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.
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.
Also take a look at folks like Paul Mason