Read "Red Rosa" - it's my go to resource when I'm feeling frustrated with the state of the left. Trotsky seems a bad choice when you're frustrated because by his very nature he was bloody infuriating.
It's incredible, and the artwork is actually part of the story. Some beautifully drawn scenes in that one.
I don't think leftism is inherently more prone to factonalism than any other ideology. We just feel it more immediately than we feel it in other groups, and it's compounded by feds and the gargantuan task of building socialism in a country so reflexively against it.
What's the TLDR of this dude going from military hero / Lenin's heir to trots being a meme?
Trotsky died 70 years ago, and it takes a certain kind of person to want to endlessly rehash their grandparents’ arguments instead of joining a more dynamic and modern leftism
Words to live by
Thanks!
How much annoying you have to be to gain that much fame for being annoying?
He wasn't ruthless enough to keep his position during the power struggle that followed when Lenin got sick.
Then when Stalin took over, Trotsky decided it would be a great idea to suddenly find his backbone and aggressively push for "continuing world revolution" That would inevitably lead to the dismantling of the current Soviet state as it was at that moment. No one else wanted this. So Trotsky then got mad and began openly criticising Stalin for the lack of democracy in the Communist Party under his rule and his failure to have what Trotsky viewed as a viable economic plan for the future of the USSR. Remarkably Trotsky was tolerated as a nuisance for a hit before they finally got sick of him and exiled his annoying self after a drawn out propaganda campaign against him where he lost his important titles and jobs one by one.
How different do you think things go if Trotsky just used his position and started knocking off his political opponents straight after Lenin dies?
Counterpoint: legislatively (whether it's laws or policies from government entities like the NLRB) the deck is so badly stacked against unionization that we need movements (like the kind DSA et al can organize) to change things before we can really get mass unionization going.
Its not really either or at this point. We're basically rebuilding the very idea of socialism in America, it requires people at all levels
We should be trying everything that isn't a total waste of time, and that covers a lot of ground. No one knows how to build socialism in the modern imperial core, so we can't afford to write off this or that if it even plausibly might help.
The thing is we are all ego driven and that is doubly true for anyone who wants to be in any sort of leadership role
I'm agreeing haha, Trotsky was a wrecker, not a communist. You can read his works and take from them what you will, but the man himself was a stubborn shithead.
It takes a special sort to start out as commander of the armed forces and lose. I don't think it would ever really happen again though because the person in Trotskies position probably just has the Stalin equivalent killed right off the bat.
