Trotsky and Lenin: Early Marxist Philosophers [In Depth Analysis Ep. 3]
An introduction to historical analysis, and an explanation of what Trotsky and Lenin each believed, the historical context which drove them to adopt the beliefs they did, and how their philosophies became mechanisms for social change. This video is preparation for explaining how American politics has become heavily influenced by both of them.
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There's an image that keeps coming up in political cartoons, that of the left and the right in America working in unison with one another.
New boss just like the old boss, two different flavors of the same sugary soda.
In this video, I'd like to explore the importance of ideology and how it affects our understanding of the world.
The modern day left and right, Democrats and Republicans, should be understood through a Marxist lens, since that is the ideology which both parties employ.
In the case of the Democrats, they follow a bottom-up Leninist approach.
With the Republicans, it's a top-down Trotskyist approach.
To understand what's going on today, we need to understand what was going on a century ago, how different organizations and political ideas from revolutionary Russia came to influence our present day understanding of the world, the heuristics through which we view reality, and how these old ideologies determine what we're capable of seeing and what sort of political conversation we're able to have.
Because this is ultimately what's wrong with modern political discourse.
We're like a carriage horse wearing blinders, Nazi this and communist that, ridiculous oversimplifications like the political compass test, which, incidentally, scores almost everybody as a liberal moderate.
The problem in present day America isn't left versus right.
It's that we're looking at the world in black and white.
Part 1.
Understanding heuristics Heuristics is a term you'll often hear amongst computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers.
It refers to the nature of a problem-solving process.
Your heuristic is a filter which determines what you choose to observe as well as how you then process the information.
This is what your computer's kernel does.
It breaks down each process into a different tier of importance and then selects which one will have access to the processor at a given time.
A kernel with a good heuristic will maintain all the vital operations in balance, minimizing processing time spent on background services and ensuring steady and hang-free operation of whatever primary application you're currently using.
A kernel with a bad heuristic will regularly hang and crash out for no reason.
Heuristics are just as important in the humanities.
The heuristic you choose for your filter will determine what information you're able to notice and what information you write off as irrelevant.
For instance, the heuristic of philosophical materialism states that everything in reality has a deterministic physical cause.
This leads its adherents to explore the world around them in an effort to explain all observable phenomenon through a mechanistic cause-effect paradigm.
However, it also necessitates a dismissal of any phenomenon which doesn't fit into this worldview.
I'm sure you've heard this criticized before.
My second favorite childhood book, after the Baby BB Bird, was The Bunyap of Berkeley's Creek.
In it, a bunyip crawls out of a billabon and goes on a journey to try and find out what he looks like.
Eventually he stumbles upon a scientist and asks him.
However, the scientist is too busy observing his telescope and taking notes to look over at the bunyip and simply informs him that bunyips look like nothing because bunyips don't exist.
Disheartened, the bunyip wanders back to his creek only to stumble upon another bunyip emerging from the mud.
With this, he realizes what he truly wanted was friendship and he drops his quest for external validation.
Now, if you're saying that a bunyip is clearly a physical phenomenon which the scientist ought to have observed, you're missing the point.
Philosophical materialism can acknowledge that you exist as a physical entity, but it can't acknowledge you as a person.
It won't tell you what the true meaning of friendship is or where the artist finds the inspiration to write a song.
The bunyip in the story is a metaphorical representation of the human spirit, and science does not, cannot address the question of why music moves the soul.
It will have quite a bit to say about serotonin and audio frequencies, but it won't be able to explain why any of this matters.
Philosophical materialism is a wonderful heuristic when it comes to examining physical reality.
It dispels Carl Sagan's demon haunted world, which still plagues places like Africa, but it utterly fails in providing meaning or purpose in society.
Psychiatry, one of its offshoots, is very useful at keeping people medicated so that they don't cause too much friction, but it often fails at providing long-term improvement in the individual, and even when it does, it's not a testament to the philosophical materialism of the practitioner, rather, it is the spiritual heuristics that said practitioner also employs.
Now keep in mind, science versus spirituality is just one example of a heuristical conflict.
These sort of conflicts also crop up within science and spirituality.
For instance, there is presently an incipient revolution happening in our understanding of the cosmos, which can be tracked back to heuristical assumptions, heuristical assumptions which are implicit in our biological makeup.
As creatures who exist on the surface of a planet, with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, with a sun of a certain magnitude, we've developed sensory organs attuned to the world around us, an environment which is strikingly exceptional when you consider what the rest of the universe looks like.
The challenge for the cosmologist is to pull himself out of this environment to try and understand a cosmos that is mostly empty space, or at least what appears to be empty space from our perspective.
According to this new theory, which is challenging traditional cosmology, the old school has failed on two fronts, our understanding of matter and on the importance of gravity.
Here on Earth, we're mostly familiar with solids, liquids, and gases.
Plasma, the fourth state of matter, is almost completely unknown, despite being omnipresent in the empty spaces between the stars.
Similarly, gravity is incredibly important to us naked apes crawling about on the surface of the third rock from the sun, but when it comes to fundamental forces, it's one of the weakest, paling in comparison to electromagnetism.
The electric universe theory holds that plasma and electromagnetics are far more important than gravity, and that they may offer an explanation for the curious movements of stars and galaxies that doesn't require speculation about dark matter or dark energy.
Whether the theory is right or not remains to be seen, but it serves as an example of how heuristical assumptions can lead you down the wrong path and make you blind to the reality right in front of your notes.
With history and political science, the challenge is to find a heuristic that gives you the most useful picture and to constantly challenge it with new perspectives.
When analyzing society, data such as population density, technological levels, and farming capacity of the land are obviously important.
But what about standardized weights and measurements?
What about cultural worldview?
What about social stratification?
Failure to take these into account, or conversely, placing too much emphasis on them, will result in a distorted understanding of the world and complete blindness to the historical forces at play.
Present day universalism, for instance, assumes that all religions are essentially the same because they all address the same topics birth, death, marriage, and the question of the ineffable.
Sometimes this assumption can be valid.
A civil engineer, for instance, shouldn't waste time considering whether a public transit system is being developed for a Buddhist country or a Christian country, its extraneous data.
But in other situations, this cultural chauvinism will have disastrous results.
So when it comes to considering the tenets of Marxism, it's important to remember that it isn't merely a political system.
We're not simply discussing policy disagreements between the left and the right.
What we're talking about is a fundamental approach and assumption about the nature of humanity, which has many cachet values within it and many blind spots on matters it considers irrelevant.
So with that in mind, let's jump into the history between Leninism and Trotskyism.
Part two understanding Marxism To understand the difference between Leninism and Trotskyism, we need to understand about the preceding split between the Bolshevist and Menshevist forms of Marxism.
And to understand why Marxism split into Bolshevism and Menshevism, we need to understand both the theory and the historical context in which all of this occurred.
This is a tall order, but we're going to simplify things by analyzing each shade of Marxist thought from three separate angles.
First, as a theory of history.
That is, an explanation of why history and politics operated as they had up to that point, an explanation of the situation which Marxist philosophers found themselves in.
Second, as a movement within a particular historical context, why such and such a school arose at such and such a place and what they were trying to achieve.
And third, as a methodology of operation.
We'll be looking at how the theory, plus the historical context, led to a certain prescription as to what should be done.
This breakdown will allow us to specifically identify each movement, what sort of animal it was, how it operated, and where its blind spots were.
For example, let's apply this breakdown to the social science of marketing and propaganda.
First, as a theory.
The theory which underlies modern marketing techniques goes all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century to a man named Edward Bernays.
Inspired by the psychoanalytic theories of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays posited that individuals are subconsciously motivated by a universal set of desires sex, popularity, agency, etc, and that arguments which appeal to these subconscious desires would be more effective than arguments which targeted rational self-interest.
Second, as a historical context.
The modern science of marketing and propaganda arose in conjunction with two specific technologies.
The first is industrialization and the normalization of replaceable parts.
These days, not only is every 10 millimeter bolt identical to every other 10 millimeter bolt, we've even homogenized agriculture.
Think about when you buy a dozen eggs from the grocery store.
All twelve are not only the same size, they're even the same color.
The second important technology which influenced Bernays' theories was the mass media, the one-to-many data model which could assume mass consumption.
The confluence of these two physical technologies is what drove the formation of marketing as a social technology.
We have a one-size-fits-all product and a one-size-fits-all media outlet.
Marketing addressed the question of how to combine these two different systems, which, on their own, would both be innately alienating, but by combining them, he was able to create something which seemed intimate and comforting.
And finally, marketing as a methodology.
The marketer or propagandist starts out by breaking down their audience into specific groups or lifestyles, stay-at-home moms, blue-collar workers, urban yuppies, so on and so forth.
And then they determine what sort of psychological need is being unmet amongst each group.
For instance, you might have a working mother who feels guilty about not being able to cook from scratch.
So what you do is you take instant pancake batter, just add water, and remove the dehydrated eggs.
Now you have to add water and eggs, and this token gesture assuages her sense of guilt, even though it doesn't change the nutritional value of the meal itself.
So that's the science of marketing and propaganda as understood and developed in the 20th century.
Today, in the 21st century, much of it no longer applies due to easy product customization and the many to many model of internet communications.
Failing to understand this has resulted in numerous marketing failures, in particular, the notorious PSP rap video from Sony.
So now let's consider the original topic of this video, Marxism itself.
Marx's theories are often misunderstood as being primarily economic in nature, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.
There are several reasons for this.
First is the legacy of the Cold War, the battle between free trade capitalism and state-run communism.
Second is the sociopolitical environment in which Marx developed his theories.
We'll touch more upon this shortly.
And third is the simple fact that economic policies are far easier to delineate and define than the esoteric heuristics which are the actual core.
Marxism is primarily a theory of history, more properly known as dialectical materialism.
It looks at society as a negotiation between different physical and social forces, technology, capital, religion, and culture, and predicts a certain pattern to how all human cultures will develop.
The first stage is known as primitive communism.
An egalitarian society where one's contributions are recognized by the rest of the tribe, all members are provided for and high status and rewards are granted organically.
Today you can see this sort of organization spontaneously arising in hippie communes such as the annual rainbow gathering, as well as being orchestrated by larger organizations such as the military.
The currency of these organizations is how much you contribute to the group as a whole.
The second stage of dialectical materialism is the slave society, which is triggered by two interrelated events the rise of agriculture, requiring laborious managed servitude, and the organization of religion.
No longer did we have shamans offering guidance on the individual's path through the ineffable, but instead we developed god emperors and the priestly caste who maintained order by threat of violence in this world and the next.
These slave societies created massive suffering for most of the individuals within them, but they also created societal success.
Eventually, they created sufficient excess wealth to lead to the next stage of development, feudalism.
In the feudal society, elites no longer needed to grind the peasants under their heels.
Life was still difficult, but the slaves were becoming serfs, tied to the land, but no longer tasked by the master's whip, and the aristocracy began leading as much by example as by divine fiat.
This loosening of social controls opened up avenues for a new caste within society, the bourgeoisie merchants.
The excess wealth provided opportunities for speculation and traders, and the merchants found ways to profit off of wealth's redistribution.
Eventually they became so powerful that they overtook the ruling class, leading to the next stage in societal development, capitalism.
This was the society in which Marx developed his theories.
The ruling aristocracy was on the wane.
In France, they'd been completely ousted, while in Britain, their rights and privileges were worth less and less by the day.
Back in 1600, the crown had commissioned the East India Company, granting the merchants permission to earn money for the British Empire.
By the 1700s, the crown had become reliant upon the merchants, organizations such as the South Sea Company were vital in financing foreign wars and servicing the national debt.
While the aristocrats still held nominal power, it was the bankers and capitalists, that is, the owners of large factories whom the peasants termed worker proletariat depended upon for employment, who truly ran the country.
This is the historical context in which Marx's theory arose, a society driven not by the rhythm of nature or by the narrative of chivalry, but by the incessant, clanging demands of remorseless machinery.
The aristocrat might put on airs of noblesse oblige, but they were ultimately co-opted by their dependence upon money.
They'd become parasitical off of the capitalist class, allowed to exist so long as they did as they were told.
The proletariat, meanwhile, the peasants and serfs and slaves who had become workers, found themselves divorced from the means of production.
They performed meaningless tasks in ugly environments, disconnected from the long-term purpose of their labors, and subject to the whims of economic trade winds which they could not predict, let alone control, all while renting their homes from absentee landlords.
Marx saw the pregnant possibilities of this technological era, as well as the strict class divisions, and the withering of the old world's cultures and religions.
Inspired by Hegel's theory of historical dialectic, that is, unmovable object A meets unstoppable force B, creating new society C, he predicted a world where wealth could be effectively limitless, where narratives based upon superstition could be eschewed, where the owners would be overthrown, and a new communist man could emerge to glorify in his mastery of the material.
His methodology was revolution, a worldwide elimination of all cultures and histories, a purely materialistic belief system that eschewed narrative for machinery, a resetting of the clock to year zero.
With a century and a half of retrospective, we can see the foundational flaws in his theory.
For one thing, it's ahistorical.
Primitive tribes are not peaceful.
Their form of primitive communism relies upon exclusion and murder to maintain a productive core.
Both the hippie communes and the military use similar, though less brutal techniques to achieve the same.
They are both very selective about who is allowed in.
They are merely enclaves of primitive communism within a larger social context.
Another problem is the emphasis on materialism.
If there's one thing that the 20th century taught us, it's that we are not as smart as we think we are.
The Great War managed to kill more than 15 million people and devastate Europe even though nobody wanted it.
And then we have Frederick Gerdell and Alan Turing proving what philosophers have been saying for centuries, that there are hard physical limits to how far our reasoning can take us.
Nineteenth century materialism saw man as the pinnacle of creation, not just the measure of all things, but the master of the measuring system itself.
And through our own hubris, we fell hard.
And finally, there's the imprecision of Marx's terminology.
What is a capitalist?
What is productive capital?
In 1850, the answer was obvious, the man who owned the factory and the machines that were used to produce.
But what about nowadays?
If you drive for Uber, does that make your car capital and you a capitalist?
What about Mark Zuckerberg?
His capital is a domain name and a bit of code that people voluntarily subscribe to.
Is he a capitalist?
For that matter, being a CEO of a company seems like a lot more work than most people are interested in doing.
Most of us would prefer the easy work and weekends off that a salaried job offers rather than the twenty four seven dedication and stress of running a multinational firm.
Dialectical materialism mistook a temporary socioeconomic condition for an absolute state of being.
It was as if he saw a man kicking a vending machine because it just ate his last dollar and decided that he must just be an angry individual probably with bad parents.
At most, dialectical materialism was a contemporary critique of British manufacturing and foreign policy in the late 1800s.
But by providing such a rational sounding theory, which fit in perfectly with the average working man's problems and that prescribed a specific response with the promise of utopia, it managed to take root in many places throughout the globe.
Even in Russia, despite the fact that industrialization had yet to take place across that vast wilderness.
At the turn of the 20th century, Russia was still firmly entrenched in the third Marxist stage of feudalism.
How could they leap over the fourth stage of capitalism to achieve the utopia promised by the communists?
Russia's population was still 90% rural, the breakdown of most medieval societies.
In stark contrast to contemporary Great Britain, where less than 20% of the population lived in rural or mostly rural districts.
Less than half of Russians were literate, while over 90% of Britons could read and write.
The Marxist game plan assumed a society where the nobility and priestly castes had withered into irrelevance, where the bourgeoisie had risen to prominence, capturing the means of production, and where the peasants had matured into the city dwelling proletariat who chafed under the yoke of capitalism.
Russia had the wrong mix of elements.
The Romanov dynasty had been ruling for 300 years.
The population was primarily composed of uneducated peasants in rural areas.
The proletariat, the city dwelling workers, were a minority, and even worse, the bourgeoisie capitalist whose investments had created this small proletariat mostly dwelt in foreign lands, offering no direct antagonist for the revolutionaries to target.
Despite this, the political upheavals that had been plaguing Western Europe for the past century and a half began to reach the Near East.
Demands for an end to the Romanov autocracy and for workers' rights led to repeated clashes between government forces and various radical factions, but the latter remained disorganized with no specific plan or strategy for seizing power.
Enter Vladimir Lenin Part three Examining Leninism Born in 1870 to a wealthy middle class family in Simbersk, a major city five hundred miles east of Moscow, he became involved in radical politics following the death of his brother, who was executed in 1887 for his attempted assassination of Alexander III, the penultimate Russian emperor.
Lenin was the most important political agitator of his time.
He was responsible for organizing the various radical groups and adapting Marxist philosophy to the agrarian Russian conditions.
He started off by offering an explanation of why Marx's predicted utopia had failed to manifest in the West.
It's a theory that all of you will be intimately familiar with, since it's still taught in high schools to this day.
Capitalist Imperialism A new stage of Marxism in between capitalism and utopia.
According to imperialist theory, the rising class consciousness of the working proletariat provoked a response in the capitalist bourgeoisie.
Realizing that they could no longer exploit the working man of their own countries, they turned their gaze abroad to undeveloped, technologically primitive lands.
The capitalists would develop these countries, but only for the sake of extracting natural resources, a form of super exploitation which kept the natives laboring in bondage subjugated by invisible masters in foreign lands.
The resources thus acquired would be sufficient to keep the European proletariat content while keeping the far off third world peasants ignorant and impoverished.
This new historical stage of capitalist imperialism required a new sort of communism, a global communism where the workers of the world would finally unite to achieve this unity, and this revolution would start in Russia before eventually expanding to the rest of the globe.
To achieve this, Lenin proposed a two-pronged strategy, the inner party vanguard and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The communist vanguard would be made up of the inner party intellectuals, those who had the knowledge and historicity to understand what was happening on a global scale.
The dictator of the proletariat, meanwhile, would arise through education of the masses, introducing them to an understanding of the global situation and their own role of becoming democratic dictators of industrial resources.
Lenin's theories were adopted by the Bolsheviks in Russia, who came into conflict with the Mensheviks.
The latter were more moderate in tone.
They wanted to create a wide base, an alliance of everybody on the left, Marxists, Social Democrats, anybody and everybody.
They wanted an ideological movement which allowed input from the masses and discussion of policy rather than a top-down indoctrination and one party democracy.
This open-mindedness would eventually lead to their downfall.
With such a diverse base, they weren't able to form a specific strategy.
They could organize against the Tsar, but they were powerless against their supposed allies to the left.
When the Romanov dynasty fell in 1917, the Mensheviks were quickly ousted, and Marxist Leninism was adopted as the party platform of the revolutionary Russians, one party, an inner vanguard, and the indoctrination of the masses.
Now let's briefly review Leninism using the threefold breakdown from earlier Leninism as a theory, Leninism as a historical event, and Leninism as a methodology.
As a theory.
Leninism addresses two failures of traditional Marxist theory.
The first is its failure to achieve its predicted utopia through raising the class consciousness of the proletariat.
The second is its failure to acknowledge events in societies outside of Western Europe or to consider how they could come into play.
Leninism posits a fifth historical stage which Marx and Engels had ignored.
In between capitalism and utopia was capitalist imperialism.
In this stage, ignorant second and third world peasants would be hyper-exploited for the sake of satiating the working class in first world countries.
Thus, the first world proletariat would never develop class consciousness until the second and third world workers threw off their own chains, at which point the revolution would become global.
To accomplish this would require the education of the third world peasants, indoctrination into Leninist theory by an inner party vanguard.
On their own, the third world peasants would be too ignorant and too far away from their capitalist owners to truly see the situation for what it was.
But with the help of the Leninists, those at the bottom would rule, but only after being taught what to think by their intellectual superiors.
As a historical context Leninism was specifically designed for Russian conditions at the beginning of the 20th century, a country that was still largely pre-industrial with a traditional government, powerful church, and a rural populace.
While the revolutionary fervor of the last century had reached the Russian steppes, the demands being made were fuzzy, and the groups disorganized.
The specific situation and triggers for Western revolutions weren't present in the Russian landscape, and demands for workers' rights were easily sated, or easily ignored.
A new theory of revolution was needed which would incorporate an ignorant populace, capitalist investment from far off lands, and a culture accustomed to top down control.
It also needed to offer a long term vision, a raison d'etre for the revolutionaries.
It needed a myth to power it, and that myth was the dictatorship of the proletariat as a methodology.
Leninism was not just one ideology amongst many.
There were a plethora of socialist groups, democratic groups, workers' groups, all trying to overthrow the Tsar.
But Leninism was the only one which also plotted to overthrow the other groups.
The methodology of Leninism was to create a strong vanguard for the party, an inner corps of intellectuals, who would then proceed to educate and indoctrinate the ignorant peasants into becoming a borg-like army who marched in lockstep as part of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Part four The Objections of Leon Trotsky Now let's consider the other major school of Marxist philosophy which arose during this time Trotskyism.
Leon Trotsky first became involved in radical politics during his teenage years, distributing leaflets advocating populism and workers' rights.
On january first, eighteen ninety eight, at the age of eighteen, he, along with over two hundred fellow union members, were arrested.
He spent the next two years awaiting trial, and it was during this time that he first became familiar with Lenin's work and converted to full-blown Marxism.
Though he initially supported the Russian Mensheviks, that's the Social Democrats, the People's Party, remember, he decided to join the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the Revolution of 1917 and would become an important figure within the new Russian government.
As a contemporary of Lenin, he developed his theories in the same milieu, revolution in a largely feudal society with a foreign capitalist class, but a small and yet significant group of industrial workers, of proletariats, who could be mobilized against the status quo and for the new government.
While Lenin's vision was focused internally and downward, how do we turn the peasants into a revolutionary party?
Trotsky's vision was focused upward and outward.
According to Trotsky, the industrial workers were the key.
They were the ones who could allow Russia to skip over the capitalist stage in classical Marxist theory.
And so he developed the idea of permanent revolution.
While the workers might not have the same numbers as in countries to the west, nor the same sort of immediate targets as their Western counterparts, since many of the factory owners lived outside of Russia, his experience as a socialist organizer showed him that there was still a lot they could accomplish.
They also weren't sparsely distributed across the countryside like the peasants were.
For Trotsky, permanent revolution meant an organized, gradual movement to remove all vestiges of capitalism from his society.
They would start by claiming the factories, then creating small democracies through local Soviet councils, and so on building up the new society piece by piece, creating new elements that would eventually translate into becoming the new normal of the regime.
The workers' state would be a step en route to liberating the peasants.
But to accomplish his goal of permanent revolution, it wasn't enough to just look to the Russian workers.
Like Lenin, he noted how capital was being controlled by international capitalists backed by the ruling elite.
But where Lenin focused on educating the Russian peasants, Trotsky saw the need to raise awareness amongst foreign workers.
The nascent socialism in Russia simply wouldn't be able to survive against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world.
Thus the second meaning of permanent revolution.
Trotskyism would be permanently moving out from Russia, radicalizing the workers, overthrowing the capitalists, and ensuring freedom and stability in all other lands.
So let's recap, breaking Trotskyism down as a theory, as a historical context, and as a methodology.
As a theory, Trotskyism is a counter argument to Leninism.
The latter wanted to build Russia from the ground up by using the peasantry to create the new Soviet man.
Trotsky argues that the workers should be used to create a workers' state as one step in an ongoing process to eventually liberate the peasants.
Furthermore, this workers' revolt needs to be spread out internationally to ensure the security of the revolt at home.
Allowing foreign capitalists to stay in power would ultimately endanger the Soviets, that is, the workers' councils in Russia.
As a historical context Trotsky's theories came out of the same context as Lenin's, but unlike his contemporary, Trotsky had a blue collar history as a socialist and a union organizer.
Lenin was an educated man.
He'd attended Kazan Imperial University, and after getting expelled he focused on getting a law degree.
He spent many of his formative years in Europe writing political theories.
Trotsky, meanwhile, was the fifth child of well to do farmers living fifteen miles from the nearest post office who, upon his own exile, wound up in Siberia, not the salons of France.
The different backgrounds of these two men explain the different perspectives they brought to speculative Marxist theory.
Lenin was an intellectual, while Trotsky had a working class, no nonsense background.
As a methodology It is here we find the greatest difference between Leninism and Trotskyism.
Their assessments of the Russian situation were largely the same, the class breakdown, the same fight against international capitalism, the same emphasis on the inner party vanguard.
But their one point of contention, workers versus peasants, led to wildly divergent methodologies.
Lenin wanted the largest mass of society to take charge of the revolution.
He proposed a bottom up approach to utopia.
Trotsky wanted to focus on those who had some power already and organizations which could make a meaningful change.
In Russia, this was the workers' councils.
Trotskyism can be described as a top down form of communism.
Part 5 The Aftermath Lenin died in 1924 at the age of 53 due to a stroke.
Shortly thereafter, Trotsky was exiled, eventually winding up in Mexico where he was assassinated in 1940 by a Soviet agent, dying at the age of sixty.
Stalin took over the party in 1922 and claimed his own Marxist theory as the natural inheritor of Lenin, whose body was preserved as one of the founding fathers of Russian Communism.
The principles he championed, state terror, socialism in one state, collectivization, and rapid industrialization, these are what we think of today as communism.
They are also why modern-day Marxists are wont to point out that true Marxism has never been tried.
In retrospect, Leninism and Trotskyism come across as pipe dreams, optimistic fantasies put forth by true believers, which are very effective at overthrowing the state, but incapable of creating a staple order.
Trotsky organizes the top, turning them against the status quo, while Lenin goes to the bottom and turns them against the status quo as well.
By attacking things from both sides, the old order is destroyed, but without any new order to replace it, just empty promises of utopia.
In combination, their philosophies are extremely effective at destabilizing society, and they pave the way for a tyrant like Stalin, a realist like Stalin.
The two of them managed to create a vacuum and power, and it should be no surprise that a man with no ethics, morals, or beliefs decided to occupy it.
Thank you for listening to this episode of In-Depth Analysis.
A special thanks to everybody that's backing me on Patreon so that I can put the work into doing videos like this.
Next time, we'll be considering how these Marxist philosophies have gone on to influence American politics, particularly neoconservatism.
