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Disclaimer: I adore my anarchist comrades and I don't write for a newspaper, I have in fact never even read one.
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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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You know what, I think you are right. I don’t know any Trots personally but there are plenty of them out there IRL that are cool and good (Michael Hudson and China Mieville come to mind). I’ve also read individual Trots as they often have good article and essays. They run the world’s best website, marxists.org; and IIRC they keep International Publishers going.
I feel similar about leftcoms (doubt we have any here, either). Dunk on some takes they might have, maybe allow for ACTUAL, thoughtful critique of positions, too. But no uncharitable generalizations.
I would love the rule to be that there’s no ripping on any genuine leftist movement in general, only ripping on specific takes by individuals.
Yeah this site is kinda weird about trots. I know trots that do way more than anarchists and have better takes and vice versa. Most ML's I know are armchair socialists but that's not reason to dunk on every ML.
Some people on here think that there's some specific tendency that, if they subscribe to, will push the socialism button.
Most of those were MLMs, they should get appropriate credit.
Also nobody has pulled it off in the imperial core yet.
What MLMs have ever seized power or formed a state?
The USSR was a Marxist and Leninist revolution. Mao was a Marxist-Leninist. Cuba's revolution was more broadly socialist until it won and was forced to defend itself from imperialism, at which point it adopted Marxism-Leninism officially. Juche is a subcategory of Marxism-Leninism and derives from it. May I remind you that MLM is a creation of Gonzalo and the Shining Path and created after the death of Mao.
I will give the Trotskyists some credit for being broadly involved in the pink wave in Venezuela, although that also was broadly Democratic Socialist. Venezuela and Bolivia seem to be exceptions to the global rule though, it's exceedingly rare for democratic socialists to win electorally and then maintain power.
In the imperial core itself democratic socialism is not possible and basically always results in social imperialism. If it doesn't, like Corbyn, it will be destroyed.
Honestly I saw "dozens" and assumed you were counting a bunch of dubiously successful MLM/third worldist projects, because how else would you get above, like, four.
I'm interested in what it means to you to "press the socialism button" or to "maintain power". There's some line that needs to be drawn.
After reading that list, it seems peculiar how you start Vietnam at 1945 but not Laos, how you start Cuba at 1975 instead of 1959. And that's leaving alone how the USSR was largely a successor state to the Russian Empire and was the result of the same party/faction operating in different "national" contexts but the same state context.
In some of the cases on this list it was a consolidation of power in a revolutionary context, rather than toppling a bourgeois government.
Is the line drawn at a successful revolution, or is the line drawn at winning an election, or something else entirely? And where do examples like Ghana and Zimbabwe (and maybe Nepal and a few others) fit in?
You know Trotsky is a Leninist right?
Sorry, what do you think Trotsky was doing in 1917? The years prior?
what do you think stalin was doing
Okay I didn't ask you but what do you think Trotsky was doing?
Stalin wasn't even in Russia in February, and before October he was like politicking and being kind of a centrist. Lenin was in hiding (but writing and directing) and Stalin was dragging his feet on setting a date for the revolution. They were all in St. Petersburg, fighting an uphill battle, incredibly unpopular until some time in August, dodging the police and trying to do a revolution.
I guess I'm gonna get piled on now. I really just wanted to know what people think Stalin was doing but let's get this over with
yeah that was a weird one from me, sorry
I miss you HEdoublehockeysticks
You're good. I was being kinda defensive. See ya around.
Being a snacc
Careful, you're getting close to doing the wrong kind of sectarianism
the "marx-leninism is the only tendency that has succeeded historically" line is always really funny to me. like, i get the appeal of believing that revolution is simply a cake that you need to follow a recipe to bake, but 1) the bolsheviks did not have any way of knowing that it would work when they put "leninism" (if you want to imagine it as a single, eternal, unchanging body of Correct Theory) into practice, so clearly they had something better on their side than the best books and the snappiest chants and 2) you have to do a lot of special pleading before you can get me to accept that the russian revolution "won" the world historic struggle to resolve the dialectic of capitalism.
this is the timeline in which communism has lost, repeatedly. we need a revolutionary practice that actually acknowledges that, and functions anyway.
true, i'll give props for that.
by "won" I don't mean established global communism, I mean "seized the means of production and defended itself for at least 1 year". Baby steps, and we have to do first things first.
Lmao I didn't say to ban you, I think you're taking this whole post way too seriously. It's all in jest.
I guess I'm misunderstanding you, didn't you just say that I said to ban you?
Edit: responded before your edit, I understand now
Yeah I got it after your edit, thanks for you explanation anyway though. I agree with a lot of your points, it's frustating but it's also a dificult needle to thread.
Damn you really summed up my feelings on it
They better ban me too if they take Zed bc I need to get back to the point where we're arguing constructively again
I'm curious why their comment got deleted. They weren't really doing a sectarianism, just pointing out how the sectarianism rule ends up working around here. What he said was totally accurate.
None has won and implying that any has you are turning this into a dick measuring contest which is basically the most bad faith and obvious sectarianism can get.
Word. It's the 21st century now, the world is radically radically different from the last time an ML revolution succeeded and held power. We need to keep learning, growing, adapting, and planning to be ready to operate in this century.
They're not there yet.
>99% of my life has been in founding NATO member states. What do you propose that I do... what is the track record of ML organizations in these states?
but not the ones who point that out online.
Cool and good until you say the word China and then the conversation turns into a complete shitshow.
Also every single article they have ever written has something in it about "stalinists". It is in fact the only way to tell something was written by a trot compared to any other ideological branch.
How much does that matter outside internet shitposting?
Not too much really, the downside is that they actively reinforce a lot of anti-communist stuff by agreeing with the right on it.
Socialist Appeal is also kind of cult-ey. I worry that their methods end up turning off a lot of the young student crowd that they burn through who get a bad taste for "organising" because all they do is rock up to events organised by other people, set up all their highly visible branding to make themselves look associated with it and then sell newspapers and shit. Their member turnover is extremely high. But that's just my experience with one specific group of trots I suppose and might not be the case for all of them, but it's a big group here.
The old Labour Militant members are fucking good organisers though.
Yeah, I've been looking into joining an org and I was all for joining socialist appeal because they were the most prominent org in my area until I looked at their recent news thing about the accomplishments of the national org and it was basically all just various thing about how [local wing] went to a protest organised by other people and sold almost two dozen newspapers or got some other people to copy their chant, or managed to get two people to say they'd join up or whatever. From the outside it kind of just looked like a really rubbish MLM for selling newspapers.
I've decided to join CPB instead
Good luck with CPB. They've got some real brainworms about trans people and it will be a serious struggle to steer that org back to being right. But someone has to do it. The only way it will steer away from reaction is with people putting the work in to do it.
I've had people turn an organizing strategy meeting into bullshit about "stalinism" because I was the only ML there. It was a conversation about recruiting, and that always gets to this point. The Trots hated whenever I didn't want to denigrate China or really any leftist project. Also many got pissed that there was a Soviet aesthetic in some posters, which I get, but disagreed because they hate the Soviet Union, not because it's ineffective.
In my experience, active recruitment always brings out the differences very fast, because factions want to recruit more to their faction.
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