Although I used to find it funny, these days I'm getting tired of Trotskyists using the insult of "Stalinist" to declaim communist movements and theoretical commitments of which they are ignorant. The crude and simplistic Trotskyist rejection of Maoism, after all, is that it is "Stalinist." And then, following this charge, very simplistic analyses of Maoism and the Chinese Revolution are mobilized (most of which demonstrate an utter ignorance of history and bizarre willingness to conflate revolutionary China with today's pro-capitalist China), along with spurious complaints about Maoists killing Trotskyists in third world settings for being counter-revolutionary. Hence:Earlier, in the context of another post , I briefly indicated that Trotskyism was flawed by an essentialist understanding of class; because of this the prototypical Trotskyist understanding of class consciousness, class position, and class struggle annihilates the possibility of concretely understanding race/racism, gender/sexism, and other sites of oppression as part of social class. Trotskyism's crude class reductionism, which at the end of the day obliterates a proper understanding of class as a social category, also connects to its general eurocentric understanding of world history. There is a reason that Maoism is simply another species of "Stalinism"––this is because no one from places like China, according to the most rabid Trotskyite cult recruiter, are capable of theoretical thought. The same goes for any revolutionary African historical materialism: I have heard numerous Trotskyists, for example, write-off Frantz Fanon because he was not a proper "revolutionary theorist"––apparently writing theory in the midst of an anticolonial revolution does not qualify as properly. No, to be a proper revolutionary one must cling to theory that emerged from the "civilized" centres of world capitalism where workers struggles, we are told, are far more advanced than the "primitive" and "degenerated" struggles in the peripheries.Trotskyist theory of world revolution, then, generally tends to be a eurocentric game. The entire theory of Permanent Revolution, which relies on the erroneous analysis of world capitalism being "combined and uneven development" (one mode of production cast upon the entire globe), ultimately produces an understanding of revolution that is both chauvinist and paralyzing: the task of underdeveloped nations (and there is no clear understanding of the global capitalist relationship that develops underdevelopment), was for the germ of the working classes there to pursue the bourgeois democratic revolution in their own country and keep alive a revolutionary spirit (i.e. holding the revolution in permanence), while keeping alive a revolutionary spirit, thus creating a larger and more advanced working class––ultimately all of the nations that did this would have to hold the revolution in permanence for a long time until everyone in the world was in a similar place, like the "advanced" working class in the already capitalist developed nations, so as to have a socialist revolution altogether. Maoist theories, along with theories emerging from revolutionary African movements (i.e. Fanon, Cabral, etc.), rejected this position as a half-truth; this is why the theories of New Democratic Revolution and Cultural Revolution, for example, emerged in China. (It might also be why Tony Cliff, despite being a Trotskyist, tried to "update" the theory of Permanent Revolution and ended up with a version that, despite being messy, closely approximated Mao's theory of New Democratic Revolution.)In any case, I am not going to spend too much time here going into the problems of Trotskyist theory: once you point out a flaw at the heart of these types of theories, you tend to unleash a storm of anger from theoretical partisans who want to argue the minutia as a way of throwing dust in your eyes to detract from your original complaint. My aim here is to focus on the Trotskyist charge of "Stalinism" to point out its irony, especially when wielded against Maoists: not only does it try to conflate all marxist theory to simplistic understanding of the politics that emerged in the Russian revolution, it is. Samir Amin, political economist and critical marxist, once remarked that Trotskyism and Stalinism were two sides of the same economic determinist coin, both dogmatic dead-ends post-Lenin.Aside from the eurocentric nature behind the charge, whenever Trotskyists scream "Stalinist" I feel like I am encountering the echo of mimetic rivalry that refused to die with Trotsky and Stalin. Maybe Trotskyists are just mad because Stalin, rather than Trotsky, was Lenin's successor and thus the temporary leader of world communism. A short-lived and problematic leader of the International (and the former was probably due to the latter), true, but the recognized leader nonetheless. Fourth Internationalists tend to believe that if Trotsky had been in charge of the Russian Revolution things would be different; they are angry that he was driven out of the fold and forced into exile.Before going further I want to be clear that I do not believe, as some dogmatic anti-Trotskyists claim, that Trotsky was some sort of counter-revolutionary wrecker who was secretly reactionary and thus deserved exile. Clearly Trotsky was a great revolutionary: he did not deserve the religious-style excommunication levelled upon him by the rest of the Russian Comintern, nor did he deserve the dogmatic ret-conning of history that would assign him to eternal and secret counter-revolutionary status. My complaints are about Trotskyist theory, which I think post-Trotsky does lead to unintentional counter-revolutionary tendencies in revolutionary contexts, because I think that Trotsky, like Stalin, wasn't a very good revolutionary theorist and, as mentioned above, both Trotskyism and Stalinism were theoretical dead-ends post-Lenin. Moreover, because of the mimetic rivalry I think existed between Trotsky and Stalin and their theoretical understandings of capitalism, I think that if things had been reversed Trotsky would have acted in a similar manner and performed the same, or at least similar, "sins" as Stalin.Take, for example, the theoretical debate that led to Trotsky's exile. Whereas Trotsky wanted more rapid industrialization and to escalate class struggle against the kulak (wealthy peasant) class in the countryside, Stalin argued for a slower and more measured approach––he was backed in this by Bukharin who probably wanted and even slower and more measured approach in peasant policies. Thus, Trotsky's belief that the kulak class was "a vulture class" of "undeniable and irreconcilable enemies" (Trotsky,, 106) was what placed him at odds with the Comintern and led to his exile. What is interesting about this, however, is that Stalin would later reverse his position on the peasant question and adopt the line argued by Trotsky. (In fact, and this hilariously supports my claim about mimetic rivalry, it is interesting to note that one of Stalin's most read books, with the most underlined passages and marginalia, was Trotsky's.)We know that one of the great "sins" of Stalin was his policies in the countryside: the rapid industrialization and class struggle against the kulak led to violence––violence maybe overestimated and overemphasized by rightists, but something we as leftists need to take seriously. Anti-Stalin (and most often anti-communist) historiographies, after all, focus on these policies and the deaths they produced: these are the arguments used to present Stalin as a force of evil. Most interestingly, however, these arguments areand often mobilized by Trotskyists to demonstrate why Stalin was the wrong leader and why Trotsky would have been a better man for the job. Nor do most Trotskyists argue, as would be proper, that Stalin's error was in switching political lines possibly for real politik and callous reasons (thus demonstrating, maybe, a potential lack of theoretical/political integrity or, if anything, a lack of consistency). Generally, they choose to forget that the policies that have become known as Stalin's sins were policies first pushed by Trotsky. Bukharin knew this, and argued that this was the case when he set himself against the escalation of industrialization and war against the kulaks, which led to his show-trial.Whether or not Bukharin's political position was correct (I think it was just as erroneous) is not the issue here: the issue is that Bukharin remained politically consistent whereas Trotsky and Stalin did not. Nor am I arguing for the morality of political consistency; I understand that contexts require shifts in policy and that mistakes, often great mistakes, are produced by an inability to adapt just as they are produced by an inability to adapt the proper policy. What I find interesting is how the sides of the Stalin-Trotsky theoretical coin were reversed when it came to Stalin's policies and the death of Bukharin: Trotskyists screamed bloody murder, Stalinists screamed about counter-revolutionaries, when the truth is that the Trotskyist and Stalinist positions had simply flip-flopped. Bukharin's death was another sin for Trotskyists to lay at the feet of Stalin as if Trotsky himself would not have had Bukharin executed for the very same reasons. (Again, this is not to justify Bukharin's death: I think it was unjustifiable, but I also think that it is utterly hypocritical for Trotskyists, who had once railed against Bukharin when he was also behind Trotsky's expulsion, to cry about his execution.)When we turn our attention to the Chinese Revolution, the next great world historical revolution after Russia, we again find mimetic positions held by the Stalin and Trotsky backed communist factions. Both Chen Duxhiu (Trotskyist) and Li Lisan (Stalinist), once the pre-eminent leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, argued for a strange form of entryism: to liquidate themselves within the nationalist Kuomintang, guide it from the inside, and take over the leadership. They also argued for a city-based struggle amongst the "advanced" working-class where city insurrections would be the key to revolution. Both Stalin and Trotsky backed this strategy while, at the same time, each arguing that their mimetic rival was doing something different (read a Workers Vanguard journal about the Chinese Revolution and you can see that this bad historical analysis, filled with all sorts of contradictions, is still alive today). In any case, Mao led a political line that broke from this position of revolution, rejected the Kuomintang as a space for struggle, and moved to the countryside––which saved the communist party because the Duxhiu and Lisan line was annihilated by the Kuomintang (demonstrating yet again why entryism is not a very good tactic).Thus, Maoism first emerged as a creative application of marxism that was neither Trotskyist nor Stalinist. Generally Mao and his allies saw the Stalinist and Trotskyist positions as theoretically identical. The key difference, however, was that Stalin was actually a leader of a nation that was still socialist, and still the recognized leader (however bad his leadership might have been), of the international proletariat. Trotsky on the other hand was a leader in exile whose influence on global revolution was null, whose supposed Fourth International would never be an international (a small handful of eurocentrists does not an international make), and who wasn't worth taking seriously. Mao's statements about Stalin must always be read in this light: Stalin was a recognized revolutionary leader and so his policies and positions were considerably more serious than those of a dishonoured exile.But if we examine the Maoist critique of Stalin we can see how the same critique could be levelled at Trotsky. First of all there was the Maoist rejection of Moscow's interference in the Chinese Revolution represented by Li Lisan––the same policy pushed by the Trotskyists represented by Chen Duxhiu. Then there is Mao's criticism of Stalin's peasant policies, for example, which could easily be levelled at Trotsky since, as aforementioned, they were originally Trotsky's. Finally, and this connects to my initial complaint about Trotskyism being, the Chinese revolutionaries under Mao charged Stalin with having the same class reductionist analysis that I have seen demonstrated by many Trotskyists: "[i]n his way of thinking, Stalin departed from dialectical materialism and fell into metaphysics and subjectivism on certain questions and consequently he was sometimes divorced from reality and from the masses." (, 91) They also accused Stalin of not fully applying "proletarian democratic revolution", wrongly convicting/punishing innocent people, and giving "bad counsel in the internationalist communist movement"––counsel that China, as aforementioned, ignored.Again, the key difference between Stalin and Trotsky in this context was that, while their theoretical approaches were mimetically similar, the former was the recognized leader of the international proletariat and the latter was not. So while Maoist theory emerged against both of these post-Leninist dead-ends, it only took Stalinism and Stalin seriously because that was the theoretical line being pushed by the first actually existing socialism. If Maoist theory is ultimately a rejection of the "metaphysics and subjectivism" of Stalinism, then it is a rejection of Trotskyism for the same reason… And if history had been different, and Trotsky was the leader of the Soviet Union and Stalin was in exile, then the Maoist complaints about Stalin would be identical but this time assigned to Trotsky.