Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 10:21:55 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Debating Trotskyists?


On Wed, 24 Jul 1996 CAGJimKane-AT-aol.com wrote:

> 
> When I offered to debate with Trotskyists on the lists, I had hoped we could
> have had a detailed, theoretical debate. Instead of answering my challenge,
> or that posed by other genuine Communists on the list, the likes of Malecki
> chose to show their true colours at a time when all genuine revolutionaries
> and progressives could see the need to close ranks around the Hunger Strikers
> in Turkey (incidentally, there are six comrade on Hunger Strike to death in
> Belgium and Britain, in solidarity). So be it. 

Louis: This is the problem, isn't it? If you put all the Trotskyist on the
list together, you wouldn't generate very much intellectual power. This is
a movement that has declined numerically and politically.

In the 1960s, when I became a Trotskyist, its influence was everywhere.
Ernest Mandel was an important figure on the left who had influence on a
wide range of thinkers such as the staff at New Left Review. In the United
States, the SWP was probably the most powerful group on the left.

What has happened is that the intellectual leaders of Trotskyism have
either passed on or national sections have evolved into workerist sects.
Jim Miller speaks for one such sect, the American SWP while Hugh Rodwell
speaks for the Morenoite current based in Argentina.

Most of the leading figures on the left in the United States have evolved
passed Trotskyism and are looking at politics with a fresh perspective. I
regard Richard Bos as an example of this type of thinking. I also find
that the German PDS, the SACP, many of the Latin American currents grouped
around the Sao Paolo forum tend to gravitate in the same direction.

Speaking for this current, I would say that the whole question of Trotsky
vs Stalin is exceedingly sterile. The real questions that confront us
today can not be answered by ritual incantations from either thinker. They
can only be answered by searching class analyses based on first-hand
knowledge of social and economic conditions. Trotskyists are not capable
of doing this at all. Judging from the efforts of Rolf Martens, it seems
to me that Maoism provides no magic bullet to help one do this either.

At any rate, you will find an attempt to debate Trotskyist on this list an
exercise in futility. They constantly run away from me and I am a mere
petty-bourgeois radical.



     --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---