Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 13:34:03 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: On Trotsky


On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Hugh Rodwell wrote:

> proletariat. If any party of the IV International anywhere got real mass
> influence, the effect on the rest of the world working class would be
> electrifying. That's one of the reasons for the embittered persistence of
> reaction (including the reaction of 'socialism in one country' and
> 'peaceful coexistence') in its efforts to thwart the development of a
> Trotskyist leadership.
> 

Louis: I guess Hugh is one of those folks who is for a Trotskyist 
movement that will this time get it right. The problem with the FI is 
that it is based on a model that has a built-in sectarian logic. This 
model is the same followed by the Communist Parties and has little to do 
with Lenin's Bolshevik Party.

Lenin advocated that a socialist party be constructed in Russia that was 
demarcated along the lines of being "for Marxism".

Trotskyist parties have a demarcation that includes a library of 
literature including everything that Trotsky ever wrote. This tends to 
lead to an idealistic and propagandistic concept of politics.

The reason Trotskyist parties remain small is not because of bourgeois 
repression, but because they are sectarian one and all. Trotsky told his 
followers in NYC in the late 1920s that they, all 150 of them, were the 
vanguard of the vanguard. This sort of nonsense has been a curse to the 
Trotskyist movement. 


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