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

  • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]
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    4 years ago

    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.

    • PhaseFour [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      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:

      We have a giant deficit. They have a lot of oil. Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit. If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil rich countries partially pay us back doesn't seem crazy to me.

      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.

      • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
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        4 years ago

        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.

      • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]
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        4 years ago

        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.

        • PhaseFour [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          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.