Just catching up with the splits and factionalism in British #Trotskyism, should only take me a month of solid reading.

fuck me

I envy the class unity of the 1%

Brutal.

"Trotsky's own past and theories preclude on his part the initiation of a movement to the left of Stalinism and condemned 'Trotskyism' to remain a mere collecting agency for unsuccessful Bolsheviks. As such it could maintain itself outside of Russia because of the ceaseless competitive struggles for power and positions within the so-called 'communist' world-movement. But it could not achieve significance for it had nothing to offer but the replacement of one set of politicians by another. The Trotskyist defence of Russia in the Second World War was consistent with all the previous policies of this, Stalin's most bitter, but also most loyal, opposition."

- Paul Mattick, "Bolshevism and Stalinism," 1947.

#trotsky #trotskyism #marxism #communism #CommunistLeft #LeftCommunism

Thursday's book of the day is:
#JPosadas #argentina #Trotskyism #posadism

HAPPY MAY DAY, COMRADES!

https://youtu.be/yUVAYRkdvfc

#Marxism #Communism #Socialism #TheMilitantTendency #InternationalMarxistTendency #Trotskyists #Trotskyism #FourthInternational #GTFOStalinists #ToriesOut #FuckTheTories

One of NYC’s most dynamic new radical groups in the 1980s was an international solidarity org called Neither East Nor West. It was formed by anarchists and sympathetic Trotskyists with the mission of supporting anarchists and other left-wing dissidents in the Soviet Union.

New York City was the locus of the network, although it spread to dozens of cities in the United States and beyond. It was primarily the brainchild of a man named Bob McGlynn who had traveled in the Eastern Bloc and had many personal connections with dissidents.

Neither East Nor West built on a long tradition of anarchist criticism of the Soviet Union. Many anarchists were initially emboldened by the 1917 Russian Revolution, seeing it as the first step towards the new society for which they fought.

The Bolsheviks took up the anarchistic slogan “all power to the soviets,” which seemed to promise grassroots democratic control of industry. Although anarchists worried as the Bolsheviks began to consolidate power after 1917, many still believed that it was just a brief transitional period; along with Lenin himself, they thought that the revolution was about to spread across Europe and the Americas.

Only after several years of increasingly worrying news from Russia—and the failure of the German Revolution—did anarchists begin to turn strongly against the Bolsheviks. The violent suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion, in which Trotsky led the Red Army against striking workers and sailors who sought to revitalize soviet democracy from below, seemed to confirm the authoritarian turn. The Bolsheviks destroyed the anarchist movement by jailing its leaders, outlawing their papers and organizations, and branding anarchism as a counter-revolutionary plot.

In the 1930s, Trotsky began to develop his own critique of the Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers state” led by a counter-revolutionary layer of bureaucrats. In the 1980s, anarchists and Trotskyists found common ground in Neither East Nor West supporting left-wing and anti-state dissidents in the Eastern Bloc.

#anarchism #trotskyism #sovietunion #history

"The Russian revolution saved the honour of marxism. Yet what has become of the Soviet Union proceeded to lose it again. Official marxism-leninism is now a more conservative cult than the Catholic Church and Lenin's curt, bearded brand image endorses some of the most repressive, boring and un-revolutionary states ever to exist.

"There are more 'leninist' parties than inverted commas now, covering every sin from the ascendant bourgeoisie of Malawi to the doctrinaire trots of Michigan..."

"It would make life a lot easier to dismiss bolshevism en bloc as inherently hierarchical and inevitably dictatorial (as do the libertarian and anarchist comrades). And more soothing to somehow persuade yourself that the various heads of state who flank the nuclear missiles in Red Square every year are socialist revolutionaries-of-a-sort after all (as do most communists, some of social-democrats and a fair few trotskyists).

"It requires more imaginative effort to comprehend that the Russian revolution was both overwhelmingly and genuinely a mass social revolution and yet that it began to lose its authentic socialist character within months of the workers' seizure of power."

- David Widgery, Post-Electronic Leninism, 1979.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/widgery/1979/03/lenin.htm

#lenin #trotskyism #marxism #socialism #communism

Alfred Rosmer, siding with Trotsky's widow Natalia Sedova against the post-war Trotskyists:

"Their essential error comes from their belief that the best way of remaining faithful to the teachings of Trotsky was to stick blindly to the position of 1940: 'Russia is a proletarian state; the defense of the U.S.S.R. remains in the program of the opposition.' The upsets which shook up the world left them unmoved, for Stalin’s armies were carrying the revolution with them. On all the fundamental questions, their positions were -- and are -- always the Stalinist positions; sometimes they are even more royalist than the king, more Stalinist than Stalin. Having remained frozen to the theses of 1940 prevents them from understanding that Russia is no longer anything but a Great military and militaristic Power, which carries out nothing but the traditional policy of the Great Powers, placing on it its own stamp only by virtue of the bestiality of a totalitarian regime with the blessing of the Metropolitans."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/rosmer/1951/xx/nataliat.html

#socialism #communism #trotsky #trotskyism #marxism

January 6th and today, January 8th, is why we don't debate with fascists, why we don't deal "fairly" with Nazis.

We crush them, wherever they sprout up.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

#Communism #Marxism #Trotskyism

@geth

And I don't believe the revolution will be outpaced by tech, rather that the tech itself is the destabilising influence that hastens the revolution. Just as it was industrialisation / the factory that created the urban working class in the first place.

Once everything's gone AI and every middle-class job has gone - how are those people gonna eat? What are they going to buy? Who is going to buy the products of capitalism if no workers have money?

#Communism #Marxism #Trotskyism

https://www.marxist.com/is-this-the-end-of-globalisation.htm

Fascinating analysis, not least for a Marxist perspective on protectionism.

#Globalisation #Communism #Marxism #Trotskyism

I was raised as a #Trotskyist within #Trotskyism and taught to venerate #LeonTrotsky. I still think his work on the #UnitedFront is very important. We can unite as #AntiFascists but I don't have to pay lip service to any old bullshit that my allies happen to believe and I can keep my powder dry and watch my back around you thank you very much