[Marxism] Banal Platitudes and Marxism-Clulesslism and impressionism

[David Walters <dwalters@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

No really wishing to get into the philosophical side of this (I would
stand with Jurrian's last post...wow!) but Carlos tends to work under
impressionist assumptions and then uses these as proofs for his thesis.

One such assumption are "most of the Trotskyists he knows..." who were
won to Marxism by JVS. Besides being totally unproven, I'm sure I know
(or, rather knew) a lot more LA Trotskyists than he did since I was
part of their current. I got to see the educational syllables first
hand for several of the larger of Latin American Trot organizations in
the 1970s, including the PST of Argentina, the Peruvian POMR and the
PRT in Mexico. At one time these were largest and most influential
Trotskyist groups in the world, all before Carlos was born, however :).
It's always fun to see what people were reading and training their
cadre on. The Argentinean group's educational stuff was a local one
developed out of Cordoba or Rosario, I don't remember which.

None of then used JVS. They were all intros to Marxism for newer
members. While trying to associate "permanent revolution" with Academia
(what ever that is supposed to mean) and JVS's DHM with some sort of
more proletarian orientation is just a semantic game Carlos like to
play with people who oppose his brand(s?) of Stalinism which he calls
"anti-revisionism" (also an amazing oxymoron if you think about it).

In these organizations mentioned above, there were extremely large
proletarian bases, and in the case of Mexico, a peasant base, where the
first order of business was to teach people to read. [I participated in
some of these educationals in northern Mexico during the height of the
land seizures in and around Hermosillo and Nogales in 1976 . It was
enough to give any Maoist the hebejebes as thousands of peasants flying
red flags and banners with pictures of Lenin and Trotsky went around
from hacienda to hacienda occupying the land!] People join the "Party"
mostly because of their activities in the class struggle, not out of
adherence to Marxism. I think this is true for most socialists,
Maoists, left-Nationalists, Trotskyists, etc. Their adherence to
Marxism is a slower one that comes from being 'recruited to it after
joining a Marxist party'. Their basic  texts were various pamphlets,
often printed in Moscow, by Marx/Engels and Lenin, and, of course,
locally printed Trotsky. I never once saw a Stalin pamphlet on
anything, which, IMO, is a bad thing since Stalinism was very strong
throughout Latin America and the Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinists
leftists had to contend with it, they ought to study him closely.

Ironically it was the very small number of the more "academically"
inclined Trotskyists that I know of that 'went back to Stalinism' who
had more access to reading materials or did so after organized readings
of JVS in some more advanced Trotskyist study groups. I know of this
happening in the US, Pakistan and Japan, but again, this is my personal
experience. I know of one big exception to this: Peru, where the
Trotskyists fucked up the whole situation when they had mass influence,
and the Senderno Luminosa was able to capture the demoralization after
the failure of the FOCEP and ARI coalitions. There hundreds, maybe
thousands of working class Trotskyists ended up joining the Maoists.
But again, it was over action of in the class struggle that forced them
to do it, not reading a pamphlet by JVS.

Lastly, every Stalinist I know of who had been a Trotskyist (like the 3
I know in the US) and others who simply (lots of them) became
Stalinists, NONE of them were won over to Marxism and or Stalinism via
DHM but through "Foundations of Leninism". My former work mates in the
CWP, CPUSA-ML and the Workers Congress all went through the same sort
of situation in their respective groups. This is impressionism, of
course, as was my own sojourn through Latin America. Still, it seems
very different than Carlos' one.

David


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