I live in the UK and nearly every older Communist you meet is a Trot and all the protests that I've been to that have had communists at them were mostly Trot orgs but online everyone just seems to shit on them for no clear reason. Am I missing something? Or is it just regular leftist infighting
Trotskyists have a long history of basically destroying left wing momentum. In the beginning, they would undermine international Solidarity with the USSR. They have historically had several harmful tendencies like constant splitting, repeatedly trying failed strategies (entryism), contrarianism and cultlike behavior. Look at the political landscape on the left in places where Trotskyism is dominant vs places where Marxism-Leninism is dominant. You will find in the US and UK that there are like 100 different microscopic trot groups, while in countries like Greece there is one dominant ML Communist party and maybe a couple irrelevant groups that literally nobody cares about.
The constant insistence on entryism has been huge too and it literally always fails. In the UK, the Corbynistas were the latest example, but they also had Militant Tendency in the 80s. It's like they just can't learn that you will never be allowed to win as a socialist. It's called a Bourgeois democracy for a reason.
The Militant tendency did win elections to parliament and did win control of the city government of Liverpool on a working class program, before being purged from the party. The elected members of the Militant Tendency had no illusions in winning class struggle in bourgeois government, and instead used their positions to advance a clear class perspective and to recruit members to their ranks, which is a strategy Lenin himself advocated for.
Ultimately, yea, mistakes were made and the strategy was not a linear success, but like, I really don’t see the issue with entering the youth wing or community branches of the Labour Party for the purpose of spreading and winning support for Marxist ideas. You have to work with the working class as it actually exists, and in the spaces and organizations where it actually moves.
As for the Corbynites, while some of them had experiences with the Militant back in the day, that shift in the Labour Party was not a deliberate entryist strategy by Trotskyists. Trotskyists are for sure intervening in the Labour Party, but focusing on recruiting from the youth wing of the party, local branches, and specific projects like the campaign for the reinstatement of Clause IV.
And like, your counter example is the communist party of Greece? Wholly irrelevant in the Greek working class movement and a husk of its former self by virtue of decades of stagnation, collaborationism, and failure to put forward any sort of socialist program, while notably failing to defend LGBT rights under bourgeois law. There was something approaching a revolutionary situation in Greece in 2015, and they played basically no role.
I'll never understand why people defend Militant Tendency as some sort of pyrrhic victory, they didn't do anything. Like you say that they wanted to use their position to recruit but what happened after they all got fucked? You had Blairism for decades. They were a resounding failure. Most people today don't even know they ever existed.
And yeah, the KKE is not nearly as relevant as they once we're, but they are definitely still more relevant than any Communist party in the west, let alone a NATO country. 850,000 people are in a KKE-affiliated labor union federation. I will admit though that the left has been subsumed by anarchists, which is a very common occurrence in NATO countries for some reason. They have plenty of folks lobbing molotovs but not really much else.
very common occurrence in NATO countries for some reason
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I see a lot of online leftists say stuff like “tankies aren’t real leftists” or “authoritarians deserve the wall” and it makes me feel like they they just want to kill a bunch of non-white third-worlders
Online anarchists are heavily misguided in their hatred for "tankies" and "authoritarians" but I promise you with all my heart that none of them think of "non-white third-worlders" when they are saying that shit. They're thinking of also very-online MLs they interact with on twitter, who are at the very least first worlders and likely white. Anarchists that say this shit mostly are just too uninformed to know that most third world leftists are MLs or MLMs.
This is true. There are definitely issues with irl Anarchist movements, and I think you can probably draw a line from the CIA funding philosophers like Foucault to their preeminence in the first world but online leftists of all stripes are cringe.
And anti-CPC plots
China’s Trotskyists even defected to KMT to participate in anti-communists activities.
yeah it's a good overview of the historical inception of the ML and Trotskyist divide which can help illuminate why there is still a rift despite being almost a century apart
Yeah, the later parts (in which there aren't quotations from self reports and such) aren't bad and even have some theoretical accessible insights.
There is the great problem though to act as if trotskism is the same today as it was then and that the label means the same thing. Both which isn't quite true.
The experience of trotskist groups (with that I don't mean following trotskism, but self identifying and sometimes being identified by other leftists as trot) - or rather with those groups - in the last 70+ years is relevant.
I don't know however one of my favourite history moments is Lenin saying "P.S. Trotsky has sent in a silly letter. We shall neither print it nor reply to him."
First letter of Terf is the same as the first letter of Trot....
Coincidence? You decide!
Almost all of the M-L’s you see on the internet are radicalized online and not part of any sort of IRL group or politics. The knee-jerk reaction against trots is basically in-group/out-group identity signaling based on, at best, a meme-level understanding of theoretical differences.
Basically none of the criticism online, as you can see in this thread, is based on anything resembling Marxist analysis. Take, for example, the point below blaming trotskyists for failing to support “AES.” Like we would raise the point that like Cuba as it exists now is in a transitional state, which means the possibility of sliding back into capitalism, especially without a large workers’ state like the USSR to fill in the gaps of its economy. The other way forward, under this analysis, is to spread and deepen the revolution, reinvolving the working masses in an active role, deepening workers control of the economy and democratic planning, etc.
This is a dialectical and materialist analysis of the situation, but internet stalinists would characterize this perspective, in itself, as a failure to support actually existing socialism.
How do you feel about Trotskyist organizations aligning themselves with US foreign policy, both historically and recently?
I feel like you probably have some gotcha quote pulled up from like Tony Cliff or someone, but fundamentally we oppose capitalism and US imperialism on a working class basis.
Almost all of the M-L’s you see on the internet are radicalized online and not part of any sort of IRL group or politics
The long storied history of Trotskyists making shit up is alive and well.
We would raise the point that like Cuba as it exists now is in a transitional state, which means the possibility of sliding back into capitalism, especially without a large workers’ state like the USSR to fill in the gaps of its economy. The other way forward, under this analysis, is to spread and deepen the revolution, reinvolving the working masses in an active role, deepening workers control of the economy and democratic planning, etc.
No ML opposes this statement. The type of shit MLs oppose is:
From a general historical point of view, developing nuclear weapons is an absolute waste of human and material resources. But as long as society is dominated by privileged national ruling classes - in the case of North Korea, a privileged Stalinist bureaucracy - these will arm to the teeth to defend their privileges[1]
Also, I don't love Trotskyists taking US-aligned intelligence reports as fact:
Despite the indoctrination, it still remains to be seen how the North Korean masses will respond to Kim Jong-il’s death, and above all to the transition. Reports have emerged that indicate that their instinct to struggle has not been completely snuffed out. Here is what AsiaNews reported in February of this year:
“The wave of protests that began in the Mideast appears to have reached even North Korea. For the first time in the history of the Stalinist regime, groups of ordinary citizens have protested in three cities demanding food and electricity, sources say. The event is exceptional and confirms the economic difficulties, especially concerning food supplies, people have to face under the Communist government.
“According to South Korea’s Chosun-Ilbo newspaper, citing a North Korean source, demonstrations broke out on 14 February, two days before Kim Jong-il’s birthday, in the cities of Jongju, Yongchon and Sonchon, not far from the border of China.
“The State Security Department (the all-powerful agency under Kim Jong-il’s direct control) investigated the incident but failed to identify the people who started the commotion when they met with a wall of silence.
“‘When such an incident took place in the past, people used to report their neighbours to the security forces, but now they're covering for each other,’ the source said.
“Korean sources told AsiaNews that this represents a crack in the prevailing mindset. ‘Different factors are at play. On the one hand, the country’s worsening economic situation is certainly one reason. The regime is in fact unable to feed most of its people. On the other, changes at the top are another as Kim Jong-un gets ready to succeed his father on the throne in Pyongyang.’
“The younger Kim is ‘feared by the population,’ the source said. ‘He is viewed as bloodthirsty and mad. Almost everyone thinks he was behind the military attacks against ROKS Cheonan and an island under South Korean control, which led to restrictions on humanitarian aid from the South. This has further worsened standards of living in the North. North Koreans are ready to do just about anything to stop the succession.’” [2]
I think that the working class of Korea should have full control of their economy and society and I do think the leadership in the DPRK as it stands has an interest in repressing this process. You can “defend” the state against imperialism by signaling your support online or whatever, but the health of the workers’ state, the involvement of the masses in the revolutionary tasks, is going to be the outcome determinative factor whether or not you want to acknowledge it.
I said nothing about "defending" the DPRK lol
Trotskyists routinely and uncritically push far-right and imperialist lines on US-enemy states because they are desperate for their own political line to be validated.
In the case of IMT's articles on the DPRK, they quote at-length unnamed sources from a far-right news publication with known connections to the US. The same news publication which has published hits such as "Kim Jong-Un Executes Wife for Doing Porn" and "North Korean Diplomat Executed on a Whim by Kim Jong-Un", both obviously false.
The history of Trotskyism is a history of taking L's because they refuse to study and learn from revolutionary struggle. They just want to rehash 1924 until we all burn to death.
Edit: Also, claiming the DPRK developed nukes to protect itself from their workers is deranged. The US military is stationed on their southern border. There is a better explanation lmao
And the DPRK is such a transparent, shining beacon of light for the workers of the world that there is no shortage of reliable information on the conditions and consciousness of the working class there.
You distilled Trotskyism perfectly right here: "we only trust the far-right and imperialists when it comes to the DPRK."
I actually said that “ the DPRK is such a transparent, shining beacon of light for the workers of the world that there is no shortage of reliable information on the conditions and consciousness of the working class there.”
By that I meant, sarcastically, that the DPRK has conditions for its workers that are less-than-exemplary and therefore it can’t hold itself out as an alternative to the status quo for the workers of the region. Same reason why China can’t hold itself out as an alternative to the workers of Hong Kong.
It doesn’t mean I support US imperialism in Hong Kong, or in Korea, but it’s not me who is failing the working class there, and the quality of that working class leadership, whose deficiencies you defend, will be what makes or breaks the struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
You are talking around the fact that every single Trotskyist publication relies heavily on myth-making from the far-right and imperialists. There are definitely valid criticisms of the DPRK. They are just never provided by Trotskyists because their understanding of the country comes from South Korean tabloids.
And I have not said one word defending the DPRK thus far. What would I be defending them from?
If you want to claim that Kim Jong-Un sent secret service members to crush a popular uprising in 2017, and use that Chosun Ilbo article as proof (as IMT did), I would defend the DPRK from that obvious imperialist lie.
Since you really want to see a defense of the DPRK, here's one: the Workers Party of Korea and the Chinese Communist Party have done more for their working people than any Trotskyist party in history. No Trotskyist is interested in learning from that history.
So maybe Trots and other left anticommunists should shut the fuck up when they dont have reliable information instead of following the imperialist line and therefore earning the title of left anticommunist?
So maybe M-L’s and other vulgar Marxists should shut the fuck up when they dont have reliable information instead of constantly staking out positions on the right of the working class movement and abandoning proletarian internationalism in favor of one-dimensional “anti-imperialist” positions.
love to be internationalist and fighting for the proletariat by not taking anti-imperialist positions.
I think there's a real split (heh) amongst trotskyist positions here. Many Trotskyists would reject eh "Deformed Workers State" analysis, and take the Cliffite view that China/Cuba/USSR were "State Capitalist" and should not be critically supported at all, and the dominance of that view in the UK/Aus has coloured the Trotskyist position as a whole.
You’re not wrong about the Cliffite deviation, but you literally contradict yourself within your own two-sentence comment with the lazy addendum that “the dominance of that view in the UK/Aus has coloured the Trotskyist position as a whole.”
Perhaps I should clarify, I mean the "public" (here meaning "weird politics nerds") perception of the Trotskyist position is widely seen as a State Capitalist one. So when someone says they're a Trotskyist they assume the next words are basically "China/USSR/Vietnam/Cuba/Laos Bad and not Socialist" rather than "Maybe the Nomenklatura wasn't a super great move"
Funny enough, I tend to associate the "X country is good/bad" categorical thinking with the M-L's online who are Marxist in aesthetic, but don't possess the ability conceive of anything dialectically.
So, it's partially just a bit. Many Trotskyists are true comrades in day to day action, Online ones like Steven Brust are super cool, and I'm friends with many of them. Don't let the online shit break left unity.
Also many Trot orgs do practice demcent. And many kept the left alive when there was nothing else extant as a revolutionary party. Those "Old Trots" were all alone in the early 90s as ML and Maoist parties were in chaos, save the few Anarchists that avoided the weird centrist insurrectionism that developed.
That Said...
Basically, in the Anglosphere just pre and post-WW2 the ML parties and Anarchists were smacked down pretty hard, while the Trots were seen as a safety valve for leftist agitation by the authorities and a way to prevent Soviet influence.
This allowed them to become the centre of the "New Left" in many ways. Unfortunately a combination of Trotsky being butthurt and actual semi-valid criticism of Soviet Bureaucracy coupled with the fact many of them were taking spook dollars from the start (which many rationalised as being sold the rope to hang the capitalists) meant that splits, weird political positions like supporting Fascists and Absolute Monarchs against AES, and general uselessness were rife.
This was especially pronounced in the UK where most major left orgs were Trotskyist and there was a major attempt at Labour Party entryism. It failed spectacularly for a variety of reasons including huge infighting, distracted from building a revolutionary workers movement at a time when labour militancy was at its peak, and was widely regarded as a bad idea that let Thatcher and Blair in.
A combination of these is why the stereotype of a Trot party is 30 people at a climate protest with a newspaper denouncing the 30 people they just split from, and supporting "Anti-Imperialist" Turkish Militia against the "Bourgeois Social Reactionaries" of Rojava.
Trots get a bad name, particularly UK Trots, on the basis of they tend to get weird as they age. Like, Spike magazine taking money from the Koch brothers weird. Or in general when some conservative ghoul claims to be a former Marxist, they were a Trot.
Or in general when some conservative ghoul claims to be a former Marxist, they were a Trot
Is it like a statistical thing because most anglo marxists were trots at some point?
Trots have never had a successful revolution. They have only attacked actually existing socialism, given fuel to imperialist narratives and eventually become neocons. That’s why everyone hates them, they are traitors.
They reject democratic centralism, and thus their organizations tend to split or turn into weird cults.
Every Trotskyist organization supports democratic centralism until their very niche political views are crossed.
It is hard to look at the complex web of Trotskyist parties in the US and think, "these are some true believers of democratic centralism."
Right, trot orgs are the only left groups with a splitting problem lol
There's a reason ML parties are known by Trots as a "dictatorship" and "bureaucracy", precisely because they do not split.
What? They absolutely do lol, why do you think we have so many? Also, many of those parties used to be trot parties and then split off from other trot parties soo idk what you're on about
There are three ML parties in the US: CPUSA, WWP, and PSL. WWP and PSL come from a lineage of Trotskyist splinter groups.
That's the point I'm making, Trotskyism is prone to undermining Democratic Centralism. The history of splinter groups is the history of Trotskyism in the US, even if some parties end up back at ML.
There has not been a serious ML splinter from CPUSA, in spite of their rampant revisionism. That is a testament, for better or worse, to their commitment to democratic centralism and unity in action.
I see what you're saying. My response would be that splits happening don't necessarily mean a rejection of demcent. If you're in a demcent org that somehow got coopted by revisionists, is it not your duty to combat that liberalism and raise hell or leave the now neutered liberal or even reactionary org?
Idk, splits as a metric for that sort of thing make about as much sense to me as GDP measuring the health of a nations economy in terms of the average person
Neoconservatism as an ideology evolved out of Trotskyism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
You had no idea because it’s literally not true. The ideology of neoconservatism has nothing to do with Trotskyism as a theoretical tradition. There are like maybe 5 prominent individuals who had some degree of connection to Trotskyists groups, or groups descended from Trotskyist groups, and some degree of connection to neoconservatism, and that’s the basis of the “trot-to-neocon pipeline.”
Half these people weren’t actually Trotskyists in any meaningful sense or, like James Burnham, were members of Trotskyist groups as young people or in college and wound up rejecting Marxism altogether as they moved right.
Funny enough, the surface-level shit take that Trotskyism gave rise to neoconservatism is itself obviously not a Marxist analysis. There’s no analysis of the material forces underpinning the rise of neoconservatism, there’s just the shallow idealism of “these people thought X and then later thought Y, and therefore Y is the consequence of thinking X.”
I didn't say I HATE them, I said I didn't like them, I think their ideology is a dead end, but despite that I still see them as fellow travelers
Just another day on the hexbear site.
Scrolled through the thread and it's not as bad as i thought it'll be.
Okay having actually talked to and interacted with a Trot org at this point, I think a lot of people are over generalizing. There are Trotskyist orgs that are no longer attempting entryism, doing active organizing, and producing contemporary analysis to shine light on the failures of bourgeois democracy and grow a workers party. You know, all the same shit we say Marxists should do on here all the time. Many 'Trots' just consider themselves "Marxists." Some comrades don't like Trots mission of developing a smaller number of politically educated cadre and building a vanguard party from a tight core outwards rather than focusing on mass issues - but at the end of the day it seems a widely blown out of proportion disagreement over tactics towards the same just goals. I think organizing benefits from both strategies as different people will be drawn to different methods, and in the imperial core I think more traditional focus on the proletariat rather than mass-line/maoist organizing still makes sense. I guess time will tell in that regard.
Rather than listen to a bunch of leftists with axes to grind, though, you can just check out their analysis and organizations yourself. I think a lot of the negativity towards Trotskyist comes from people's subjective experiences with smaller groups or orgs, and they generalize to the entire tendency. https://www.marxist.com/about-us.htm
Edit: but I could be wrong here. If the one true leftist wants to put me in my place I'll take it on the chin.
IMT's website does a good job of highlighting my biggest problem with Trotskyists. Their actions generally support imperialism. That fact was a major tension point for me when trying to do anti-war work with them.
Effort-post below, feel free to ignore if you understand how Trotskyist Parties tend to push the Liberal Interventionalist line uncritically.
I'll focus on their analysis of the situation in Libya as an example.
Any serious-minded person who looked at the situation in Libya would see an imperialist NATO invasion. Here is how people in the Obama administration talked about the affair:
Every single socialist country put out a statement condemning the action, so did most Marxist-Leninist and Left nationalist parties in the world. It was an obvious imperialist intervention in Libya that that needed a broad anti-war front to oppose it. And yet, IMT released an unsourced article about how Libya is actually imperialist and we need to support the "uprising" there.
the workers, youth and poor in Libya have stood up against a dictatorship that has revealed its true character. The uprising that began in Benghazi, the second largest city, has spread to many regions of the country.
Gaddafi responded with brutal violence, and as during the popular uprising in Caracazo, has used the army against the unarmed civilian population. He has also used mercenaries against the people. The fact that Gaddafi was forced to pay mercenaries is evidence of the fact that he does not trust his own soldiers. In Benghazi, the army joined the revolutionary people and this has been repeated in other cities. It is difficult to estimate the death toll, but we know that in Benghazi alone more than 230 people have been killed. Repression has reached such a brutal level that they have used the air force to bomb the demonstrators.
This is the most important part of the article. If true, it would have ramifications for the world socialist movement. But there was no attempt to substantiate this claim.
IMT gladly quoted Hugo Chavez when he said "in Egypt, what is happening in the Caracazo, a sudden awakening of a people. We have just seen the first ripples. They are events that mark a new story in the world." Yet, his comments that the news surrounding Libya were built on a "colossal campaign of lies" fell on deaf ears.
Today all the major oil multinationals are operating in Libya, British Petroleum, Exonn Mobil, Total, Repsol, among others. On the other hand, it is worth noting that Gaddafi holds five percent of the shares of Fiat, as a result of opening the country to the Italian capitalists.
This uprising in Libya has the same causes as those in Tunisia and Egypt. The result of Gaddafi’s deals with imperialism has been an economic disaster for most people, despite the country's oil wealth. Libya is a country with 30 percent unemployment and the cost of living is getting ever higher. The prices of basic foodstuffs such as rice, flour and sugar have increased by 85% in the last three years
Every single point made here would also describe Venezuela. Multinationals operating in their borders, mass unemployment, and inflation. That is not a justification for imperialist intervention in a sovereign nation.
Personal experiences with the IMT as well as checking their websites has pretty much shown me that they are also more than a little casually transphobic, refusing to publish any purely supportive articles but instead posting endless criticisms of "the movement" or "queer theory" where basically inbetween single sentence support they denounce everything and say that the only way forward is for the trans community to subsume themselves into the workers movements. In at least one case they flat out called campaigns to get trans women treated equally to cis women within Labour "a waste of time".
Thats not to say that they never write supportive articles, there are a few, not more than you can count on one hand, but you'd never know since as far as I can tell they do not tag those articles with anything so even if you enter their categories for gender issues you cant find any of the supportive articles, only the criticisms. The supportive articles are also never highlighted on the international page even when trivial bullshit like fundraising the Trotsky museum makes it on at the same time as articles about the UK/US war against trans people are buried in national websites.
I tracked down the article you're citing from.
https://www.marxist.com/truth-about-present-revolutionary-uprising-libya.htm
In fairness, I think the last paragraph addresses at least some of your concerns?
Without doubt, imperialism in this situation will try to assert their interests. We oppose any imperialist intervention in Libya. The imperialists are the ones who sold weapons to Gaddafi, made business deals with him to plunder the country's oil wealth and used the country as a barrier against illegal migration in Europe. Imperialism is not interested in the fate of the Libyan people, but only the country's natural resources.
I'm much newer to the movement so I'm not familiar with some of these old disagreements. I guess I lack the necessary context to really develop a strong opinion on this particular issue. I just see so much vitriolic hate for Trots online, and it does not match up to my (again, limited) understanding of them in real life.
We oppose any imperialist intervention in Libya.
That's not true. The operations in Libya in March 2011 was objectively an imperialist intervention. IMT calling it something different does not change reality. History has vindicated this understanding, but it was obvious in the moment as well.
In most interactions with them I find that they occupy a space inbetween ultras and MLs, mega-leftists perhaps?
Ultra leftists are those who take the positions appropriate for when the working class has achieved class consciousness and is the revolution is nigh or already happening, it's more how we should ideally structure things, and it is not what you talk about when you're talking to working people, and not taking ultra left positions is rather important, because you have to meet people where they are
The job of an org is to build a bridge for the working class from where their consciousness is to where you need it to be, ultraleftists just stand on the far end of the gap yelling at people for not being across it yet
