Which leftwing tendency is most likely to succeed in fomenting and winning a revolution and building a stable society afterwards?
Guess I should define success. By success I mean the best outcome for the most people. Interested to hear from both internationalists and the other ones.
Lets see if yous can go a few posts without descent into sectarian shitflinging
I am your semi-resident 4pol retard (hey Marxhead) and as such have basically no idea what I'm talking about. But IMO socialism would require a strong., borderline authoritarian government to ensure that people don't group together to exploit others
I kind of want to just sidestep the monumentally-useless question "what leftist tendency is most likely to succeed", but then again it kind of feeds into the main point I'm gonna make anyways.
There is no fucking way of answering your question without being an ideologue m8. Every single left-wing tendency has failed, and quibbling over which left-wing tendency didn't fail the hardest is the epitome of ideological retardation. At the end of the day, pretty much every leftist position you can come up with will be really hard to defend given its track record, and while there are a few points you can make (which IMO are insignificant) about how the historical conditions of a given revolution weren't just right, at the end of the day I don't see any way of answering that question because none of the tendencies are likely to succeed.
But that's my nihilist cop-out. I don't expect a proletarian-lead revolution to be possible in this world, at least how it is right now, but I also don't think that is a necessary condition for continuing to engage in struggles (or "strugglismo" as Aragorn! calls them) against the State and capital.
Nathan Morgan
Trotskyism.
They are the only ones who organize. They are the only ones who understand the necessity of transitional demands.
Tyler Evans
I wasn't even going to bring up historical failures ITT. Just curious to see what leftypol considers the most practical and likely to succeed in the world as it is today.
I am starting to come round to your way of thinking, that capitalism it the root cause for most of the worlds problems.
The Holla Forums in me says nationalism is the best solution (a government that puts the nation before private interests of big business and will defend its people against big business by basically any means necessary). For the sake of being open minded I'm trying to see what lefty position I could stomach.
I think libertarian socialism/ancom would be too easy for a group to get together and start exploiting.
This is internationalism right? Like almost Stalinist in how shit would be done (central planning etc) but rejects country-based socialism?
Elijah Thompson
Yes, internationalism is fundamental to Trotskyism. But Trotskyism is not reducible to internationalism; it has other key features to the theory.
The concept of central planning is not what makes Stalinism Stalinism. Trotskyism rejects the idea of socialism in one country, and is anti-Stalinist in that respect. But it is anti-Stalinist in many other ways too, to do with structures of bureaucracy etc. But yes, most Trots would advocate for a centrally planned economy.
Jonathan Ramirez
Care to expand a little?
Sebastian Ross
It's pretty complex, I can recommend you some reading maybe? From wikipedia for a brief summary: (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism) "Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified himself as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, and supported founding a vanguard party of the working-class, proletarian internationalism, and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working-class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism, as they oppose the idea of Socialism in One Country. Trotskyists also criticise the bureaucracy that developed in the USSR under Stalin."
Essentially, the fundamentals of Trotskyism rely on internationalism and democracy - proper democracy, that is structured so as not to form the bureaucratic crust of elites we saw under Stalin, and tactically/strategically they call for a "vanguard party" - that is, the forming of a Marxist Socialist party (not necessarily, but potentially, a political party that operates within existing capitalist democratic structures) in order to facilitate revolution. The vanguard party, in Trotskyism, should comprise the best and most advanced layers of the working class. What he means by "best" or "most advanced" is the most revolutionary; he is not interested in their formal education on paper etc, he is interested in their ability to understand the ideas of Marxism, of socialism, and to understand the necessity for and path to revolution.
Lincoln Evans
Thanks.
Though I'm curious to know how this would work in practice.
With proper democracy and internationalism what stops one group deciding they want to do things differently?
Camden Robinson
Nothing is to stop them, really. It depends on what you mean by "doing things differently". Internationalism should not be understood as an antithesis to localism. Internationalism should be understood as a mutual co-operation of localities. In an international socialist world, there would still be different countries, different localities. In order for proper democracy to work, there must be democratic structures from the bottom-up, democratic decision making has to happen by communities, for communities. There can be differences between these communities, of course. There just will be, inevitably. People are very different, across the world. What makes it internationalist is the international economic co-operation; countries are working together for everyone, essentially, rather than competing to out-exploit and out-muscle each other as they do in capitalist international economy.
