i was wondering what your thoughts on trotskyism are and if you have any criticism
Trotskyism is for people who want to call themselves communists but are not fully committed to it. Otherwise they would just be Marxist-Leninists(-Maoists).
In Europe if you tell someone – anyone – you’re a trotskyist you’ll be seen as mostly harmless, maybe a little bit weird. It’s the safe choice if you want to butter up to libs because you can join in on criticizing Stalin for things he didn’t do with your lib friends.
We have a trot party here. They get into a lot of controversies and I’ve never seen them do anything except sell their newspaper, or co-opt other movements to sell their newspapers. They do have a few locally elected politicians (much less than our ML-oriented party) but clearly they fail to connect with the working class. I’ve heard from someone who went there that they don’t have a youth wing, unlike us, and that most people there come out of academia and get into deep Marxist economics discussions. It’s not a very welcoming atmosphere for new people.
While I think that some of Trotsky’s written works are good, and that he did good work during the russian civil war, his analysis regarding world revolution, rejection of socialism in one country, was dogmatic.
- What is Socialism in one country? What’s the controversy around it w/ respect to Stalin and Trotsky? 2 3 4
- What did Lenin say about socialism in one country?
Also his stances on the peasant question, and belief that revolution could only survive if it broke out in western europe, was incredibly euro-centric and proven wrong by history. This eurocentric basis is the reason why trotskyist parties are only popular in western countries.
Also after Trotsky’s positions were defeated in the 15th party congress (he got 0.5% of the vote), he left the USSR and spent the next decade trying to gain support for his faction and writing about how it was a “degenerated workers state”, until he got iced. IMO we only know of him so well now because of this period, in his role as a lightning rod of USSR opposition, when in fact it was Trotsky who was extremely unpopular.
The only saving grace for Trotsky as far as I’m concerned is how he absolutely dabs on Makhno and the Ukrainian Anarchists.
Edit: One thing that always stands out to me about the Trotskyist coup attempt is that despite enormous efforts to obfuscate various key events that lead up to the purge (did Trotskyists assassinate Kirov or was it Stalin, Was Tukhachevsky actually a German narc etc) the fact that the Sedov letters, the incriminating correspondence between Trotsky and his son, were in fact discovered by a committed French Trotskyist makes the case clean to me. I only thank Pierre Broué that he had the strength of character to accept and report the reality in front of him and not simply bury the letters for sectarian reasons.
What were these letters and what did they prove?
The correspondence in the Sedov letters confirmed that a plot was underway against Stalin, with Trotsky communicating with his son about the existence of a Trotsky-Zinovievist faction of conspirators inside the party, with Trotsky allegedly stating, "Before everything else we have to drive out the present leadership and get rid of Stalin nothing but their liquidation can bring victory”. Curiously, later scholars who accessed this archive of all of Trotsky’s papers found this document was missing and allegations of a document purge were thrown around. It doesn’t help that the archive in question is at Harvard, after academics there bought all of Trotsky’s correspondence some time after his death. Broué wrote about it all.
Thanks!
Also before he died he asked for his archive to be closed for forty years so Broue only discovered these in the 1980s
They were written in invisible ink too
Grover Furr has an outline here of the documents
https://espressostalinist.com/2017/01/27/grover-furr-trotskys-lies-what-they-are-and-what-they-mean/
You can also get from libgen.rs Arch Gettys Origins of the great purges and Pierre Broues party opposition to Stalin where they both found it
@muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml pretty much covered most of the theoretical problems with Trotskyism, so I won’t delve into that. What I care about more is just the fact that Trotskyism is just irreverent. There has never been a Trot revolution. Trots pretty much only exist in the Western world where socialism hasn’t taken hold to any major degree (unfortunately). What bothers me the most is that Trots don’t support any of the current socialist states, or even the USSR. They are dogmantic idealists, and the only reason anyone knows they exist is because they go to every rally and try to sell you their crappy newspapers. Kshama Sawant is kind of cool though.
Slight add (maybe it’s a correction? idk) The two places you’re most likely to find trots are in the west, but there’s also a heckin’ chonker of a trot movement in South and Central America. And those Trots in S&CA often directly aid agitation of the masses and support communist movements. One of the more popular SA trots (in the west) is Posadas. But there’s a bunch of others.
Mexico has a decent Trot movement, which I hear is more popular than Marxism-Leninism, but it seems only because Trotsky was assassinated there. I haven’t heard much else about leftism in Mexico though (other than the Zapatistas) and I wouldn’t be surprised if what I’ve been told about trots there is false, to grain of salt this bit.
Most of the critiques I had are mentioned looks like, even the obsession with newspapers when they should move to a more widely accessible media that’s probably today’s version of the paper.
Anyway, for all his flaws his work on fascism was for the time pretty decent imo since it goes through the class interactions and manipulation leading the lumpen into the arms of the fascists.
I believe there are archived threads here on this topic.
