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by fao_ 3184 days ago
> Chomsky disagrees with them (..., Trotskyists, ...) on the same grounds of statist antidemocratic rule as he does ...

As I understand it (Based on an admittedly rudimentary understanding of the relevant philosophies), Trotsky advocated that everything be decentralized -- i.e. not controlled by the state -- at least in the traditional sense, but by the people, locally to the people. Thus it seems weird to me that Chomsky would disagree with him on this matter.

Personally, I'm still searching for the holon system that was used in Suarez' Daemon series. Although I suspect that I might be remembering it to be less capitalistic than it was described to be.

1 comments

Ah, interesting. For some reason I had the sense that Trotskyism was like dictatorship rule by vanguards (like Stalinism I guess), but it seems that it's more like dictatorship by the proletariat by means of a dash of anarchism according to wikipedia, and in that way pretty much completely different than how I perceived it. Although wikipedia does also say that "permanent revolution" has non-identical uses; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution

All I know for certain is that Chomsky is no Posadist, lol.

Trotsky opposed centralised technocracy, and he was right - this was what ultimately killed the ussr, as corrupt and incompetent centralised bureaucracy could not respond rapidly enough or appropriately to external conditions. Production was a mess, goods would be in dire shortage in one oblast and vast excess in another. Those who held the central reigns of power funnelled everything into their own pockets - cf. the incumbent oligarchy.

Had Trotsky succeeded Lenin rather than Stalin, the world might be a very different place today. But he didn’t, and it might not have made any damn difference.

I guess we need to run another experiment.