Everyone is always saying that we aught to organize, well, SA is an org and it's not explicitly lib shit. A few of my friends are into it, so I was curious if anyone here had experience with them.
To me they honestly kind of seem like a crank warehouse, but maybe I'm wrong.
What even is trotskyism? All I can figure out is that some people think they're splitters and they like newspapers.
Yes I've googled it, I didn't find a comprehensible answer
They're "Marxists" who denounce all actual existing socialism and prone to counter-revolutionary ultra-leftism. They would claim they're orthodox Marxists that are fighting against the opportunism of MLs.
This is a pretty solid take on trotskyism. I'd add that trotskyist groups in Europe also suck ass and serve the same function as the US trots.
As for SAlt, it's basically like if the DSA didn't want to elect democrats but instead ran their own candidates. Like most trots, they support US-backed color revolutions abroad and do stupid shit like help start CHAZ but people like them because they say stuff like they think the economy should be democratic and that we need a workers party.
The conflict between Trotsky and Stalin was over the focus of the revolution. Trotsky wanted to focus on starting revolution in the colonized nations and relying on an alliance of revolutionary states to fight imperialist forces. Stalin saw that colonized nations didn't have developed enough industry to put up resistance to the colonizers (see the maxim gun and tanks) so thought focus should be on developing productive forces in the USSR to better resist imperialist forces (building tanks and machine guns hence "tankies").
Both methods have merit, but I believe that Stalin's direction was absolutely the only thing that kept the USSR and a lot of other revolutionary states from being nuked. Without the legitimate threat of Soviet retaliation, the US would absolutely have continued to use nuclear weapons.
Trotskyism itself is not necessarily a bad ideology, but he fell into the same trap as Orwell. Seeing his fight against alternative socialist methods as more important than the shared fight against imperialism (he sided with rightists in the USSR against Stalin).
His work in the americas helped spark a lot of the revolutions we see there during the 20th century, but many of them ended up at a similar impasse. See Cuba with Che and Castro. Che wanted to continue exporting revolution around Latin America, but Castro saw the threat of US intervention and allied with the Soviets (Cuban missile crisis) which led to the perservation of the revolution there.
So basically, there's nothing wrong with Trotskyism unless you decide to side with imperialists to fight against the revolutionary state that currently exists.
For all the one-sided caricaturing of Trotskyism ITT, notice how no one is saying “that Trot group is bad, check out my group instead,” and that’s because they’re not personally involved in anything more worthwhile.
When I was looking for a socialist group, the trotskyists were the only ones who could articulate positions that made sense and were actually based in anything resembling Marxism.
I mean they're trotskyist, so if that's your thing then go for it, but if not, then you probably should look elsewhere. Of course if someone from the org speaks up I'd be interested to see if that's still true, but yeah. What are you looking for? Big tent DSA/Greens type or ML party? Maiost?
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I've seen their members make rather grandiose and false claims about certain BLM protests (and their level of involvement) so I would be wary of them.