I have recently been interested in organizing more (outside of animal rights and anti-racism) and was looking to join a communist org. Unfortunately the choice for these kind of movements is incredibly limited where I live. I found a trot org that is linked to IMT near me and was willing to give them a chance as choice is limited.
After reading their manifesto, I think I won’t bother... Here’s a translation of some paragraphs.
Our position is very simple: in every struggle, we always take the side of the oppressed against the oppressors. But this general position is not precise enough. We must add that our position is essentially negative. This means that we are opposed to all forms of oppression and discrimination - whether they target women, people of color, homosexuals, transgender people or any other minority.
However, we firmly and categorically reject “identity” politics which, under the pretext of defending the rights of this or that group, play a reactionary role, dividing the working class, weakening its unity and providing invaluable aid to the ruling class.
The labor movement has been contaminated by a whole series of ideas that were alien to it. Postmodernism, identity politics, “political correctness” and other oddities have been smuggled in from the universities by the “left” petty bourgeoisie, who act as a conveyor belt for reactionary ideas alien to the working class.
Stemming from “postmodernism”, identity politics have confused the brains of many students. But these ideas have also been introduced into the workers' movement, where they are used as weapons by the bureaucracy to combat the most resolute militants.
They have a whole FAQ section dedicated to how inclusive writing is wrong because it divides the working class ffs.
You have a good nose for bullshit. "Identity politics" have been central to successful organized Marxism for over a century. Attributing them to 'post-modernism' is itself a contemporary idea that divorces them unessecerily from class politics.
Most communist states always had specific women's labor and political groups, as well as usually catering towards the needs and problems of ethnic minorities. The need for this is well recognised even as far back as Marx and Engels themselves, with Eleanor Marx being one of the prominent caretakers and disseminaters of Marx's writing into the hands of the continental European left after his death, with the Bolsheviks truly being the party that insisted on a multicultural doctrine, having leaders from many different ethnicities and nationalities, and insisting on native language and ethnic conservation programs (something which even the modern CPC continues today). It is in fact a rejection of material support of this multi-cultural heritage that exemplifies the worst revanchist and reactionary elements of modern Russia, which is now experiencing a greater cultural flattening (loss of non-Russ language and culture) than ever existed during the Soviet period.
The idea that we can just become one big working class is an idealistic model of class politics that doesn't represent historically successful communist parties. In order to get to that point, as that is where our power lies, through our labor, we will have to address matters of identity. We don't get there by insisting they don't exist.
Edit: This catering toward ethnic minorities within the party btw, was one of the essential wedges used by the 'National Socialists' to distinguish themselves from communist parties. You know we are in a bad place theoretically when even supposed communist organizations are parroting literal Nazi propaganda towards organizing the working class.
You mean by pretending there are no oppressions between members of the same class ?
Essentially, yes.
Histories and current oppression and discrimination have to be addressed to understand the role of dominant identity workers participation in this discrimination and how it weakens the cause of labor as a whole. This is not "identity politics" it is the very essence of 'From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.'
If there is to be a vanguard party movement, then it is within their ability to address the needs of identity. The inability to do so suggests a lack of understanding of what Marxism is about, which is a further postulate of liberal thinking, a rejection of the libertarian idea that the needs of individuals are necessarily opposed by the needs of society, instead falling for a stripped down version of Marxism often postulated by western academia that is essentially vulgar class politics and materialism. Being a dialectic materialist doesn't mean a rejection of ideals, it just means understanding that any ideals that are not rewarded by a material base are built upon sand. As such, any worker's movement that does not seem to empower dispossessed minority groups will soon find itself without that support, which is essential, not only for our ideals but for pragmatism as well. Nothing crumbled faster than 'Marxists and communists' who sought to subsume all identities into stripped down "Well we are all the working class, so you should just be on our side." ideology and practice.
BTW I’m digging more into their position and found this bit again about identity politics:
What the fuck is this first part?! Do these people not understand systemic racism and how it can up to a point benefit working class white people? I mean also living in the imperial core is literally benefiting from the oppression of the periphery.
You should read Marx and Engels 'The German Ideology' to get a firmer grasp of how this whole dialectical materialism thing is supposed to work.
That said, the basis is so simple that it has literally been smuggled into conditional psychology, despite being formulated before Freud was even born.
Basically, human ideals and ideology are not grounded in approaching a divine will (as Hegel would say) but in what is rewarded by classes of ownership. As the ruling (ownership) class changes and benefits from changes in production, so to does the ideology created by them.
An ideology that does not materially benefit the ruling class is largely phased out losing it's 'conditional' (this bit is my words not Marx or Engel) properties on the working class. Literally, ideologies are skinner boxes for the ruling class based on what the current model of material production is. An ideology without some type of material reward system will (statistically speaking) be discarded in favor of one that does. There will always be outliers, but that does not make something the primary ideology of the era. The goal of the revolutionary then, is to seize the means of production by any means available, and orient them towards rewarding an ideology that has communist/socialist ideals, which should be oriented around the ideals of the working class, as the primary creators of value, not the ideals of the ruling class, who are parasitical on that labor-value.
It's incredibly unclear to me how these trots get to their conclusions outside of a complete reactionary rejection of Marxist-Leninist analysis. It's basically "Lenin said there are labor aristocrats, so therefore there aren't."
Thanks for the recommendation and the explanation, I’ll add it to my reading list.