:groundskeeper-Willie: Tankies and trots are natural enemies. Like socdems and trots. Or anarchists and trots. Or MLs and trots. Or trots and other trots.
You know what, I think you are right. I don’t know any Trots personally but there are plenty of them out there IRL that are cool and good (Michael Hudson and China Mieville come to mind). I’ve also read individual Trots as they often have good article and essays. They run the world’s best website, marxists.org; and IIRC they keep International Publishers going.
I feel similar about leftcoms (doubt we have any here, either). Dunk on some takes they might have, maybe allow for ACTUAL, thoughtful critique of positions, too. But no uncharitable generalizations.
I would love the rule to be that there’s no ripping on any genuine leftist movement in general, only ripping on specific takes by individuals.
Yeah this site is kinda weird about trots. I know trots that do way more than anarchists and have better takes and vice versa. Most ML's I know are armchair socialists but that's not reason to dunk on every ML.
Some people on here think that there's some specific tendency that, if they subscribe to, will push the socialism button.
What MLMs have ever seized power or formed a state?
The USSR was a Marxist and Leninist revolution. Mao was a Marxist-Leninist. Cuba's revolution was more broadly socialist until it won and was forced to defend itself from imperialism, at which point it adopted Marxism-Leninism officially. Juche is a subcategory of Marxism-Leninism and derives from it. May I remind you that MLM is a creation of Gonzalo and the Shining Path and created after the death of Mao.
I will give the Trotskyists some credit for being broadly involved in the pink wave in Venezuela, although that also was broadly Democratic Socialist. Venezuela and Bolivia seem to be exceptions to the global rule though, it's exceedingly rare for democratic socialists to win electorally and then maintain power.
In the imperial core itself democratic socialism is not possible and basically always results in social imperialism. If it doesn't, like Corbyn, it will be destroyed.
Honestly I saw "dozens" and assumed you were counting a bunch of dubiously successful MLM/third worldist projects, because how else would you get above, like, four.
I'm interested in what it means to you to "press the socialism button" or to "maintain power". There's some line that needs to be drawn.
After reading that list, it seems peculiar how you start Vietnam at 1945 but not Laos, how you start Cuba at 1975 instead of 1959. And that's leaving alone how the USSR was largely a successor state to the Russian Empire and was the result of the same party/faction operating in different "national" contexts but the same state context.
In some of the cases on this list it was a consolidation of power in a revolutionary context, rather than toppling a bourgeois government.
Is the line drawn at a successful revolution, or is the line drawn at winning an election, or something else entirely? And where do examples like Ghana and Zimbabwe (and maybe Nepal and a few others) fit in?
Okay I didn't ask you but what do you think Trotsky was doing?
Stalin wasn't even in Russia in February, and before October he was like politicking and being kind of a centrist. Lenin was in hiding (but writing and directing) and Stalin was dragging his feet on setting a date for the revolution. They were all in St. Petersburg, fighting an uphill battle, incredibly unpopular until some time in August, dodging the police and trying to do a revolution.
I guess I'm gonna get piled on now. I really just wanted to know what people think Stalin was doing but let's get this over with
the "marx-leninism is the only tendency that has succeeded historically" line is always really funny to me. like, i get the appeal of believing that revolution is simply a cake that you need to follow a recipe to bake, but 1) the bolsheviks did not have any way of knowing that it would work when they put "leninism" (if you want to imagine it as a single, eternal, unchanging body of Correct Theory) into practice, so clearly they had something better on their side than the best books and the snappiest chants and 2) you have to do a lot of special pleading before you can get me to accept that the russian revolution "won" the world historic struggle to resolve the dialectic of capitalism.
this is the timeline in which communism has lost, repeatedly. we need a revolutionary practice that actually acknowledges that, and functions anyway.
by "won" I don't mean established global communism, I mean "seized the means of production and defended itself for at least 1 year". Baby steps, and we have to do first things first.
Yeah I got it after your edit, thanks for you explanation anyway though. I agree with a lot of your points, it's frustating but it's also a dificult needle to thread.
Basically I'm saying that the people in here saying that deep theoretical discussions between tendencies are allowed are kind of full of it and not paying attention, the opposite is true. All that is allowed if very shallow joking conversations. The more deep and truthful your critique, the harder it is to wriggle out of, the more likely you are to get banned for it because the litmus test for banning is based on outrage from the offended party and not any objective metric, and truthful critiques cause more outrage and offense.
I'm curious why their comment got deleted. They weren't really doing a sectarianism, just pointing out how the sectarianism rule ends up working around here. What he said was totally accurate.
None has won and implying that any has you are turning this into a dick measuring contest which is basically the most bad faith and obvious sectarianism can get.
Word. It's the 21st century now, the world is radically radically different from the last time an ML revolution succeeded and held power. We need to keep learning, growing, adapting, and planning to be ready to operate in this century.
>99% of my life has been in founding NATO member states. What do you propose that I do... what is the track record of ML organizations in these states?
You know what, I think you are right. I don’t know any Trots personally but there are plenty of them out there IRL that are cool and good
Cool and good until you say the word China and then the conversation turns into a complete shitshow.
Also every single article they have ever written has something in it about "stalinists". It is in fact the only way to tell something was written by a trot compared to any other ideological branch.
Not too much really, the downside is that they actively reinforce a lot of anti-communist stuff by agreeing with the right on it.
Socialist Appeal is also kind of cult-ey. I worry that their methods end up turning off a lot of the young student crowd that they burn through who get a bad taste for "organising" because all they do is rock up to events organised by other people, set up all their highly visible branding to make themselves look associated with it and then sell newspapers and shit. Their member turnover is extremely high. But that's just my experience with one specific group of trots I suppose and might not be the case for all of them, but it's a big group here.
The old Labour Militant members are fucking good organisers though.
Yeah, I've been looking into joining an org and I was all for joining socialist appeal because they were the most prominent org in my area until I looked at their recent news thing about the accomplishments of the national org and it was basically all just various thing about how [local wing] went to a protest organised by other people and sold almost two dozen newspapers or got some other people to copy their chant, or managed to get two people to say they'd join up or whatever. From the outside it kind of just looked like a really rubbish MLM for selling newspapers.
Good luck with CPB. They've got some real brainworms about trans people and it will be a serious struggle to steer that org back to being right. But someone has to do it. The only way it will steer away from reaction is with people putting the work in to do it.
I've had people turn an organizing strategy meeting into bullshit about "stalinism" because I was the only ML there. It was a conversation about recruiting, and that always gets to this point. The Trots hated whenever I didn't want to denigrate China or really any leftist project. Also many got pissed that there was a Soviet aesthetic in some posters, which I get, but disagreed because they hate the Soviet Union, not because it's ineffective.
In my experience, active recruitment always brings out the differences very fast, because factions want to recruit more to their faction.
They're too busy writing newspapers that no one will read.
That shouldn't really be an issue though since all the ml's are busy creating new parties (some guy in the last one thinks we should implement urban farms after the revolution, but my group thinks it's important to use the implementation of urban farms as a step of taking away power from the landholding class before the inevitable revolution)
And the anarchists are of course busy... Meeting in councils talking about how they should structure a council without a vote? Building parallel power structures (smoke weed with my friends)? Playing in a kindergarten? I dunno what the leftist stereotype of anarchists are.
Luckily this seems to mostly be an online and/or USAmerican thing, every single IRL anarchist I know here in europe will shit on NATO/the US just as vigorously as they will on Putin or whatever.
I may catch a sectarianism ding here, but I do want to say, I used to be an anarchist, and this isn't really just an "online" problem. I knew a lot of people who were otherwise great, smart, well read, did really good local activism, but then suddenly would start talking like a neocon anytime AES states or the global south was brought up. I knew a guy who did awesome community gardening and anti-eviction work, but was pro-Iraq war, a trans comrade who organized a lgbt youth center who supported "humanitarian invention" in Iran.
Whether or not these people were "real" or "fake" anarchists, I met a lot of them, to the point I think they likely out number anarchists with good positions in imperialism and US adventurism, and it was a pretty big contributing factor to me moving towards becoming and ML.
Real or fake, I do think the anarchist movement should confront why these people who align with them on domestic issues but turn into Clinton style liberal hawks with regards to foreign policy as so attracted to the label.
I'm generally okay with Trots but my god, the articles they put out can be really grating sometimes. Keep them on track and they can tell you a dozen interesting things about current-day struggles and labour movements. But let them stray a little and they'll just talk about how workers need to form their own rank-and-file movements free of collaborationist union leadership (which like, sure I guess, but union membership and vibrancy isn't exactly thriving throughout the world right now and I just don't think unions can have the same degree of power under financial capitalism that has exported industry to other countries so there's less means of production to even seize), and how Stalinists are destroying every good thing on the planet, and how China is secretly an even worse imperialist than America. I've spent nearly two years reading the stuff they put out and I feel like it would be pretty easy to set up an AI script to just write a solid third of their articles for them, so I hope they're getting in on that to save themselves some effort on the weekly China Bad article so they can focus on the better stuff that I know they can and do regularly write.
I appreciate that the online versions of most left-wing ideologies tend to spend a lot of time in the past for a variety of reasons - things seemed much more dynamic and changeable back then; the world is very difficult to understand and predict right now in anything but general trajectories; arguing online about past events is easier than going outside and actually doing stuff; most of the OG thinkers that you have to read to understand their works happened to be about a century or so ago and there's not a ton of big English-language communist works nowadays; etc - but of all the major left ideologies, Trots seem to be the ones who spend the most time in the past, and with ways of organizing and disseminating information that are built on the assumptions of a world that no longer really exists. They're kind of like the grandpas of the left. I can't really hate or even really dislike them that much, but you're not expecting a lot of energy and movement in that sphere compared to say, the still-surviving ML countries, or the vibrant and energetic anarchist sphere.
One of the things with trots is that they're a bit too committed to book worship, and don't translate the fact that influencing via media in the 19th century is not the same thing as influencing via media in the 21st century. You're absolutely right that the modern newspaper is no longer an actual newspaper.
They kind of strike me as tech-priests from 40k lol. Dogmatic adherents to doctrine no longer useful or relevant, though at times still helpful and insightful
I'm part of a smallish local trot organisation whose members are grounded in reality and bring interesting conversations to the table. I don't really understand why everyone here digs into trots, I assume it's all part of a years-long inside joke on the site and I interpret it as good faith joshing around.
...That is how I'm supposed to interpret it, right?
It probably depends on the trots you know. I hang out with an ex-Trot org that dropped the Trot label because Trots were generally way too harsh on smaller Marxist revolutions (e.g. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos etc). I also know a lot of SAlt members (both current and former) that I mention elsewhere in the thread. I think trots can vary quite wildly, both individually and as organisations.
I don't directly have a problem with individual SAlt members in Australia, but they have a problem with me since I say too many nice things about the USSR (or even Cuba) so they've stopped trying to recruit me or sell me newspapers. That said, I've heard pretty sketchy things from ex-SAlt members about the internal social dynamics (which isn't unique to them, it happens a lot in any closed off org/group with a few older powerful members and a lot of university students).
I just find it funny how the sectarianism rule isn't really a thing when it comes to trots.
:groundskeeper-Willie: Tankies and trots are natural enemies. Like socdems and trots. Or anarchists and trots. Or MLs and trots. Or trots and other trots.
Trots sound like a contentious people
You just split the party.
4th5th InternationalAt this point we're past the 100's I think
You know what, I think you are right. I don’t know any Trots personally but there are plenty of them out there IRL that are cool and good (Michael Hudson and China Mieville come to mind). I’ve also read individual Trots as they often have good article and essays. They run the world’s best website, marxists.org; and IIRC they keep International Publishers going.
I feel similar about leftcoms (doubt we have any here, either). Dunk on some takes they might have, maybe allow for ACTUAL, thoughtful critique of positions, too. But no uncharitable generalizations.
I would love the rule to be that there’s no ripping on any genuine leftist movement in general, only ripping on specific takes by individuals.
Yeah this site is kinda weird about trots. I know trots that do way more than anarchists and have better takes and vice versa. Most ML's I know are armchair socialists but that's not reason to dunk on every ML.
Some people on here think that there's some specific tendency that, if they subscribe to, will push the socialism button.
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Most of those were MLMs, they should get appropriate credit.
Also nobody has pulled it off in the imperial core yet.
What MLMs have ever seized power or formed a state?
The USSR was a Marxist and Leninist revolution. Mao was a Marxist-Leninist. Cuba's revolution was more broadly socialist until it won and was forced to defend itself from imperialism, at which point it adopted Marxism-Leninism officially. Juche is a subcategory of Marxism-Leninism and derives from it. May I remind you that MLM is a creation of Gonzalo and the Shining Path and created after the death of Mao.
I will give the Trotskyists some credit for being broadly involved in the pink wave in Venezuela, although that also was broadly Democratic Socialist. Venezuela and Bolivia seem to be exceptions to the global rule though, it's exceedingly rare for democratic socialists to win electorally and then maintain power.
In the imperial core itself democratic socialism is not possible and basically always results in social imperialism. If it doesn't, like Corbyn, it will be destroyed.
Honestly I saw "dozens" and assumed you were counting a bunch of dubiously successful MLM/third worldist projects, because how else would you get above, like, four.
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I'm interested in what it means to you to "press the socialism button" or to "maintain power". There's some line that needs to be drawn.
After reading that list, it seems peculiar how you start Vietnam at 1945 but not Laos, how you start Cuba at 1975 instead of 1959. And that's leaving alone how the USSR was largely a successor state to the Russian Empire and was the result of the same party/faction operating in different "national" contexts but the same state context.
In some of the cases on this list it was a consolidation of power in a revolutionary context, rather than toppling a bourgeois government.
Is the line drawn at a successful revolution, or is the line drawn at winning an election, or something else entirely? And where do examples like Ghana and Zimbabwe (and maybe Nepal and a few others) fit in?
You know Trotsky is a Leninist right?
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Sorry, what do you think Trotsky was doing in 1917? The years prior?
what do you think stalin was doing
Okay I didn't ask you but what do you think Trotsky was doing?
Stalin wasn't even in Russia in February, and before October he was like politicking and being kind of a centrist. Lenin was in hiding (but writing and directing) and Stalin was dragging his feet on setting a date for the revolution. They were all in St. Petersburg, fighting an uphill battle, incredibly unpopular until some time in August, dodging the police and trying to do a revolution.
I guess I'm gonna get piled on now. I really just wanted to know what people think Stalin was doing but let's get this over with
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yeah that was a weird one from me, sorry
I miss you HEdoublehockeysticks
You're good. I was being kinda defensive. See ya around.
Being a snacc
Careful, you're getting close to doing the wrong kind of sectarianism
the "marx-leninism is the only tendency that has succeeded historically" line is always really funny to me. like, i get the appeal of believing that revolution is simply a cake that you need to follow a recipe to bake, but 1) the bolsheviks did not have any way of knowing that it would work when they put "leninism" (if you want to imagine it as a single, eternal, unchanging body of Correct Theory) into practice, so clearly they had something better on their side than the best books and the snappiest chants and 2) you have to do a lot of special pleading before you can get me to accept that the russian revolution "won" the world historic struggle to resolve the dialectic of capitalism.
this is the timeline in which communism has lost, repeatedly. we need a revolutionary practice that actually acknowledges that, and functions anyway.
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true, i'll give props for that.
by "won" I don't mean established global communism, I mean "seized the means of production and defended itself for at least 1 year". Baby steps, and we have to do first things first.
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Lmao I didn't say to ban you, I think you're taking this whole post way too seriously. It's all in jest.
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I guess I'm misunderstanding you, didn't you just say that I said to ban you?
Edit: responded before your edit, I understand now
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Yeah I got it after your edit, thanks for you explanation anyway though. I agree with a lot of your points, it's frustating but it's also a dificult needle to thread.
Damn you really summed up my feelings on it
They better ban me too if they take Zed bc I need to get back to the point where we're arguing constructively again
I'm curious why their comment got deleted. They weren't really doing a sectarianism, just pointing out how the sectarianism rule ends up working around here. What he said was totally accurate.
None has won and implying that any has you are turning this into a dick measuring contest which is basically the most bad faith and obvious sectarianism can get.
Word. It's the 21st century now, the world is radically radically different from the last time an ML revolution succeeded and held power. We need to keep learning, growing, adapting, and planning to be ready to operate in this century.
They're not there yet.
>99% of my life has been in founding NATO member states. What do you propose that I do... what is the track record of ML organizations in these states?
but not the ones who point that out online.
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Cool and good until you say the word China and then the conversation turns into a complete shitshow.
Also every single article they have ever written has something in it about "stalinists". It is in fact the only way to tell something was written by a trot compared to any other ideological branch.
How much does that matter outside internet shitposting?
Not too much really, the downside is that they actively reinforce a lot of anti-communist stuff by agreeing with the right on it.
Socialist Appeal is also kind of cult-ey. I worry that their methods end up turning off a lot of the young student crowd that they burn through who get a bad taste for "organising" because all they do is rock up to events organised by other people, set up all their highly visible branding to make themselves look associated with it and then sell newspapers and shit. Their member turnover is extremely high. But that's just my experience with one specific group of trots I suppose and might not be the case for all of them, but it's a big group here.
The old Labour Militant members are fucking good organisers though.
Yeah, I've been looking into joining an org and I was all for joining socialist appeal because they were the most prominent org in my area until I looked at their recent news thing about the accomplishments of the national org and it was basically all just various thing about how [local wing] went to a protest organised by other people and sold almost two dozen newspapers or got some other people to copy their chant, or managed to get two people to say they'd join up or whatever. From the outside it kind of just looked like a really rubbish MLM for selling newspapers.
I've decided to join CPB instead
Good luck with CPB. They've got some real brainworms about trans people and it will be a serious struggle to steer that org back to being right. But someone has to do it. The only way it will steer away from reaction is with people putting the work in to do it.
I've had people turn an organizing strategy meeting into bullshit about "stalinism" because I was the only ML there. It was a conversation about recruiting, and that always gets to this point. The Trots hated whenever I didn't want to denigrate China or really any leftist project. Also many got pissed that there was a Soviet aesthetic in some posters, which I get, but disagreed because they hate the Soviet Union, not because it's ineffective.
In my experience, active recruitment always brings out the differences very fast, because factions want to recruit more to their faction.
Shows
Shows
I'd be surprised if there are any on Hexbear to offend tbh.
They're too busy writing newspapers that no one will read.
That shouldn't really be an issue though since all the ml's are busy creating new parties (some guy in the last one thinks we should implement urban farms after the revolution, but my group thinks it's important to use the implementation of urban farms as a step of taking away power from the landholding class before the inevitable revolution)
And the anarchists are of course busy... Meeting in councils talking about how they should structure a council without a vote? Building parallel power structures (smoke weed with my friends)? Playing in a kindergarten? I dunno what the leftist stereotype of anarchists are.
Feeding vegan food to the unhoused and then doing drugs.
Nowadays it's mostly about them suddenly transforming into John Bolton the second foreign policy is brought up
Luckily this seems to mostly be an online and/or USAmerican thing, every single IRL anarchist I know here in europe will shit on NATO/the US just as vigorously as they will on Putin or whatever.
I may catch a sectarianism ding here, but I do want to say, I used to be an anarchist, and this isn't really just an "online" problem. I knew a lot of people who were otherwise great, smart, well read, did really good local activism, but then suddenly would start talking like a neocon anytime AES states or the global south was brought up. I knew a guy who did awesome community gardening and anti-eviction work, but was pro-Iraq war, a trans comrade who organized a lgbt youth center who supported "humanitarian invention" in Iran.
Whether or not these people were "real" or "fake" anarchists, I met a lot of them, to the point I think they likely out number anarchists with good positions in imperialism and US adventurism, and it was a pretty big contributing factor to me moving towards becoming and ML.
Real or fake, I do think the anarchist movement should confront why these people who align with them on domestic issues but turn into Clinton style liberal hawks with regards to foreign policy as so attracted to the label.
Yeah but statistically there have to be a lot of us former trots around
I'm generally okay with Trots but my god, the articles they put out can be really grating sometimes. Keep them on track and they can tell you a dozen interesting things about current-day struggles and labour movements. But let them stray a little and they'll just talk about how workers need to form their own rank-and-file movements free of collaborationist union leadership (which like, sure I guess, but union membership and vibrancy isn't exactly thriving throughout the world right now and I just don't think unions can have the same degree of power under financial capitalism that has exported industry to other countries so there's less means of production to even seize), and how Stalinists are destroying every good thing on the planet, and how China is secretly an even worse imperialist than America. I've spent nearly two years reading the stuff they put out and I feel like it would be pretty easy to set up an AI script to just write a solid third of their articles for them, so I hope they're getting in on that to save themselves some effort on the weekly China Bad article so they can focus on the better stuff that I know they can and do regularly write.
I appreciate that the online versions of most left-wing ideologies tend to spend a lot of time in the past for a variety of reasons - things seemed much more dynamic and changeable back then; the world is very difficult to understand and predict right now in anything but general trajectories; arguing online about past events is easier than going outside and actually doing stuff; most of the OG thinkers that you have to read to understand their works happened to be about a century or so ago and there's not a ton of big English-language communist works nowadays; etc - but of all the major left ideologies, Trots seem to be the ones who spend the most time in the past, and with ways of organizing and disseminating information that are built on the assumptions of a world that no longer really exists. They're kind of like the grandpas of the left. I can't really hate or even really dislike them that much, but you're not expecting a lot of energy and movement in that sphere compared to say, the still-surviving ML countries, or the vibrant and energetic anarchist sphere.
It's really ONLY a thing for anarchists, I used to call it the "be nice to anarchists" rule.
it's kind of hard when i genuinely came across a trotskyist pamphlet this week
They do be writing newspapers. I really don't get it, they should be influencers (Instagram pages are the modern pamphlet)
Showing my butthole to everyone to benefit the mass line
Sexworkers are, no bullshit, consistently the most radical people I know with the best politics.
*the ass line
One of the things with trots is that they're a bit too committed to book worship, and don't translate the fact that influencing via media in the 19th century is not the same thing as influencing via media in the 21st century. You're absolutely right that the modern newspaper is no longer an actual newspaper.
They kind of strike me as tech-priests from 40k lol. Dogmatic adherents to doctrine no longer useful or relevant, though at times still helpful and insightful
TFW you read “What is to be Done?” and come away with “I must start a newspaper!”
So you're saying we need to induct the Trots in to the worship of the ruinous powers so they start experimenting with Heretek and get on HereTikTok?
i think if there was a trot who really complained we'd probably stop, but they simply are not dedicated enough to posting to be on here
I'm part of a smallish local trot organisation whose members are grounded in reality and bring interesting conversations to the table. I don't really understand why everyone here digs into trots, I assume it's all part of a years-long inside joke on the site and I interpret it as good faith joshing around.
...That is how I'm supposed to interpret it, right?
It probably depends on the trots you know. I hang out with an ex-Trot org that dropped the Trot label because Trots were generally way too harsh on smaller Marxist revolutions (e.g. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos etc). I also know a lot of SAlt members (both current and former) that I mention elsewhere in the thread. I think trots can vary quite wildly, both individually and as organisations.
It's like anti-italian racism, only instead of being illiterate like Italians, every trot aspires to run their own publishing house.
I don't directly have a problem with individual SAlt members in Australia, but they have a problem with me since I say too many nice things about the USSR (or even Cuba) so they've stopped trying to recruit me or sell me newspapers. That said, I've heard pretty sketchy things from ex-SAlt members about the internal social dynamics (which isn't unique to them, it happens a lot in any closed off org/group with a few older powerful members and a lot of university students).