"Set the Record Straight" implies a materialist method in contradiction
with B.A.'s approach taking advantage of white worker utopians
Someone needs to tell "Set the Record Straight" and presumably Raymond Lotta
that they're confused about what party they are in. (See their Revolution #024,
posted November 27, 2005 on their website)
In MIM, we set the record straight, compare capitalism and socialism and talk
facts about life expectancy before and after revolution. Your attempted
imitation of us and establishment of a FAQ and Internet work despite years
criticizing MIM for these are flattering, but now you have gone too far so that
you contradict yourselves.
Your new tour to set the record straight says in bold-faced headline: "Socialism
is Much Better Than Capitalism." Let us refresh your memories on how your leader
B.A. disagrees with your approach: "You have to handle correctly the relation
between standing on our basic principles and at the same time creatively
applying them. . . on the basis of firmly grounding yourself in the basic
principles, if you just blindly apply that, it's going to turn into its
opposite." (#1204, p. 7) For the RCP=U$A, method is a word game pitting
"reverence" and "irreverence," not a systematic summation of concrete reality
and comparison of those realities. So when you are now comparing socialism and
capitalism as they concretely existed in your "Set the Record Straight" project,
you are taking the MIM line and opposing the B.A. line. The B.A. approach is to
compare purely mental categories like "reverence" and "irreverence" in a
Hegelian way.
Lately B.A. develops over and over again in various places what English teachers
know is the difference between "canon" and relative truth or exactly as both
B.A. and the major Christian churches call "foundational" dogma and "new"
principles. At best, he belongs in the Frankfurt school of idealism. There is
not a shred of materialism in his approach.
So when someone says to RCP=U$A that your principles are "Trotskyist" and you
are defending, say, Braverman, the correct answer is not that "Trotskyism could
be true!" Methodologically, as a procedure in producing truth, of course, we
have to admit Trotskyism could be true, but that does not mean the charge
against you of Trotskyism is false. It just so happens that on most major
questions you have more in common with Trotskyism than Marxism. So the question
becomes why you bother calling yourself M-L-M today. Creationists do not
generally call themselves Darwinists. Being called a Darwinist does not make one
right, but believing in Noah's Ark is not compatible with being called a
Darwinist. There is an important question of truth in that question as well.
So then B.A.'s answer to our criticism of "Conquer the World" is the following:
"I didn't say, 'All these people ever did was mess up.'" So again the yardstick
is not relative among concrete realities, but on some imaginary scale where he
did not say errors were 100%.
In case B.A. did not notice, even Trotskyists do not say everything Stalin did
was wrong. Trotsky himself said Stalin was correct in some struggles against
Bukharin. A Russian Trotskyist recently said Stalin would have taken some
Russians espousing a Western line on gender and shot them and that Stalin would
have been right given what is happening with the deterioration of conditions for
wimmin in the ex-Soviet bloc.
In fact, lately with the Black Book of Communism hype and the effort to
rehabilitate Hitler by running down Stalin even more than before, many of
today's Trotskyists are actively saying the criticism of Stalin has gone too
far. Unlike B.A., some Trotskyists sense that the hype against Stalin is not to
promote Trotsky but to restore regular fascism. We can even say that those
Trotskyists got involved in that recent struggle before the RCP=U$A did. So if
anything many Trotskyists are less extreme Trotskyists than B.A.
So the question is never 100% purity in anything, because even Trotskyism and
Stalinism cannot be 100% opposed to each other. The question is what is RCP=U$A
CLOSER to, Maoism or Trotskyism. There is no need to say anyone completely
"messed up." For that matter one could believe Stalin was correct in his day and
now Trotskyism is correct up and down the line. That would make one a
Trotskyist, because the present and future are more important than the past.
Consider the following points where B.A. is closer to Trotskyism than Maoism.
1. Believes that Soviet foreign policy under Stalin was dictated by bourgeois
national interests.
2. Says Stalin and Mao took a wrong "country by country"
approach.
3. Believes in a Comintern and organizational splits in proletarian
parties while opposing "Bundism."
4. Says Stalin went too far leaving us with
"parasitism" considerations.
5. Believes knowing the people in charge is more important than knowing the line.
6. Shares Trotskyist class analysis of the
Third World so that Mao was wrong to ally with the compradors against the super-
powers. Bought into related revisionist criticism on Angola in the 1970s.
7. Says right in speech that higher wages in the West are part of necessity of
reproduction, thus buying into the theory of productive forces defended
consistently only by Trotsky among Soviet leaders (who saw Western workers as
"most advanced.")
8. Believes that capitalist productivity could be so high that
Western workers might have this standard of living without net parasitism. (A
variant of the theory of productive forces defended most ably by Trotsky.)
9. Believed in a one-stage revolution for El Salvador in the 1980s, despite its
obvious agrarian character --again just like the Trotskyists who oppose all two-
stage revolutions.
10. Enjoyed the support of hard-core Trotskyists
internationally in Internet forums in the struggle over peace accords in Peru.
11. Has been endorsed by a website claiming to be Indian Maoism and another
claiming Kanadian Maoism but which in fact endorse openly Trotskyist
websites.
12. Sabotages struggles against admitted police informers while
promoting CIA activities just as Trotsky aided police in Mexico and intelligence
in the united $tates. Encourages followers to adopt the Trotskyist pose of
Liberalism against purges.
13. Encourages followers to slander "gulags" in the
Soviet Union under Stalin.
14. Has no published line on MacKinnon's opposition
to Freud or MacKinnon at all for that matter, while endorsing major Freudian
"feminist" figures in their paper and equating sexual satisfaction with lack of
oppression (but not oppressor status) like Trotsky did and in opposition to
Lenin on the Freud question.
15. Recently took up a line opposing "fascism" in
the united $tates as a justification to let Democrats off the hook as of lesser
importance than Republicans. The high priority given to fighting fascism as if
white workers could do better comes also from Trotsky. Followers of Stalin and
Mao only distinguished fascism and liberal imperialism when a socialist bloc was
at stake. Prior to that they denounced "social-fascism," not to mention the
Democratic Party, a non-socialist party ranking among the top two imperialist
parties of all time! B.A.'s idea that there is some imperialist country internal
class alliance that can ward off fascism is Trotsky's idea, similar to how
Trotsky wanted an alliance with bourgeois parties in Europe to stave off Hitler.
16. Openly adopts a neo-Kantian method against "justifying" history thereby
encouraging Liberal humyn-rights dreams like Trotskyists did in the same
Liberal-nihilist political space--in order to recruit naive idealists.
Against the above list, there is only one point I've heard B.A. make that I have
not heard Trotskyists make, and that is the bourgeoisie in the party thesis of
Mao's. Workers World agrees about the same extent as RCP=U$A does with Maoists
on the events of 1976 in China. As for the Soviet Union, of course, there is an
endless splintering, but no lack of Trotskyists who said capitalism came to the
Soviet Union before 1989 or even 1960. What it comes down to with all the pro-
Trotsky education the bourgeoisie promotes in the West is that it is spontaneous
for the Amerikan to support Trotsky and oppose the interests of the Soviet Union
from the 1930s and 1940s. Even with half the above Trotskyist positions, RCP=U$A
would have a strong whiff of Trotskyism which would spill over and have a huge
Trotskyist effect in this country ripe with parasitism and a huge labor
aristocracy.
On the whole, despite the fact that Trotskyism is splintered beyond recognition
on the question of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union and China, and
therefore RCP=U$A might be out of the mainstream of Trotskyism on that question,
(and if a Trotskyist position can be determined at all given Trotskyist
stupidity on the question), RCP=U$A is more ideologically Trotskyist than
Workers World which is too watered down, despite being directly descended from
the major u.$. Trotskyist party. For that matter, Workers World officially
believes there are more nations within U.$. borders that need liberation than
RCP=U$A does. So the whole relative emphasis of race relative to nation is more
pronounced in RCP=U$A than in some Trotskyists. So again, nothing is pure, but
the question is not who messed up totally, but whether RCP=U$A is more
Trotskyist than Workers World and some other organizations of Trotskyists now
tailing Kim Jong-il and Castro, and the answer is yes, RCP=u$A is more purely
Trotskyist than some openly Trotskyist parties today.