> Michael Pugliese wrote:
>
> > Ay, carumba! All the Trotskyist parties in the world. I want some
> >of the drugs these folks are on, well on second thought..
> >http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/4192/trotskyi.html
>
> My god. What is it about Trots? Put three of them together in a room
> and in 5 minutes you'll have two new parties and a tendency. Is there
> some conjunction between the doctrine and a particular
> psychopathology? Can someone explain this?
For all of the humour of groups like the Generic Trotskyist League, I think that the history of Trotskyism is a history which needs answering - in the sense of why did all this stuff happen?
There seems to be a relation between the thoroughness of theoretical investigation and the inability to hold an organisation together. The Spartacists, for instance, until recently, produced a paper which combined extremely thorough analysis (which was meticulously self-consistent) with extreme sectarianism, and, to a large extent, disdain for the human results of their policies.
Though far less brutal (or consistent) in their results, the strange behaviour of the Sparts also has its counterparts (splits, extreme personal hostility) in other Trotskyist currents, including the Sparts' 'opposite', the Mandel-inspired 4th Internationalists, as well as 'revisionist' Trotskyists like the UK Socialist Workers Party.
This relationship - this combination of mental rigour and behaviour which appears to be utterly pathological - is, to me at least, a challenge which needs to be unraveling: what is the correct 'attitude' to approach the world with? Are behavious such as displayed by the Sparts (very confrontational behaviour, attempts to provoke opponents, extremely fast and unrelenting delivery of their arguments) unrelated to the way they theorise about theory? Or is their a link between theoretical basis and behaviour - and if there is a link, what is the correct relation between these two things?
Put simply: does being an asshole matter? If so, then precisely why, and how?
Peter P.S. chronic splitting and pathological behaviour is hardly a Trotskyist monopoly - anarchism shows at least as much of this behavious as Trotskyism, and Maoism also has a history of split upon split upon split. -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.