It seems like people mostly use trotskyist as a stand in for "anti-communist leftism" or "ultra," but what are the actual thoughts he contributed? Is there anything that is useful today and can be separated from anti-communism and the legacy of trots?
No newspaper memes please. I genuinely want to know.
(Ice pick memes are acceptable)
Edit: thanks for the info everyone. I'm proud of you all.
Thanks for the incredibly thorough response. I think I can see now why his ideas are so prevalent in the West, as it seems like it places a lot of importance on the Western proletariat.
I find it genuinely confusing that people with ultra-ish tendencies would look down upon Mao, seeing as he twice tried to establish radical class chance change and worker power through the great leap forward and cultural revolution. You can argue that it didn't work, but Mao himself was very clearly dedicated to the cause of communism.
I think the popularity also has to do with the alienation of the western left from the USSR during the Cold War. Many of those who wanted to still adhere to a revolutionary marxist line found trotskyism ideal or convenient. Others turned to what they took to be maoism, but frankly I get the impression that most of them didn't really have a good idea of developments in China at the time.
Most people who get called ultras by ML's and related tendencies are ideologically part of the left-communist tradition coming out of Italy, Germany and Holland (there are internal differences, like italian operaismo as opposed to council communism, deeply influenced by Rosa and Pannenkoek), or anarchists. Obviously people in these traditions would not be too down with Mao on their own terms, namely because they see the chinese revolution as nationalist and the CPC as stalinist in nature, structure, etc.; but it's also undeniably due to propaganda either explicitly or by osmosis.
During the height of maoist influence in the 60s and 70s there were deffo accusations by orthodox MLs that the new groups proliferating in the former tendency were ultras. I think there are many orthodox marxists, including leninists, who see many of the Maoist period's and Mao's policies as ultra.The maosit response to them was that the soviets were revisionist, and so on and so forth, sniff :zizek-ok:
In addition to the focus on the Western proletariat, I think this particular form of Anglo trotskyism benefits from that ideologically purist, ineffectual aspect. It creates a scenario where you engage with politics in a way that is still quite similar to bourgeois electoralism, the context in which every Western leftist grew up and gained an intrinsic understanding of what it means to be political.
It is a much larger break to accept a lack of purity and appreciate and engage with different experiments in revolution and defense of the revolution. You don't get a clean good/bad, successful/not dichotomy, and yet that dichotomy is required for the individualistic morality of bourgeois electoralism. Irs my impression that this is why western trotskyists are perceived as strident and quickly make enemies: only their party has the capacity to do things right, others are revisionist / capitalist, and there is clearly a very large amount of time spent on deciding which is which.
Yh it's maybe worth noting that there can be a lot of variation between trotskyist groups regionally. Like I get the impression that the culture of South American Troskyism is different to the European. The Br*ts got their own thing goin on.
The more radical,actually Leninist Trotskyists explicitly reject electorialism and are no friends on the Eurocommunists. Honestly I think the anarchists annoy them the most lmao.
What your describing can also be connected to the Christian cultural values of the societies these people come from. To continue the religious metaphor, the reason they emphasize conflict and often split is because they are trying to recreate the original act of Bolshevik-Menshevik split, or in secular terms to carry out the same function of ensuring a disciplined, ideologically secure vanguard party.
It does raise the genuine question of when you do, in fact, have to split. Like what do you and your developing fraction within an increasingly reformist party do?
Again, they are not concerned during non-revolutionary periods with winning electoral hearts and minds. This doesn't mean that they don't think that ultimately what matters is mass politics and that the vanguard party must always be organically linked to the working class. They often do try to maintain these links with, for instance, trade unions. I think there's almost a theory of revolutionary meritocracy behind it where, as revolutionary conditions and situations develop and emerge, the groups most suitably radical - meaning conforming to the Leninist model - will be the ones to win because they preserved their revolutionary status. It's also clearly an attempt to learn from the February-October period in 1917 when the Bolsheviks distinguished themselves and ultimately won broad working class support by reaching a point after which they maintained consistent political opposition to the Provisional Government, unlike the other groups.
I think these are all good points, though having interacted with a lot of American trotskyists, just in terms of parties, most parties have engaged with electoralism, some even trying to get Dems elected. There is a strange strain of vanguardiam that is like a 3-layer levela of obfuscation where they think they can't just say commie things, they instead want to piggyback on socdem popularity. But because they're not good at acting, everyone quickly sees that they're trying to manipulate you. So you get yet another way to have distrust.
I've also seen different parties try to make connections to unions, and there is a tendency for these parties to attemot entryism even there, which ends up usually failing and just pissing people off.
It is a frustrating combination of somewhat effective strategies with outright counterproductive execution, and I think the sticking point really is one of control: not feeling comfortabke building a coalition, insteas the attempt is to get everyone else on the party line, whether the proles realize it or not.
I'll take your word for it, as I've heard it elsewhere from other yankie comrades. It sounds like that applies more to the US context. The European and South American trotskyists are, I think, far less in electoralism mode.
The combination of 'effective strategies and ineffective execution' I think hits much of the nail of the head. When I discuss politics with Trotskyists, avoiding explicit theoretical issues where differences would become pronounced, I'm often in complete agreement as regards strategy, and even tactics and operations, but the executionc can certainly be lacking. It's worth bearing in mind, though, imo, that we're often speaking about deeply ideologically convinced people (like ourselves) who also see no other way of even trying to engage in genuinely radical politics, but where there isn't really much of an institutional structure to normalize effective political praxis, or when there are institutions, they are reformist and anti-revolutionary. I'm not surprised that then when they try to preach the immortal science it can come across as alienating.
For what it's worth, I've noticed a shift in trotskyist strategies where they will not adverstise themselves as hardcore as such as before, without broader far left party frameworks, while building a fraction of hardcore trotskyists within said broader org (in preparation, naturally, for the aforementioned day of revelation and judgement). Their strategy then seems to be nnot such trying to explicitly communicate a party line as to show the contradictions and shortcomings of less radical or unified orgs from within. So it's basically an evolution of entryism, as far as I can tell.