Prior to the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s, where the CIA installed a military dictatorship that the lives of millions, the country’s communist party technically did warn about the peril. The problem was that this warning had been made in a reactive way, and therefore wasn’t nearly enough to prepare the people to fight back.
They tend to be ultras (and, in contradiction, sometimes obsessed with electoralist approaches) and fairly disruptive to others’ organizing. Discussing Trotsky himself or permanent revolution can be a good exercise and a way to develop theory but that’s usually not what is actually happening.
Examples:
Notorious for trying to enter other left spaces and take them over. Especially if those spaces seem “ascendant”. A lot of this weird tendency of self-congratulation and appointing themselves as the vanguard or whatever even though all they did was show up to something that someone else organized and then take a picture of themselves.
So critical of the USSR, historically, that there was a serious pipeline from Trots to neocons. The USSR is gone but terrible international takes are still the norm. These are the people telling you to believe in the Israeli working class rather than criticize settler culture in the Zionist entity. Not all, but it’s dominant.
A belief in leading through publications that nobody reads that say a lot about what should happen according to them. Kind of harmless I guess but it does waste people’s time when they could be doing useful things or becoming educated. It’s also a funny contrast to how they usually characterize themselves as (the only true Marxists).
A dogmatic subscription to certain approaches to labor that simultaneously alienate everyone else in the space while also supporting labor imperialism. This is annoying to deal with because when other socialists enter the space it will already be hostile to them. I’ve dealt with this A LOT.
A cynicism that I don’t want to overgeneralize about and can’t perfectly explain. Maybe it’s just that a lot of them are older. But their approach to issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, etc is often only a way to relate to their target audience rather than a principled position. This really shows in how they use language, incorporate others into their processes, etc. Everything is working class this, working class that, and then some token words so they can pass for “progressive”. This does not apply to all Trots but it’s very common. I’ve had to have many talks with Trot orgs’ leaders about not being transphobic it casually racist when they want to have a speaker at a rally or something.
A lot of what I’m describing are also behaviors common to the reactionary Western leftist stereotype and is not necessarily about Trotsky or a lot of what constitutes Trotskyism. Think of them as the only acceptable Marxists allowed to survive the Red Scare because of their hypercritical approach to other leftists and the fact that they are usually dependent on the approaches to “organizing” handed down by American and British cishet white dudes in the 1950s and 1960s.
Anyways I should mention again, “not all Trots”. I know plenty of Trots I can work with and bring into coalition etc. But I know way more that will basics ruin the space lol. Some of the issues are attributable to Trosky in the sense that he created a narrative for himself as the anti-Stalin and a hypercritic of the USSR. But a lot of it is also just that “which way, Western leftist man?” thing I’ve harped on.
Wow, thank you for the breakdown. Can I ask specifically what you meant by:
Do these Trots look down on certain forms of labor?
If you ask a Trot what should be done with a Western labor union, they will tell you that you need to kick out the labor aristocrats at the top of that staff food chain and make it accountable to the workers. Every time. No other answers will ever be given outside of maybe trying to drive union demands from below.
In theory these are usually good ideas. In practice they fail to actually accomplish these things because the answer they gave is actually their praxis. They said the thing, they are done. Or maybe they even got 1-3 people in the union on their side. But still, their praxis is to have those 2-3 people say the line and call it a day.
Then their org writes about it in their paper saying that you’ve gotta kick out the union bosses at X union or Y workplace. This is usually the nail in the coffin for gaining the trust of people involved with the union, staff or not.
In contrast, there are folks that do the actual work of building reform causes and kicking out leadership, etc. These are usually multi-tendency, inducing anarchists, commies, SocDems, etc. Part of the Trot stereotype is to take credit for that work in their little papers and to tell them what they should really be doing… again in their little papers.
Now imagine that you wanted to do something much more radical, like building independent unions or at least something different from the large, mostly captured spaces. They become entirely useless or even a distraction. One particular Trot group I know of even does little fake photo ops where they talk about the workers rising up and it’s literally just 3 salts (people that get themselves hired with the goal of unionizing a shop) from their org and it fails to achieve results. They have convinced zero (0) existing employees at that shop to join them. It’s been 9 months. If that place ever had any potential, it’s now been squandered.
Appreciate the time. An international proletariat and permanent revolution are things I feel strongly about, but it doesn’t sound like I want to be associated with the name, even if I don’t think these people are actually practicing Trotskyism.
All commies like an international proletariat and world revolution! The devil is in the details on how one wants to build a practicable movement to achieve it, and one with a solid base in both theory and material conditions. I would recommend that anyone reading Trotsky also read widely so as to have a solid ground for critique in many directions - and to compare how well theories from 100+ years ago bore out re: the history from which we can now all benefit in our analyses. One of the things that makes toxic Trots end up toxic is that they don’t actually challenge themselves or leave their bubble. They only trust other Trots when it comes to international analysis, for example, which is why they’re pretty much always wrong about Israel - they’re getting all of their takes from like 7 trade unionists that are trying their best to wish a radical Israeli working class into existence.
Ruthless criticism of all that exists!
Yeah his stance on separation of the peasantry and the proletariat is kind of moot today, right?