#marcyism

[lizardbytheriver]

So... There were two "Revolutionary Communists of America" Parties. But one is Trotskyist and one is/was Maoist (with criticisms of being a cult of personality). Revolutionary Communists of America (Trotskyist) are a part of the Revolutionary Communists International. Which is why its commonly abbreviated as RCI, even when referring to the USAmerican Branch. The PSL, while describing itself as Marxist-Leninist, was ideologically descended from some flavour of Trotskyism (Marcyism?). PSL is running its own candidate in the 2024 presidential race. Meanwhile, the CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) is describing itself as "small d democrat". And is fully aligning itself with the Democratic Party inorder to defeat "Trumpism". Then there's the American Communist Party. Which is made-up of several internet personalities. These internet personalities range from decently made anti-imperialist content to rabid blatant pro-Russia propaganda. With several founders itching for power, money, and notoriety. Then there was the (now defunct) City Builders. Who like the American Communist Party, was run by an internet personality and dipped their toes into anti-wokeism. However, ideologically, this strain was more in-line with FDR-ism. This was brought down by the founder's spanking fetish and allegations of misconduct. Am I missing another major group? Did I get this right or wrong? What other "Marxist" groups are there in the USA?

[marcygoo]

Whats the marcyism incident?

oh yknow

normal stuff

[becoming-never-being]

My controversial opinion is that for whatever criticisms can be levied at Marcyism, it ends up being correct way more times than the DemSoc “support the US just this time” form of internationalism

[milkboydotnet]

What I think is a more general problem is their parasitic relationship to the masses. It isn’t exclusive to the revisionists but I think it’s the most pronounced with them. These groups are uniformly small, rarely generate any activity of their own, and there’s an inclination towards doing as little real work as humanly possible. When they’re operating effectively, organizers from a local will fan out into any number of demonstrations or coalitions to recruit and, essentially, outsource the work of a day-to-day struggle. Whereas the Trotskyites tend to set up cheap front organizations to siphon relatively new activists into their reading groups, the Marcyites seep into existing organizations and coalitions to bring in more seasoned ones. In the PSL, the process of converting other local groups into nationally-directed mass organizations is even codified in their constitution.

Fifi Nono’s Recycle Bin

[nobodyownsland]

What is the problem with Trotsky? Would the USSR have been better off with him instead of Stalin?

I was asked this recently on another website, and wrote a whole-ass wall of text addressing it. I figure it might be a good idea to post it here too, for all you comrades out there (and Trots who are hopefully willing to listen):

So, for starters, Stalin wasn't authoritarian. Lets get that out of the way right now. Democracy very much existed in the Soviet Union and would have been even more expansive if Stalin had his way. I'd go so far as to argue that the Soviet Union was more Democratic, even during its decline after Brezhnev, than the United States has ever been. If you doubt this, then I encourage you to read the literature I just linked, because if you want to debunk me, you’ll have to debunk them.

When it comes to Trotsky, the problems with him and his ideas run a lot deeper than being simply "domineering" or “aggressive”. He had a nasty tendency to hold no real solid positions on anything, with Lenin once exclaiming:

"The obliging Trotsky is more dangerous than an enemy! ... Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. At the present moment he is in the company of the Bundists and the liquidators."

One moment Trotsky would be calling Social Democrats "fascist" allies of the Communist International, and then next he would be criticizing the Comintern for not forming a united front with them. One moment he'd say "Comrade Lenin has not left any “Testament”... All talk with regard to a concealed or mutilated “Testament” is nothing but a despicable lie, directed against the real will of Comrade Lenin" and the next he'd be saying "Stalinist censorship had placed a ban on Lenin’s Testament as well as upon hundreds of his other works". The dude was all over the place, to put it mildly, and really couldn’t be said to be a trustworthy ally of any revolutionary group.

But wait, it gets worse. In his book Black Bolshevik, Harry Haywood sums up the issues with Trotsky's theories themselves, from the perspective of someone who was physically present to witness the power struggle between him and Stalin:

"Trotsky's theories were thoroughly defeatist and class-collaborationist...

At the base of this defeatism was Trotsky's view that the peasantry would be hostile to socialism, since the proletariat would "have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations." Thus Trotksy contended that the working class would:

"... come into hostile collision not only with all the bourgeois groupings which supported the proletariat during the first stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses of the peasantry with whose assistance it came into power. The contradictions in the position of a workers' government in a backward country with an overwhelmingly peasant population could be solved only ...in the arena of the world proletarian revolution."

Therefore, it would not be possible to build socialism in a backward, peasant country like Russia. The mass of peasants would exhaust their revolutionary potential even before the revolution had completed its bourgeois democratic tasks-the breakup of the feudal landed estates and the redistribution of the land among the peasantry. This line, which underestimated the role of the peasantry, had been put forward by Trotsky as early as l 915 in his article "The Struggle for Power." There he claimed that imperialism was causing the revolutionary role of the peasantry to decline and downgraded the importance of the slogan "Confiscate the Landed Estates."

Trotsky portrayed the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass. He made no distinction between the masses of peasants who worked their own land (the muzhiks) and the exploiting strata who hired labor (the kulaks). His conclusions openly contradicted the strategy of the Bolsheviks, developed by Lenin, of building the worker-peasant alliance as the basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Further, they were at complete variance with any realistic economic or social analysis.

Trotsky's entire position reflected a lack of faith in the strength and resources of the Soviet people, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Since it denied the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the success of the revolution could not come from internal forces, but had to depend on the success of proletarian revolutions in the advanced nations of Western Europe. In the absence of such revolutions, the revolutionary process within the Soviet Union itself would have to be held in abeyance, and the proletariat, which had seized power with the help of the peasantry, would have to hold state power in conflict, with all other classes.

Behind Trotsky's revolutionary rhetoric was a simplistic social democratic view which regarded the class struggle for socialism as solely labor against capital. This concept of class struggle did not regard the struggle of peasant against landlord, or peasant against the Czar, as a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. This was reflected as early as 1905, in Trotsky's slogan, "No Czar, but a Workers' Government" which, as Stalin had said, was "the slogan of revolution without the peasantry."

So basically, Trotsky believed that it would be impossible for socialism to be achieved in a "backwards" nation and instead it had to arise specifically within Western Europe or the United States before spreading to other "less developed" nations. As Haywood states this is inherently defeatist, as he's literally saying that the entire revolution that the Soviet people had just fought for was essentially for nothing so long as western Europeans remained capitalist and didn't come to fight their battles for them. This idea of "We need white developed nations to come fight the revolution for us and give us socialism" is especially problematic when applied to colonized nations and oppressed peoples. It's dangerously close to the "white man's burden" ideology that dominated western Europe and North America at the time. As Haywood later says in this chapter:

"Trotsky's scheme of permanent revolution downgraded not only the peasantry as a revolutionary force, but also the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples"

Knowing this, it's not surprising to learn that Trotsky was a massive racist, looking down on Stalin as "of Mongolian blood", basically calling him the equivalent of "white trash" in his 1940 biography of Stalin. Like seriously, the first thing he does in that book is go out of his way to paint Stalin as anything but white, or at least not European. Thing is, he considered all of Europe to be a unified "nation", both racially and culturally, similarly to today's European "identitarians". Yet, despite this, he mysteriously doesn't consider Black people in the Americas or Africa to have the same nationhood, expecting Black people in the United States to develop leaders for Africa:

"The Negroes are a race and not a nation. Nations grow out of racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not yet a nation but they are in the process of forming a nation. The American Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But since they are under the pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one can say with certainty, and that in turn will influence the development of political consciousness in America."

This is an incredibly eurocentric (or at least ignorant) view of Africa, as there are and have been countless African nations that were all either destroyed or attacked by Europeans. Many parts of Africa had established cultural identities that were systematically destroyed. His view completely lacks any kind of consideration for Africans as historical actors, instead clearly seeing them as a people for whom "civilization" is just beginning, and who aren't ready to have their own indigenous leadership, instead having to import it from the more “culturally advanced” Black people in the US. Also "Nations grow out of racial material under definite conditions" seems to imply that national and cultural identities cannot cross racial lines, and I hope I don't have to explain why that's a really scary and problematic view.

Now, to be clear, that last quote is the view of Trotsky himself, and not all Trotskyists. So I am not calling all Trotskyists racist, I'm simply saying that Trotsky was a racist, chauvinistic ass-hat, and his supporters need to be doubly vigilant of that attitude persisting within their ranks. Trotskyists do have a history of promoting problematic people and views (See: Marcyism), and had Trotsky and Trotskyists risen to power in the USSR instead of Stalin, it's doubtful that the USSR would have remained socialist for so long. Trotsky's thinly-veiled bourgeois and social democratic ideas, and the contradictions therein, would have inevitably led to a capitalist resurgence and the eventual collapse of the entire Soviet bloc. Should it really be any surprise then, that this is exactly what happened when Soviet leaders such as Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and to a lesser extent Khrushchev started parroting his ideas again? (See: Khrushchev Lied)

[kaysha2201]

Thru thick, thru thin #marcyism #cosmictwin #myfriend #prettypeople #goodpeople @marcydepina (at Battery Park by the Water) https://www.instagram.com/p/BqA0pEKncVz/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=g5xos5xkf6ah

[marcydepina]

Smash the illusion and Illuminate your life with love. #marcyism

[forsamediagroup]

Return to the source. Reclaim your innocence, identity, and purpose. Know who you are and walk in God's vision for your life. #AmilcarCabral #CaboVerde ✨🌍🇨🇻💎 #marcyism

[perestroika-hilton]

Marcyism is unfortunately the best outcome for trots

[stay-unsatisfied]

I've been away on twitter for so long, is Xi Jinping Marcyism the One True Tendency here now as well? or did we skip that trend

[vinummeum]

Even the best weekend must end! Save a glass for Monday! #vinummeum #customerreview #seizewine #fridaynight repost from @marcyisme. Thank you Marcia. http://ift.tt/2kdmtLX

[malifestyle]

#marcyism

[kaysha2201]

One of the most beautiful qualities about friendship is to understand and be understood. 💎 #marcyism #friendship #kompatuesdays #kaysha #newyork #brazil #brasil Tshirt : @shadawear (at Katra) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bp3k2azH1l-/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=i1i05ujvbllf

[marcydepina]

Dreams (un)wind by Marcy DePina It was all a Dream Now we are living between Fantasy and truth That warped space where things bend My soul twisted out in anger My spirit flies away knowing the danger Potential is not what it is Light covers darkness You must go within New dreams will grow Don’t let your heart turn to stone New blossoms will bloom In the sweet morning dew Destiny will be fulfilled Faith is renewed Dreams unwind, love’s a state of mind Mind your state and let love rewind Edit, delete, and re-record if you must Go deep and dig up your trust In you, the one you’ve been waiting for Put yourself first and love will Open all doors

[lvingthedream]

#Repost from @marcydepina Amen!! #marcyism

[marcydepina]

The Blood by Marcy DePina By the blood, I am healed By the blood, truth is sealed Our love creation was bled out Like they say, blood in, blood Out Crucified, nothing new Never counts that I’m true blue Red hot, my anger bleeds Blood cleansing, what my soul needs Born again, I start anew Fresh blood, my spirit renews