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Stalinism vs. Trotskyism in Today's Democrat Party

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The Left, as collectivists, view all of society as one big public commons owned by all society. To them the purpose of government is to fairly provide from the commonly owned commons. But there have been two divisions within the collectivist ranks from year one. One division holds that a vanguard of the proper people should decide how the collective is to be run. The other division of thought holds that everyone should have an equal say in how the collective is run.

A piece in the New Republic today takes issue with Bernie Sanders. The Stalinists at the New Republic try to put out the fires of socialist divisions and focus in on the real enemy. They swing an ice pick at the head of the new Trotskyism:

Bernie Sanders's Misguided Attacks on the 'Liberal Elite'
Rather than highlighting class differences, the phrase beclouds them.

BY NOAH BERLATSKY

“We need a Democratic Party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country,” Senator Bernie Sanders declared at a rally in Boston last week. This has become a very common refrain for Sanders specifically and the progressive left generally. After the election, Nation editor at large D.D. Guttenplan declared that liberal elites who spurned populism are responsible for President Donald Trump, while Chris Hedges argued last month that Trump's greatest allies are, unwittingly, liberal elites.

“The elites, who live in enclaves of privilege in cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, scold an enraged population,” he wrote at Truthdig. “They tell those they dismiss as inferiors to calm down, be reasonable and patient and trust in the goodness of the old ruling class and the American system.”

When conservatives sneer at liberal elites, their complaint is largely a cultural one. But when progressives do so, it's an attack on meritocrats: They hate the “liberal elites” not for, say, demanding safe spaces on college campuses, but for believing their fancy college education makes them better than everyone else.

But in its base assumptions, the left's use of the phrase “liberal elite” unintentionally agrees with the neoliberal vision. After all, if the truly powerful villains in American society are its technocrats and overachievers, then it would seem the plutocrats and nepotists have been dethroned. Taking their place for widespread derision are the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and New England professors and Hollywood actors and Acela corridor media pundits—people who, allegedly but not always in reality, got where they are through skill and commitment.

Some people in these liberal elite professions are quite well off and even wealthy. But there are also an awful lot of adjuncts and low-level coders and freelance writers out there barely scraping by, one health scare away from penury. Defining “elite” in terms of what job you do or, worse, where you live endorses the neoliberal view that capitalism has fundamentally changed in character, and that meritocrats have replaced capitalists in the corridors of power.

When journalist Chris Arnade, for insance, that Trump and Sanders represent the “revolt of the back row kids” against front-row types like Hillary Clinton, he's analytically replacing divisions based on class with divisions based on paying attention in class. For Arnade, merit—doing well in school—replaces money as the fundamental organizer of social divisions. Arnade sympathizes with those who have lost out in neoliberalism, but he accepts neoliberalism's account of how losers and winners are structured.

And yet, neoliberalism is a lie. As Thomas Piketty showed in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, hereditary wealth and the concentration of power today look a lot like they did in the eighteenth century; then as now, the surest way to get rich is by being born rich. Supposed meritocracy doesn't change that dynamic. If anything, it compounds it. The wealthy once felt it was beneath them to work; now they eagerly take cushy CEO jobs for massive salaries, adding bloated income to bloated family fortune. The class enemy is the same as it's always been.

The right uses “liberal elite” as a rhetorical distraction. When the left uses the phrase, it plays into the hands of those who want to obscure class lines. “Liberal elite” makes people think of Meryl Streep or their local college professor, when they should be directing their ire at Jamie Dimon, Peter Thiel, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump. So forget “liberal elites.” Let's start attacking the real enemy, using language that clarifies rather than obscures. They're “the rich,” “the plutocrats,” “the wealthy.” Perhaps we should even revive a well-worn but still relevant epithet: “capitalist pigs.”

One of the many dangers of being a Leftist is that there is always someone to the Left of you. The dance of the Left is a vying to be the Left-most. It's the dance of jungle animals fighting to the death to be King of the collectivist jungle.

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Comrade, you must remember that the legend of national socialist left has it that conflict among collectivists means one is not collectivist.

Witness point made when attempting to prove Hitler was not one of us on the left - that he and socialist workers party battled the communists for control of Germany. Proof that one side was not leftist or something...

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Comrade Torcer is vying to be the Left-most, I see.


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Comrade Torcer wrote:Comrade, you must remember that the legend of national socialist left has it that conflict among collectivists means one is not collectivist.

Witness point made when attempting to prove Hitler was not one of us on the left - that he and socialist workers party battled the communists for control of Germany. Proof that one side was not leftist or something...
A great point -

The Dems are not only fighting the old "Stalin vs. Trotsky" battle, they're also fighting "Stalin vs. Hitler" battle and dragging the rest of the world into those archaic fights.

They're stuck in the mid-1900s in their mentality, hence all the "Trump is Hitler" rhetoric.

The same people who claim to be the most open-minded just keep proving how rigid and inflexible their minds really are.

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Image (SMO's Kulak Monster spiked by Redsquare)

Where have you gone Bernie Sanders, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you...

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Trotskyist Corner : Where is Batyushka (Soso) ?
and while at that : Where is Comradette Clara (and Rosa) ?

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plus :
Red Square wrote:
Comrade Torcer wrote:Comrade, you must remember that the legend of national socialist left has it that conflict among collectivists means one is not collectivist.

Witness point made when attempting to prove Hitler was not one of us on the left ...
... Dems are not only fighting the old "Stalin vs. Trotsky" battle, they're also fighting "Stalin vs. Hitler" battle and dragging the rest of the world into those archaic fights.

They're stuck in the mid-1900s in their mentality ...

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Red Square wrote: A great point -

The Dems are not only fighting the old "Stalin vs. Trotsky" battle, they're also fighting "Stalin vs. Hitler" battle and dragging the rest of the world into those archaic fights.

They're stuck in the mid-1900s in their mentality, hence all the "Trump is Hitler" rhetoric.

The same people who claim to be the most open-minded just keep proving how rigid and inflexible their minds really are.

They cannot for a nanosecond acknowledge that that Hitler and the rest of his socialist worker's party was actually a socialist worker's party. Behaving the same as other Leftists wanting to suppress liberty with cultural Marxism speech codes,burn books and kill their opposition.

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Comrade Torcer wrote:
Red Square wrote:... Dems are not only fighting the old "Stalin vs. Trotsky" battle, they're also fighting "Stalin vs. Hitler" battle and dragging the rest of the world into those archaic fights ...
They cannot for a nanosecond acknowledge that Hitler and the rest of his socialist worker's party was actually a socialist worker's party. Behaving the same as other Leftists wanting to suppress liberty with cultural Marxism speech codes ...
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Quasi-forgotten (as "Nazi" seems the sole code for all things Hitlerian): Führer's party was NSDAP.
NS: Nationalsozialistische (full: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Arbeiter=worker).

The "Hitler contra Stalin" fight was basically "National Socialism" against "Communist Socialism"
(tinged as "Aryan Ubermensch New World" against "Russo-Slavic Untermensch New World").


A most equally korrekt beam of light on the (deliberate-or-deranged) "Left"-Left vs. "Right"-Left confusion, by Comrade Šterpin (in an A1 thread of April 2015), with EUSSR added :

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