Thread:Toph's Fanboy/@comment-681745-20120820083713/@comment-3338975-20120916222339

I'm aware of that many pro-Marxists (Marxists and those symapathetic to their political philosophy) will claim that some different system is true Marxism or socialism; I'm open-minded and intelligent enough to read over the material and surrounding opinions on it before deciding whether to reject it or not. What irks me as a rational human being, is that people will claim that the USSR would have been more of a Marxist society if Trotsky had taken power instead of Stalin; doubtless, Trotsky was less of a power-mad agressor than ol' Joesph, but techinically in Marxist ideology an economic backwater place like Russia wasn't supposed to have a proletarian revolution at all, and Marx would have cosigned it to its poverty until the day when the world revolution took place (or at least until developed countries became sufficiently socialist to enforce their mode of production on semi-feudalistic systems like that of the Csars). Both Stalin and Trostky were taking significant liberties with the original fatalistic theory; solely in terms of Marxist doctrine, one cannot really determine whether Trotsky's "permanent revolution" (continuing the revolution of the proletriats and not letting the bourgeiosse have any place alongside them as the laborers themselves forced the economy to develop, in flat-out contradiction to Marx's theory) or Stalin's "two-stage economy" (allowing the bourgeioisse to develop the backwater economy - under the Party's guidance -until the time was ripe for the true proletriat revolution, though this would require the sacrifice of the proletriat's desires for a time) applied to the philosophical-theoretical aberration of the proletriat taking power in such a country, so one has to smuggle in theories of morality which aren't economically determined in order to choose between them - something which Marx would have adamantly denied one's ability to do. Stalin may have been insanely paranoid, but it's hard to argue strictly in terms of Marxist theory that he had chosen wrongly - especially when Trotsky came from an aristocratic background, whereas he came from the conquered peasantry of Georgia. It's made even worse when one realizes that all past Communist revolutions have been of this type - in the underdeveloped, rather than developed world, and always ending in a political dictatorship which oppresses the masses in the name of preserving the truths of Marx (however so they interpert it). Marxist should either learn to live with the consequences of their own inconsistency and take responsibility for their past failings as people from other political positions must do, or give up on the theory altogether - hair-splitting as to who's the true Marxist so one doesn't have to deal with such problems really shouldn't remain an option, as that's just irrational.