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« Reply #2 on: December 08, 2014, 09:50:52 AM » |
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From the point at which I decided I was a socialist, I wasn't really sure on what kind of socialist I was and where I really fit in in the grand scheme of things. At first, I thought I might be a democratic socialist, but that's a fairly hard position to maintain when you understand that the state is set up to protect the property and rule of the capitalists, and as such, you really have no shot of reforming it from within. That put me on a revolutionary track, and the first stop was some vague amalgamation of 'libertarian' socialism (i.e. anarchism), left-libertarianism, and Left Communism.
I stayed in that area for a little while, read the important texts of the council communists, all that jazz. But it became increasingly clear to me that 'Left Communism' offered no real solutions. It was, as Lenin aptly described it, an 'infantile disorder', with no hope of ever achieving much of anything. And that's how I found my way into Trotskyism. In all honesty, I still consider myself both a 'libertarian' socialist and a 'democratic' socialist in that I support a socialism which is both open and democratic, and one in which working class democracy forms the basis for the entirety of society. I don't think either of these labels conflicts with the vision that Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky laid out, and as such I also don't categorically reject the critiques or viewpoints of either. I still often read a lot of anarchist and reformist literature, which I think helps me sharpen my viewpoint while also helping me to fully understand why prefigurative or reformist approaches are wholly inadequate.
At this point, I suppose you might describe my politics as 'Trotskyism with libertarian (in the traditional sense, not the American sense) characteristics.' I don't categorically reject defending the deformed workers' states on account of the world that they developed in, nor do I feel that the Soviet Union was in anyway 'state capitalist' after the rise of Stalinism, so I pretty much wholly reject Tony Cliff's line of thinking when it comes to the Soviet Union and its adjoined states itself. Likewise, I reject the petty bourgeois anarchism of people like Noam Chomsky, who don't understand in the least what Leninism is, falsely attributing it to the horrors of the Russian Civil War and subsequent Stalinist counterrevolution, without laying any of blame, of course, on the multinational invading force destroying the Russian proletariat, industrial capacity, and then subjecting Russia to an economic and political embargo.
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