CaliforniaSpectre [he/him]

  • 8 Posts
  • 54 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • I have a question: are Trotskyists and ultras distinct?

    [Incoming rant]

    I have a friend in the UC grad student union (I’m currently not in the country but will be returning relatively soon to a UC myself). We used to live together and he’s pretty far left and all, but definitely always been a tad ultra. I was messaging him about orgs to join when I’m back when the craziest encampment action was happening. He said PSL has some members but seem “Stalinist” curious-sickle . He even said several members in his union are from PSL (super cool honestly), but that they were refusing to push the union to actively vote a statement of solidarity with palestine or something. He was critical of them being too bureaucratic about stuff like that.

    Then he told me about the Revolutionary Communists of America and said they seem pretty cool dean-smile . I thought hmmm okay I’ll check them out. They were recently founded (insert existential comic joke about leftist parties). They had a podcast and one episode was like “Why we are Leninists” and I was like lenin-heart.

    I’m listening and hear a lot of Lenin, Marx, no Stalin though. They say “we get criticism for handing out flyers at protests but that’s because we want to build the party to solve all the protests!!1!” lenin-sure. At this point I’m like no pls, next they bring up directly “a lot of people ask if we’re ‘Trotskyists’, haha the internet has such funny slang doesn’t it. Well, let’s just read what Trotsky said about…” blah blah basically yeah that Stalin re-established class society in USSR etc etc. dean-frown stalin-bummed

    So yeah I was pretty burned because it seems the trots get their marketing down pretty well these days. There were a few signs that slipped right past me.






  • This is something that I keep coming back to again and again too. Just like FDR, Bernie was the compromise candidate to let off just enough steam so that we all begrudgingly except that enough overtures have been made to the working class, move away from truly radical politics, and allow the whole cycle to start over again. And even that was too far for the capitalists this time (not that they really ever accepted FDR), but the difference is that the media control is much more entrenched, making average liberals themselves too uncompromising to make the smart choice for their preferred political system.

    In a way it is relieving to have such a clear delineation between paths of justice/evil. We will never again be tricked into wasting any energy on progressive candidates within a bourgeois party. The choice always was between socialism and barbarism, and no one who is paying attention can trick themselves into thinking otherwise ever again.