend to the national question.
Trotskyism disagrees with Marxism-Leninism on a number of important theoretical points. These disagreements aren’t limited to the field of theory but have a real practical impact on the movements of working class and oppressed peoples. In our day-to-day struggles, we see them come up again and again. Practically, the question of the united front illustrates very clearly the glaring difference between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism. This is a question of extreme theoretical importance, with tremendous practical consequences, so we should examine it closely.
Given the trajectory of Trotsky’s line on the USSR, it shouldn’t surprising that his theories missed the mark on China as well. In fact, if they had been followed, it is clear that they would have done considerable harm to the Chinese revolution. On the question of China, there are two main things that stand out regarding the position of Trotsky and his followers. First, there is the ever present failure to grasp the national-colonial question in the era of imperialism, and second, there is the failure to understand the united front in relation to that.
Trotsky argued, before and after the revolution of 1917, that building socialism in one country was impossible, and that the success of the revolution was dependent on the immediate expansion of the revolution to Western Europe. Once this didn’t happen, Trotsky’s only way to persist in this theory was to say that the Soviet Union wasn’t truly building socialism.
One of the main pillars of Trotskyism is the denial of the possibility of building socialism in a single country. This is an outgrowth of Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory, which argued that the revolution in Russia depended on the immediate success of revolution in western Europe to avoid defeat. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union did indeed build socialism in one country, so we should look at the disagreements between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism on this point and try to understand where they come from.
The disagreement between Trotsky’s “absurdly Left” (according to Lenin) theory of “Permanent Revolution” and the Leninist theory of revolution in two stages boils down to the question of how to deal with the question of the peasantry.