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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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i wanna preface this by saying i've done a lot of work with Trotskyists (Socialist Alternative, ISO, etc) and they can be alright, honestly. I think most of the problems people have with Trotskyists is that for the longest time, like after the 1960s to maybe 2016, they were the only communists in town, especially if you're from somewhere western. They were always the most prominent and vocal, and there's still residual effects of that, like for instance our very beloved marxists.org is operated by Trots, and they seem like cool people who are very dedicated to maintaining the best online repository of socialist literature anywhere. They even have all of Stalin's writings there and he's their mortal enemy. So yeah, part of the dissatisfaction with Trotskyites has got to be the fact that they were so embedded within western leftism for so long, but now their influence is rapidly waning as new people have taken an interest in leftism without a lot of the unnecessary baggage of the past. So it's partially a new blood vs old blood fight too?
maybe someone has mentioned it already, but one of the problems with Trotsykists in the west at least is how often they ended up becoming affiliated or infiltrated with feds. I know that was a huge problem in the UK and it's happened with a few American parties. But that's also an effect of Trots being the most prominent game in town for so long. Trotskyism was an easier sell to westerners in some regards. You can be a communist and still be critical of all of the west's enemies. It's perfect.
There's also a weird level of former Trotskyists who became conservatives with age, very notably Irving Kristol and James Burnham. Kristol was an anti-Soviet socialist organizer in his youth, then he made such a hard swing that the term "neoconservative" was invented to describe him specifically. James Burnham was founder of a Trotskyist party notably backed by Trotsky himself, but he also took a huge swing. He ended up working for the OSS (precursor to the CIA) and then founded the conservative magazine National Review. The whole "Trot to neocon pipeline" thing.
all in all, it really just depends on the organization and what they're doing. If you're working with an org and they're throwing around terms like Stalinist or removedd workers' state, then maybe they've got some baggage they haven't quite jumped over quite yet, maybe try to get them back on task.
That was also very common among Marxist-Leninists of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those upholding China. Lots of them became the foundational stones of Green Parties, or even worse, climbed upward liberal politics and became staunch supporters of neoliberalism.
The current Chancellor of Germany, for example. Or the infamous Gerhard Schröder. Or many hawkish Green Party politicians like Joschka Fischer (Former Foreign Minister 1998-2005) who used to throw rocks at cops in the 70s.
The issue lies therein that many of the people who were leftists in the 60s and 70s would probably be libertarians today. They had a strong focus on social issues and personal liberty even before getting high paying jobs/bureaucrat postings that let them just be libs again.
I guess that might be a more European phenomenon where there was more of a Marxist-Leninist presence, versus the US/Canada where Trotskyites have historically been more organized. ML parties in North America weirdly would spring out of splits from Trotskyite parties, rather than the other way around. Even now the PSL, one of the bigger ones, traces its lineage back through Sam Marcy's split from the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.
It really is wild to me to think about how so many higher level European politicians were throwing Molotov cocktails 40 years ago and have ended up becoming the very thing they were fighting against in their youth. Time is weird.